Ministry Centered Technologies

Hey PCO users! We have some updates to inform you of! Which do you want first….the good news, or the not-as-good news? Ok, I’ll give you the not-as-good news first:

New Look to Facebook App

Facebook has changed the way they do things, and as a result, we have as well. Facebook has taken away all notifications, which was the main feature we used to communicate PCO requests to you through Facebook. So now there are new steps needing to be taken to get your page all set up. It’s a bit complicated, but believe us when we say, we wish it could be easier! Click here to be taken to our lesson from our manual on how to set this up.

PDF Printing

This is the good news! For a while now, you all have been asking for a few more options when trying to print your plan. Here are some new options we’ve added:

You can print your plan as a PDF or as a Webpage.

You can adjust the page size, orientation, margin, and font size.

The options will be listed for you as they are shown in the screen shot. This will make it much easier for you to adjust how your plan is printed! You can also save it as a PDF and mail it off to someone who may need to see it instead of printing it. We do have plans on integrating this technology to other places within PCO.

Update to Verizon Texts:

Many of you were experiencing some issues with text messaging if you were a Verizon customer. The good news is that we have fixed this now! You all should be able to reply to texts and receive them with ease. Thanks for your patience through that!

Katie Willard

We launched our first-ever Webinar the other week with what we felt was success! We’ve decided to continue webinars that introduce Planning Center Online. The webinar allows you to log in from your computer and watch me give a demonstration of how PCO works and how to set it up. We believe this will be a bridge to better communication with our customers, which we are always striving to do. It will especially help you who have just begun using the program and want to have a demonstration of how it works and how to get everything set up. At the end, I will reserve some times for specific questions from you.

We are also looking to possibly expand this to do more detailed or advanced webinars for those of you who have had a PCO account for longer than just a few days or months. If you ever have any requests or ideas for more advanced webinars, please let us know: support@ministrycentered.com

Below are the times for December that we’ll be webinar-ing. Click the date to sign up for that specific day. We’ll see you there!

December 8th, 9AM-10AM PST

December 10th, 9AM-10AM PST

December 16th, 9AM-10AM PST

Katie Willard

Hello PCO users! We have yet another exciting release for you and it’s just in time for the Holidays (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!). Here are a few things we’ve added:

Recurring Block-Out Dates:

Yes, we know this has been a long time comin’. But it’s finally here! You are now able to block out a recurring date. So for all of you that say every 3rd Sunday of the month, you’re unavailable, it’s now just a few clicks instead of about 50.

When you enter the date you need blocked off, you have an option to select if it’s repeated or not. Once you click on the blue drop-down under Repeat, you can tell it to repeat every week or every month. Then you will have the option to indicate if you want it blocked out forever, or just until a specific time. So if I needed every Tuesday blocked out for the next 2 months, I could indicate that in one dialog box and be on my way!

Online Manual:

This has been my project for the last few months, and it’s by no means complete. But, we do have a BETA form of an online manual ready for everyone to take a look at! Our goal is to have every feature of the site covered in this manual, to give examples of how accounts are set up, and to basically answer your questions without you having to take the time to email or call us. On the right, you’ll see the Tags area which provides categories of lessons that you can easily get to. Here’s the link to the online manual, and please feel free to let us know what you think or any lessons that you’d like to see in the future!

Online Manual Link

Subscription to Community Songs and Media Pages:

If you’ve ever been curious about what others are writing on the Community pages, you can now subscribe to all comments that are made. To do so, go to each page (Community Songs and Community Media, whichever you prefer), then click the link at the bottom left as shown in the picture below. If you’ve subscribed and you want to unsubscribe, you can click on the same place to unsubscribe.

We hope everyone has an excellent Thanksgiving! You can expect to hear from us again soon, as we are continually working to improve PCO. Thanks for your continued support and feedback!

Thanks,

Katie Willard

We are very excited to introduce our newest feature, Facebook integration. For the past several months we have been learning about how to develop on top of the Facebook platform and thinking about the best way to do this integration. I am really happy with what we have come up with and I hope this helps your volunteers become more informed about when they will be serving. Let me go ahead and walk you through the integration process:

1.) Install the Planning Center Online Facebook App: You can install this by going to http://apps.facebook.com/planningcenter/ . We will shortly be adding a link to this from the Planning Center Online Dashboard & Schedule pages. Make sure you click “Allow”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Around three weeks ago we enhanced the mobile version of Planning Center with the ability to schedule and email people. Now we’re proud to announce that we just updated our mobile site to include the ability to add and edit items, songs & headers!

Additionaly, each user can easily change their status from the mobile site as well. Status is indicated in a color-coded bar at the top of the flow, and can be changed independently for each position they are scheduled.

Only mobile phones whose web browser is based on webkit (including iPhone, Android & Pre), are able to use any editing functionality at this time, for reasons explained in the previous post.

We have yet another exciting release, and this one is in the world of mobile phones. Last night we released an update that allows you to perform certain tasks on the mobile version of your phone (including iPhone, Android, and Pre). You now have the capability to schedule people and email those that are scheduled. This also paves the way for our new official Planning Center Online iPhone App that released today! The official app is a streamlined version of the updated mobile interface that runs more smoothly and remembers your password.

We apologize to our Blackberry users, but because the Blackeberry’s internet browser is not built on WebKit (like iPhone, Android & Pre), it is much more difficult to program and as a result, the Blackberry will still be read-only. Though our Blackberry users are very important to us, we discovered that only 2% of our mobile users use the Blackberry, but don’t worry- we aren’t giving up! We are continuing to find ways to improve the use of PCO on your Blackberry so stay tuned for any break-throughs and updates we may have in the future.

Hey PCO users! We have an exciting release for you. The most exciting part is a feature that people have been asking for, and that we are FINALLY adding for you! Yes, it’s about “time” these features were added. Let me explain:

Block Out Dates by the Hour/ Conflicts by the Hour:

Until now, users were only able to block out dates a whole day at a time. We realized this did not meet everyone’s needs, especially since there are some weekend services that have something happening in the morning and evening. So now, you are able to block out your dates one hour at a time. As a result, when a scheduler is scheduling and conflicts come up, they will only show as a conflict if their block-out time actually conflicts with the plan time and/or rehearsal time. The new dialog box will look like the picture on the right, and it’s rather self-explanatory. Just choose the date/s and time/s  you want to block out. It’s as easy as that!

Change The Date Of A Plan You Are Creating

When you click on the “Create A New Plan” link, the dialog box that comes up will now look different. Here you will have an option to set the date of this plan. Something we were running into a lot is if someone had accidentally deleted a plan that wasn’t the last one in the list, and had to add that back in,  the system would automatically create it for the next date past the last dated plan in the service (as it should), but it wasn’t very intuitive or easy to change the date. So now if you are in a situation like this, you can set the proper date before the plan is even created. It will also automatically update any times you have, according to that new date. If you choose to not set a date, it will add a date depending on the frequency you have set (just like normal).

New Time Options

The “edit a time” dialog box looks different now as well. Since block-out dates and conflicts are now by the hour, we’ve added end times to all your times. When you enter in a Plan, Rehearsal, or Other time (which is a new type), you will be able to designate when it will end. This will make any conflicts more accurate.

The default end time has been set to one hour after the start time, but we’ve added a great new option to help you change your times for multiple plans at once. When you edit a time, just check the new “Update in Future Plans” box at the bottom, and whatever changes you made to the time in that plan will be applied to that same time in any existing future plans!

Simplified Pages for Viewers

You can now specify that scheduled viewers should see the full plan, the song list, or their schedule only. The full plan is how it’s always been. The song list lets them view the plan, but omits any non-song items and only shows headers and songs in the flow. The schedule only option doesn’t even let them go to plan view, but takes them to the “my schedule” page which just shows them the plan dates, times, and positions they’ve been scheduled for. This is great way to simplify the experience for your users who don’t need to see plan details. You can see what the schedule view looks like by clicking “my schedule” underneath the calendar on the main plans page.

To specify this new view option, click “properties” at the bottom of the plans list on the main plans page, and then click the pencil to edit any of the people categories you want to change the view options for.

We hope you enjoy these timely updates and are able to be even more efficient with the way you plan your worship services!