Ministry Centered Technologies

Tom Roepke from the “Who are these guys” website recently wrote a review on how his church uses Planning Center for their Student Ministries.

Originally when I sat down to develop Planning Center we really worked hard to make sure that this site could meet the needs of not just Worship Ministries, but all the ministries of the church. Thanks for the glowing review Tom, this really confirms that we are meeting our goals.

Planning Center (www.planningcenteronline.com) has made numerous administrative duties light. Our church was already using it to manage our multi-site campuses with four weekend services

Planning Center has lived up to its own promotional material. It allows you to develop a matrix that can track all songs used, track and notify volunteers, and give you critical control of all aspects of the service.

The biggest and most useful part of PC is that all the information regarding a service is located in one centralized place. Since it is web based it allows all users and participants quick and easy access anywhere anytime.

From the Who Are These Guys Website

This article actually hit the web a couple weeks ago but I have been a bit busy so I wasn’t able to post it until now. Pretty cool.

“PlanningCenterOnline.com has an attractive interface. The site is easy to navigate and contains clear, detailed information on the platforms features. It is great that PlanningCenterOnline.com is easily accessible from internet connection. PlanningCenterOnline.com has many great features to help organize services. The music options are truly remarkable and very important for worship. It is great that once you sign up with PlanningCenterOnline.com you always get the upgrades. The video tutorials and testimonials are a useful way to explain the application’s functions.”

Read the whole review at KillerStartUps.com

Easter is just over a week away and we decided that it would be fun to list the top 30 songs that all of our Planning Center Online users are using for Easter. I hope you find these stats as interesting as we did.

Easter 2008 Planning Center Online Song Usage Statistics Compared To Easter 2007

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I don’t know if anyone noticed but our own Aaron Stewart has been writing a featured article for WorshipLeader.com every month. Aaron has done a great job writing these articles and I hope that you enjoy them. Below I have posted links to the first three and I am going to post the rest of the articles as they are released:

January 2008 - A Master Plan For Faster Planning

As a music pastor, I’m always looking for the most efficient way to accomplish my tasks in order to be more of a minister than an administrator. I have the pleasure of serving at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, Nevada. When I started there, I was thrilled to find that they had already made organization a high priority as evidenced by a plethora of Word and Excel documents. There were the monthly band and vocalist schedules; Big Brother, our Excel document with all past and future weekends side by side (including every song, person, video, and other elements for each week); Excel documents for each and every service order; Excel booking sheets, detailing every person and piece of equipment necessary for our tech department; plus all the other various details floating around in our heads. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

February 2008 - A Worship Plan For Vegas

Living and working in Las Vegas has many similarities to living and working as a music pastor. Being a music pastor is not a job that can easily be turned off at the end of the day; it can be the job that never sleeps. You can’t really tell your creativity what your hours are, and your volunteers don’t usually stick to your schedule either. In addition, just like the lights of Las Vegas, there is a barrage of distractions coming at you from every angle. With so many things competing for your attention, it can be difficult to remain focused. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

March 2008 - How the Matrix Changed My Life

Until about a year ago, if I thought about the Matrix, I would be envisioning the 1999 Keaunu Reeves movie in which a computer hacker learns that the world is not what he thought it was. But all that changed when Planning Center Online, our online worship planning software, added a new weapon to its arsenal: the Matrix. Not only would that word begin to conjure up a completely different image, it would also drastically simplify the way I plan my services and schedule my volunteers. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

Update: The maintenance went great, we should be prepared for a lot more growth.

Hello Everyone,

Tonight, February 1, between 9:00 and 11:00pm PST will be doing some scheduled maintenance on our database servers. During this maintenance we will need to bring down Planning Center Online. I don’t expect the outage to be more than one hour, thank you for your understanding.
Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

Before I say anything else, I’ve got good news. Planning Center is back online! Not only that, we are giving everyone 4 days free for the trouble it has caused and just to say thank you for being so patient with us. Your next credit card charge will be postponed 4 days.

In case you had not noticed, Planning Center has had some network problems over the last couple of days. First it was because the server got overloaded when everyone returned from their vacations at the same time. Then after that was fixed, AT&T went down in Palm Springs and is actually still down while I write this.

We were already in the process of upgrading our servers, but once we realized AT&T couldn’t tell us when they would be back up, we drove to our server facility, physically retrieved the servers, brought them back, and began the process of transferring the database and application to our new servers. If you want the full details of all that happened, there are a couple of posts on our blog here: http://blog.ministrycentered.com/

At around 11PM Pacific Time, the process was completed and Planning Center is back. The good news is that we have moved to some seriously upgraded servers so that this won’t happen again. Our new servers are with rackspace.com. First of all, they guarantee 100% uptime, which means this won’t happen again! For more detailed information on why they are so good, check out this page: http://www.rackspace.com/whyrackspace/network/

In addition, Planning Center should be quite a bit faster due to faster hardware in our servers. We were at a 2MB connection and our new servers have a 100MB connection. We are committed to making Planning Center as fast as possible so that you don’t have to think about it.

After we make sure the transition to the new servers is smooth and complete, we will finish up work on our next update. We’ve got some exciting new features that we are hoping to release soon.

Thank you once again for using Planning Center. We wish you many blessings in 2008.

The Planning Center Team (Jeff, Aaron & Jeff)

Wooohooo!!! We are back up…I have just switched over the DNS entries for our site to www.planningcenteronline.com to the new servers, it should only take an hour or two to propigate. If it is not working for you try staging.planningcenteronline.com.

Please e-mail us at support@ministrycentered.com for any issues that might have popped up.

Thank you so much for your prayers & support.

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

We have restored the database to our new server. We are now working on getting the app fully functional. Anyone know how to get rmagick running on Red Hat Enterprise Edition?

Jeff

Hello,

We are back at our office and we are hooking up the database server and uploading the database right now.

Jeff

Hello Everyone,

In case you don’t know what’s going on, let me tell you.

Yesterday (Jan 2), we had an overwhelming amount of traffic since almost all of you resumed work after the holidays at the same time. This caused major strain on the servers which caused them to be either very slow or non-responsive. We had anticipated this and had already ordered new upgraded servers at another server facility, but we were dependent on that facility to give us the proper information to start using their servers. Unfortunately, we did not get the information in time and subsequently weren’t able to make the transition before you all came back for the new year. This caused the problems yesterday, but by the end of the day, everything seemed to be working smoothly again.

Then at 7:00am Pacific Time this morning, the ISP (internet service provider) that our current server facility uses went down. Their ISP is AT&T and as a result, every other server in our area (almost all of them in Palm Springs) is also down. Our server facility (DISC) is working frantically with AT&T to get this fixed and this morning told us it would be resolved in an hour. This has obviously not been the case as it is still not fixed, and they are unable to give us an estimate.

So unfortunately for us, these 2 unrelated incidents happened 2 days in a row when almost all of you are dependent on our site. I can’t tell you how sorry we are about this. I personally use the site at my church as well, and I know how dependent we are on Planning Center, so I know what many of you are going through. Please know we are doing EVERYTHING in our power to resolve this as quickly as possible.

So here is the current status. We finally received the information to switch over to the new servers this morning. Jeff has been frantically working all day getting the application installed and setup. Our problem is that the database is stored on the servers at our old server facility which is the one that is down. So instead of waiting an undefined amount of time, Jeff is driving to the facility at this very moment to physically retrieve the servers so that he can bring them back and immediately transfer the database to our new servers. The facility is an hour away, which unfortunately means that you won’t be able to get to your information for at LEAST another 2 hours, but in all likelihood, it will take quite a bit longer to transfer all the information over.

We are committed to finishing this as soon as possible, but can not give an accurate estimate on when you will regain access to the site other than tomorrow morning. In addition, since we are being forced to rush the server transfer process, there will probably be slight issues during the day tomorrow as well until we are able to fully test it.

We want to thank you for your continued patience and for helping make Planning Center what it is today. We appreciate you and are so blessed to be able to help you organize and facilitate your ministry.

Aaron Stewart
Product Manager
Planning Center Online