Arena - unveiledIt's been a busy March and I can't believe it's over (actually Q1 2007 is over).

Just before I left for a spring break vacation, we unveiled Arena to seven major teams at Central (small groups, involvement, prayer, student ministries, communications, administration, and sports).  They all loved it.  Next week we begin basic user training for all the remaining staff.  By the end of the following week we'll have all but a handful of people moved off of ShelbyV5 to Arena.

During my break I read iWoz - the story of how Steve Wozniak invented the first personal computer.  Steve's story and the work Apple did to create the Macintosh UI Toolbox for their developer community reminded me about the work we are doing at the Arena Community (aka the.Community).  Caleb, Jeff, Gary, David, Jon and myself have been working hard to create some needed "toolbox" documentation to help other community developers jump start their custom Arena development projects.

I've also been reading a bit on some of the other ChMS solutions (that have yet to be released or even coded) and the more I read, the more I like the fact that Arena was actually designed by a church (of >10k members) to manage their church and that several churches have been actually using Arena for multiple years now.

2007 is going to be a banner year for ChMS and the Church.