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Monthly Archives: October 2009

Secondary Email and SMS Text Messaging

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This evening we applied an update to the WorshipPlanning.com site that has been frequently requested. Planners and Helpers can now receive WP communications through multiple email address and/or text message numbers. On your Account Settings page, you can add additional channels of communication, and specify which types of communications should be sent to each channel. The image below shows an example of a Planner that has one secondary email and one text message number set up.

Notice that the Primary email address ALWAYS receives the message, regardless of the type of communication. But each secondary channel can be individually configured based on the type of message being sent:

  • Assignment Notification
  • Assignment Response Notification (Planners only)
  • Message Board Updates
  • Service Changes
  • General Team Communications
  • User Account Updates

When a secondary channel is added, WP will send a short confirmation code via the new channel. Once received, the Planner/Helper will need click the “confirm” link and enter that code. This will activate that channel.

Messages sent to secondary email addresses will be exact copies of what is sent to the primary email address. However, messages sent to text message numbers will be very abbreviated in attempt to keep the message all in a single text message.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to post a comment here or contact us via our support site (http://support.worshipplanning.com).

New Worship Flow Printout and Roles/Skills Tool

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As the busy time of year approaches (one them, anyway), we are continuing to work very hard at providing you new enhancements and functionality to the site. To get these new features to you as quickly as possible, we try to update the site as soon as they pass our testing process (as opposed to waiting for a bunch of them to be ready before do the update).

This evening we made a couple of quick updates, and have a few more coming in the next few days. Tonight we added another Worship Flow printout style; one that has been requested by a few folks. The style is called “Flow and Assignments”. The top part of the page is similar to the Standard printout, except with better use of page space and zebra row shading. The bottom part of the page shows the service details/notes on the left side, and assignment lists of your team(s).

The other update we made can be seen by clicking on the People navigation link. You will notice a new tab called “Roles/Skills”. This new tab has taken the place of the Roles page linked from the Admin page. What’s more, you can now click on the role name itself and a window will open showing the role details AND a list of your people that have that role specified as a skill.

Stay tuned for more feature updates in the next few days (possibly a week)….

So…Where have you guys been?

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Despite the lack of activity on our blog and twitter accounts, we have been quite busy with both development efforts and marketing campaigns. And on both fronts, we feel we’re making great progress.

From a development perspective, we have one feature nearing the end of selective-church testing, and another feature that is in the middle of internal testing. The former is our Assignments Auto Reminder feature. Each team can be set up to have WP automatically send a reminder email to members that are assigned to an upcoming service. Team Leaders can specify the number of days prior to the service that the message should be sent, as well as the message subject and body.

The other feature will allow Helpers and Planners to add “channels of communication” to their account. Currently you can only have a single email address associated with your account in WP. This feature allows you to add additional email addresses, and even text message phone numbers. What’s more, you can specify the types of communication you’d like sent to each secondary communication channel. We hope to add Twitter and Facebook direct messaging as communication channels, but for the time being we’ve run into some API limitations with each of those systems.

So, what else is in the hopper? We have started laying the ground work for mobile and Facebook versions of WP. There is an effort afoot to make the process of building worship flows a little more intuitive. Also, 360WP will soon be getting a face-lift. And, of course, we have several other initiatives that we are yet ready to share. But it continues to be exciting times for both our staff AND our subscribers!

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