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Category Archives: feature updates

New Worship Flow Printout and Roles/Skills Tool

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)….

Updates Applied on Aug 30

Yesterday evening we applied a performance update to the Team Scheduling page (where people scheduling for all future services is displayed) that should be quite noticable, especially for churches that have many teams and/or many future services scheduled. The enhancement should render the entire page within a couple of seconds, rather than a couple services at a time over the period of 10 seconds or so. For those curious, we did this by changing our code to generate most of the HTML on our server, rather than passing raw data and asking the browser to process and render the HTML. We also made a small tweak to our database that helped optimize the way data is retrieved.

With this update we also made two non-critical fixes. First, if a Helper marked himself as unavailable for a day that he had already been penciled in by a Planner, the Planner would not know of this change in availability and be able to schedule the person. To handle this, we now do a check for penciled-in assignments as the person marks a day as unavailable. If a conflict is found, the penciled-in assignment is changed to status Declined, with a note stating that the person has recently marked that day as unavailable.

The other issue fixed was that the file description in MyWP was missing on some pages. That description now shows as it should.

We are continuing to add many video tutorials to the site. Just look for the “Video Tutorial” link on the left side of pages in WP. We hope to soon index these in such a way that they can be easily searched on our support center.

Quick Update on What’s Coming

Since it has been a few weeks, I wanted to post a quick update on what what will be in the next update to WP (currently scheduled for this coming Sunday night).

From a feature-perspective, we’ll be rolling out improvements to the team management pages. Managing team members, team roles, and default roles will work just like scheduling people, as far as the interface goes. You’ll be able to drag and drop said elements onto your team in a familiar fashion.

Our update will also include more video tutorials, as well as a few account configuration “tracks”. The tracks will trigger automatically when you try to perform a task that your account hasn’t been set up for yet. For example, if you try to create a service and don’t have worship flow template defined, WP will help you create a template before creating the service. The configuration tracks will be most helpful for churches new to WP, though if you have never created a team or added additional people, these tracks will be helpful to you also.

We are planning to start regularly occurring “webinar” sessions that cover various topics. Probably the first topic we cover will be on managing teams and scheduling people. If you have any ideas for other topics, feel free to post a comment with your suggestion.

Improved Privacy, Creating a Series, and a New Home Page

Last night we rolled out three new updates that we want to tell you about.

Privacy Settings
Lately we have had several requests to give Helpers and Planners some options on restricting who can see their contact information. As of this morning, both Helpers and Planners can now set one of three levels of privacy for his/her contact info: 1) Visible to all Helpers (within church account) 2) Visible only to Helpers that are teammates 3) Not visible to any Helpers. This setting can be change by clicking on the “account settings” link in the upper right area of most pages in WP (and myWP). The default setting is “Visible to all Helpers” since that is the equivalent of what it has been in the past. Administrators can also adjust this setting when adding or editing Helpers and Planners. It is important to note that Planners can always view the contact information of fellow Planners and all Helpers.

Creating a Series
Updates to this page make it even easier to create a series of services. One really nice feature is the ability to skip weeks mid-series, if desired. We also added a 3 minute video tutorial right on the Create a Series page. Just look for the Video Tutorial icon on the far left side of the page.

New Home Page
We are really excited about this enhancement. Because it is still in the final testing phase, you have to click on a link at the bottom of the current Home page to see the new one. But we think you’ll be very happy with the improvements. There is even a pretty nifty calendar! If you have any feedback you’d like to give us on this page, feel free to let us know.

People/Team Scheduling Enhancements Officially Released

Early this morning, the Team Scheduling update graduated from “Beta”. This means they are now officially integrated into the site and ready for all churches to start using. The fastest way to learn about these features is to watch the video tutorial we have put together. There are actually two videos: one on how to set up and manage Teams in WP, and another on using the new People/Team Scheduling pages. Links to each tutorial are presented to you the first time you access the People/Team Scheduling pages. They can also be found on WP SupportĀ http://support.worshipplanning.com in the “People” section.

To access one of the new pages, click on the “Roles” tab next to the Worship Flow tab of a service, then click the “Roles Scheduling” link in the upper right corner of the Roles tab.

Over the next week or so, we will be adding a new feature to People Scheduling. It is called Auto Email Reminder, and can be used by team leaders to have WP automatically send an assignment email reminder before the date of service. Team Leaders can configure the “lead time”, the message content, and whether or not a reminder summary page is sent to him or her once the reminders have been sent.

We also have a little more work to do as far as updating our support documentation and video tutorials. We hope to create a few tutorial tracks for the different types of WP users. This will include a track for ministry leaders that are not necessarily worship planners.

Finally, we want to give big “Thank You!!!” to all the churches that took part in testing this feature. Your feedback was invaluable, and we hope to continue to hear from you with this and other new features.

Finding a substitute just got easier…

We just rolled out a couple of cool Team Scheduling enhancements that should make late minute schedule changes a breeze. First, we are excited to introduce a tool that will help you find a qualified substitute for an assignment. If a person has declined an assignment, a link will appear below his name that says “sub…”. When clicked, this link will bring up a window with a list of the best qualified (and available) substitutes, starting with the most qualified. Their Qualification Index is calculated using a special algorithm we created. The desired sub can then be easily selected for assignment right from the list.

Even if an assignment hasn’t been declined, you can still find a sub by clicking on the name of the person in the assignment and selecting the “Find a substitute…” link. Or, if you haven’t even assigned a person to the role yet, you can click the “No Person” link, and WP will make suggestions.

The other significant upgrade we made this evening was the first step in replacing the old way of assigning roles and people to services. The old way, of course, is that you go to the desired service, click on the “Roles” tab, then click on the “Edit Roles” or “Edit Assignments” links. We have added a new link on that page called “Role Scheduling”. Clicking it will take you to a page that looks like the Team Scheduling, except that it keeps you on the “Roles” tab and only shows you assignments for that service (and any linked services).

One last note: We have officially launched the WorshipPlanning.com Facebook page. Check outĀ http://fb.worshipplanning.com and become a fan!

Two New Features; Team Role Templates and Sending Single Assignment Email

We just rolled out a great feature for Team Scheduling that really adds a whole new dimension to this page. It is called Team Role Templates, and here is how it works.

Within a team, “templates” of roles can be created. This would be a set roles that you often scheduled together. Here are two examples:

1) You have a Technology team that consists of all of your camera, lighting, soundboard, and computer operators. But for a normal service, you have 1 soundboard, 1 lighting, 2 camera, and 1 computer. A Team Role Template can be created with just these 5 roles.

2) You have two worship teams that alternate weekends: 1st and 3rd Sundays and 2nd and 4th Sundays. All of these people are on the same “team” in WP, but are always scheduled with their band for 1st and 3rd or 2nd and 4th weekends. Two Team Role Templates could be created called “1st and 3rd” and “2nd and 4th”. Each template could have the roles and the people specified as well.

You could even think of team role templates as “sub-teams”. The beauty of setting these up comes when you schedule them. Team Role Templates will appear as green-shaded items in the team panel on the far left side. By dragging a template to a service, all of the entries for that template will be slotted and/or assigned for that service.

To create team role templates, you can go to the Team Scheduling page, then click the down arrow next to the team name (on the far left side, not within a service), and select “Team Role Templates”. The interface to create team role templates is just like the Team Scheduling page – drag and drop.

The other feature we applied this evening is the ability to send an assignment email to just one person from the Team Scheduling page. To do so, simply click on the person’s name in the assignment and you will see the familiar menu showing you information about the person. The option at the bottom of the menu is “Send notification email for this assignment”. This will bring up a window allowing you to choose which assignments you want to include the details for in your email, as well as the subject and body of the email.

In the next few weeks, we plan on making the Team Details and Home pages a little more user friendly. This will also make accessing the Team Scheduling page a good bit easier.

Song Lyric Formating, New Help Desk System, Team Role Templates Update

We just applied a small update that I imagine will make you say, “Great update, but what took you so long?” The short description of the update is that you can now save (as part of the song details) a font type and font size for the lyrics section of the song. For those that didn’t just shout out loud “Finally!!”, let me explain how this is helpful. Many churches space the lyrics out so the chords will fit nicely above each line of lyrics. Well, if you are pasting the lyrics/chords in from a Word document, chances are the chords won’t line up correctly due to differences in font size and type. For a while, WP has allowed you to adjust the font type and size on the Song Details page….but those adjustment couldn’t be saved anywhere. So, every time you or a team members opened the lyrics of the song, they had to manually make that adjustment. Well, now you can save those setting right on the page where the song is added/edited.

On a different note (pun not intended), we have recently started using a new Help Desk system that does a better job of tracking your feedback and support requests. So, where you may have seen responses directly from WP individuals the past, you will now see them from arrive with a “from address” of support@worshipplanning.com. It will still be a message from me or another support team member, but it will have a Ticket Number associated with it. And you can respond to these emails by simply clicking “Reply” in your email software. Just be sure to keep the subject line intact to assure proper routing of your ticket.

Finally, we are shooting for an update later this week (or maybe early next) that will allow teams to create templates of roles. If you aren’t sure what this is, stay tuned. We’ll post a blog update on how it works once we update the site in the next several days.

Team Scheduling Nearing End of Test Phase

This evening we rolled out a few more TS enhancements.

  1. Assignment Response Notes are now visible on the TS page. If there is a note, there will be a little “note bubble” icon next to the role name for the assignment. Click this icon to see the response note(s).
  2. Assignments (within each team) can be sorted by Role Name or Person Name. Just use the little down-arrow icon to the right of the team name

We have a few more smaller enhancements, and then a larger “Team Role Templates” feature slated for the next couple of weeks. If those go well and minimal bugs are found, I think we’ll be ready to officially launch Team Scheduling for WP!

One other enhancement (fix) we made this evening is that the new File Browser search/selection window will now scroll properly with your browser. This was only an issue with netbooks, but one that we needed to fix anyway.

Team Scheduling Performance Improvements

We conquered a pretty big hurdle with the Team Scheduling (TS) page this evening. For those of you with many future services scheduled and/or many teams created, you probably noticed the TS page was a bit slow to load. I can confidently say “The wait is over!” Our lead developer for this TS project just released several enhancements for this page, one of which GREATLY improves the speed of the page. Kudos for Joel, the TS lead developer!

A few other really neat features that we just rolled out are:

– Assignment responses can be changed with the use of a new little down arrow under each status box – Empty teams can be hidden from view with the use of the appropriate Display Options checkbox in the upper left corner.

What’s next with TS, you might ask? Here are a couple things we are moving into the “active development” stage:

– Ability to delete an entire team assigned to a service (trickier than it sounds) – Sorting of people vs. roles within a team in a service – Showing assignment response notes – Use of Roles Templates on a per-team level

At some point, as we near the end of the beta (or “test”) phase, we plan to take some of this cool drag-n-drop technology and apply it to the team management page, role template page, and even the main edit role assignments page (the “old way” of scheduling people).

One last note regarding this whole “Team Scheduling” thing. I have spoken with a few people who like the new team-friendly features, but feel their church (or ministry) is too small to use it. As we add these team features, we are trying to maintain a level of “backward-compatibility” so that churches not wanting to organize people onto teams can still use the site as well as they always have. However, in keeping with the spirit of trying to stay organized, we are encouraging even the small churches/ministries to group their people on teams, even if it is just one team that is called “The Team”. Doing so makes it easier for you to use new WP features and for other ministries at your church to potentially use WP.