Please contact us using the feedback link within Church Director if this will interfere with your normal operations.

Update: The servers are upgraded and back online. Thanks for your patience!

Here are some screenshots to demonstrate what the new feature looks like:

Team leaders can access the availability calendar for their team members, or users can edit it themselves from within the “My Account” area.

To mark a date as blocked, simply click on the date - it is that easy! If you become available again, click on the red ‘X’ and the date will become available once again.

Notice how the Rapid Scheduler now honors the availability calendar by not scheduling someone.

We also added a CSV format to all reports, allowing the reports to be saved locally and imported into Excel or another favorite spreadsheet for any kind of custom report that you may require.

Enjoy!

Preview Rapid Scheduling Assignments

With Rapid Scheduling, you can now preview the assignments it plans to make for a specific date range. This is helpful if you want to see what the Rapid Scheduler will do, before it does it.

Our suggestion to get the most out of the feature is to use the following strategy:

1. Make sure Rapid Scheduling is deactivated (it won’t schedule nightly, giving you time to work everything out with confidence)
2. Add your team members to the appropriate scheduling groups (weekly, 1st week, 2nd week, etc)
3. Click the ‘Preview Schedule’ button to view what the Rapid Scheduler will schedule over the next month, 2 months, etc.
4. Make any changes as desired and view the preview schedule screen again to view the new results
5. Activate Rapid Scheduling when everything looks right for the needs of your team

Manually Control Rapid Scheduling Assignments

In addition to being able to preview Rapid Scheduling, you can request that the Rapid Scheduler create assignment requests and notify assignees immediately. This can be done whether the scheduler is activated or deactivated. Using it while the Rapid Scheduler is deactivated allows you to benefit from the mass assignments it will perform, while making the assignments when you want instead of on a nightly basis for the upcoming month.

Finally, you can use this manual control to schedule for multiple months in the future, a highly sought-after feature. One of our customers likes to schedule 3 months in advance, then provide a printed report for posting on a bulletin board or fridge.

Tabular Assignment Report

Want a better way to create printable reports for your team? You got it!

The screenshot above demonstrates using the Firefox print-preview feature (File->Print Preview from the Firefox menu) to set the scaling percentage to make it fit on 1 page in landscape mode prior to printing it out for you and your team.

Enjoy the new features and thanks for all of the questions, feedback, and ideas you have been providing!

UPDATE: The system is now restored. We used the latest database backup possible, but a few hours of data may have been lost. We apologize for any problems while we work out the final wrinkles in this beta release.

Support for recurring schedules on the 1st-5th week of the month

This has been the most requested feature, by far and now we have it! When you activate Rapid Scheduling, we will now create 8 teams that you can use as needed:

1. Assigned Every Week
2. Assigned Every Odd Week
3. Assigned Every Even Week
4. Assigned Every 1st Week of the Month
5. Assigned Every 2nd Week of the Month
6. Assigned Every 3rd Week of the Month
7. Assigned Every 4th Week of the Month
8. Assigned Every 5th Week of the Month

So, if your team rotates every other week, use the first three groups. If your team rotates on a monthly basis, you one or more of the last five groups. Here is a screenshot of what the new groups listing looks like within Rapid Scheduling (click to view the full size image):

Also note that the preview calendar button has been moved to each group in the list, so that it is easier to view the occurrences of a specific group for the next three months.

New Group Membership Report

A new report is now available from within the Team Reports and Church Reports that display each member of your church, along with their contact details and their team memberships. Print a report just for your team as a contact sheet, or print a church-wide report of everyone within Church Director!

Improved Request Emails

Request emails now have new subject lines and use better terminology. This has been another request recently, as the term ‘assignment’ has been deemed “not PC”. We now prevent reminder emails from being sent if the user has declined the assignment - something we should have done some time ago.

Enjoy!

Google extends its free offer to educational institutions to registered nonprofits. Basically, your nonprofit can use Google’s office applications and Gmail for free. The reason this makes life easier for most nonprofits is that:

1. Managing all your organizations email accounts is web based and maintained by Google
2. Users can send and receive email via Gmail that is available to them anywhere
3. Gmail virtually eliminates the need to put storage restrictions on email accounts
4. Gmail makes spam manageable without being complicated

I use Google Apps for Church Director and my software consulting company, Blue Jazz Consulting. It takes a load of work off of my plate, along with less to manage and maintain.

Read the full article: http://digital.leadnet.org/2007/10/how-to-set-up-g.html

Update: The site has been updated, and now includes some updates to the ‘Getting Started’ section of your team planner, along with the updates outlined in previous posts on this blog and various bug fixes.

If you see something out of the ordinary as a result of this upgrade, please let us know using the feedback form on the website.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Have a look at the preview below (click the image to view the full size screenshot):

There will now be a warning icon and pop-up notification if a team member has a possible conflict for the same day. This should prevent you from sending an assignment request, then getting a declined response due to the conflict. Of course, you will not be prevented from assigning them a job assignment if they have a possible conflict.

Other enhancements include moving the quick assignment group box so that it no longer take away valuable screen space from your team member list. Also, the new design offers a much needed cleanup of this screen and will make it easier to read.

We are getting close to releasing this new design and recently previewed features - stay subscribed!

It is now easier than ever to know when and where you are being requested, see your current response (or if you haven’t responded yet), and view any possible conflicts you may have on that same day. Clicking on a possible conflict will take you to the same assignment confirmation screen for the conflicting event, allowing you to see details and change your response, if desired. This should make it even easier to prevent double-bookings and remind assignees of forgotten assignments for the same day.
Stay tuned - more previews coming soon as we near the last stretch of this major site upgrade!

As you can tell, there is a new site theme that we think makes it look even better! The navigation bar has also been remodeled, with often-used features readily available.

In addition, the table listings have been cleaned up and the links converted to buttons to make them easier to find. Some tables also have filters on the upper-right corner, allowing you to switch between active and previously deleted items (think of the recycle bin on Windows or OS X).

Here is one more sneak preview:

Within each area, you are automatically taken to the most commonly needed function (in this example, your team member list) but other options are just a click away (e.g. Job Roles from the Manage My Team section).

There is more room on a screen now as well, using our new navigation tool bars. Combined with a wider screen layout to match your monitor size (1024×768 and above are common now), this release will make a huge improvement in how you use Church Director!

More previews coming soon…