ALL CLEARFirst the good news.  After meeting with the Arena team, I can now say it looks like we'll be able to move off of our custom developed "Student" check-in system without any issues.  It's a no-brainer.  The Arena Check-In system works very similar to ours.  We can even customize the screens to look like our existing system, but I like much of what I see in their standard/default system (sample screen shot).

Now the not so good news.  I cannot say that we'll be able to away from our Children's check-in system without issue.  Although it does have centralized, self serve capability -- and the labels can even print out in the classroom instead of locally at the kiosks, it works by "age" and not "age-group" or "grade" as ministry currently operates.  I also don't think it can break out by "ability level" (infant, crawler, walker) or "special needs" as we do at Central.

So to figure out where we stand, we are going to bring in our Children's ministry and let them see a full demo/walk through of the Arena check-in system in action to see if they will adapt their ministry to the way the system works.  If not, we'll probably be blazing the trail of custom development in Arena -- something we knew we'd eventually want to start doing anyway.  There will be many hurdles to jump as this aspect of Arena (community development) has yet to be fully explored.  We'll begin posting our questions and designs to the community site once it has been officially launched so you can see how things progress over there.