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 out http://fb.worshipplanning.com and become a fan!

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.

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

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.

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.