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 have a lot of big things on the burner right now, but we wanted to get a couple of quick enhancements out to you because they don’t really change anything, they just make it better.

Here are a couple of the changes:

Clean Up Of Facebook & Schedule pages

We have made a couple of minor enhancements to make those pages more readable & accessible, especially when you have Recurring Block Out Dates. Also, when you decline on the Facebook page it asks you for a reason.

Accept or Decline via TEXT!!!

If your phone supports replying to e-mail texts you can now reply to scheduling requests with either an ACCEPT, DECLINE or STOP (to stop receiving texts). Right now this is only for AT&T and Verizon because those are the only phone carriers we could test. If you would like this enabled for your carrier please e-mail smstest@planningcenteronline.com with your Carrier Name & Phone Number.

Also, if the reply doesn’t say Accept, Decline or Stop then we will forward it to the person who sent the message.

That’s about it! But tomorrow we have a HUGE announcement and a lot of other big things coming out over the next couple of months.

Thanks for all your support!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered technologies

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

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

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”.

2.) Enter In Your Login Information: Enter in your e-mail address and password and we will link all accounts with that information to your Facebook Account.

3.) View Your Schedule: This will show you all the dates you have accepted or have pending plus all the times you are scheduled for. You can also accept and decline from within Facebook.

4.) Receive Facebook Notifications: Whenever you are scheduled to serve, a notification will appear to alert you.

Bonus: On everyone’s Planning Center profile page a Facebook icon will appear on their record with a link to their Facebook profile. Also, when you are sending out scheduling e-mails you will see a Facebook Icon next to the people who have their Facebook accounts linked.

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.

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!

All current text message users: You must log in to your PCO account, go to ‘My Account’ in the top right corner of the screen, and then enable text messaging again. As of now, everyone’s has been cleared because of this switch. We do apologize for this inconvenience but we are trying to better your experience.  Now when you indicate that you want to enable text messaging, it will ask you for your carrier. You must indicate this in order to receive text messages. Once you’ve re-enabled and clicked ‘Save Person’ at the bottom, you’re all set to receive PCO text messages from here on out!

All International PCO users: You can now have access to the text messaging option! Just log in, go to ‘My Account’ in the top right corner, and then enter in a mobile number (make sure to indicate that it’s mobile or it won’t work). After you’ve entered your number, click ‘Enable Text Messaging’ and indicate the carrier you have. You’ll be all set!

Thanks to all PCO users for your understanding with any inconveniences this may have caused. We wanted a more reliable texting process, so that is why we are going through this transition stage with this feature.

If you do not see your carrier or need help with our new text messaging support please e-mail support@ministrycentered.com.

Thank you and have a wonderful rest of your week!

New Mobile Site

Here at Ministry Centered Technologies we love our iPhones!!! We also realize that many of you guys love your Blackberrys, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Android and other phones. So we have finally updated our mobile site for people who use phones other than the iPhone!!! Planning Center Online will now offer support for you to go to the website on most mobile phones. This has been requested by many people and it’s finally here! Enjoy!

Also, we have added attachments to the mobile view of all Plans, Plan Items, Songs, Arrangements, Media & People. So if your phone supports download & viewing attachments you can do this via the mobile interface. MP3s must have the Allow Download option enabled for them to show up in the mobile interface.

We have many other ideas for the mobile interface that we want to implement but we want to release this first to make sure everything is working for everyone.

Extra File Storage

Now you can enable “Extra File Storage” which will allow you to upload over your current plans File Storage limit. You will be charged $5 per month per GB over your current plans file storage limit. For instance if you upload 500MB over your current plans storage limit then you will be charged $2.50 per month.

New Filtering

When filtering through Custom Properties on the Songs, Media or People pages, we were running into a few things that we wanted to change so it would be even more user-friendly.

When you select multiple custom fields (for example, in my picture, Audio/Visual and Band are custom fields), before it would select people who had both an Audio/Visual AND a band property. Now, you can click on both of them if you want to and you can basically see everyone who is a part of either Audio/Visual OR Band.

Also, if you want to filter through custom options (for example, in the picture, Camera 1, Camera 2, Drums, etc are custom options) then you can click multiple custom options within the same custom field, and that will choose EITHER/OR as well. So, in this example you can now select all of your Camera 1 & Camera 2 people in one selection. We believe this will greatly improve filtering abilities!

More To Come!!!

We have several other small enhancements that we plan on releasing over the next couple of weeks so look for another update or two soon.