Day 2 brought us out to the beautiful CCV campus in Peoria. David started off the day by showing us:
- the completely professional contribution statements CCV created for Arena
- a new sync tool that lets you sync Arena tagged people to Outlook for easy offline contact data.
- a utility for importing MapPoint polygons into Arena's areas.
- the new small group "leader toolbox" and their new find-a-group module that's integrated with Microsoft Virtual Earth.
- the"family registration" system for quickly getting new families entered into Arena prior to check-in.
- and last but far from least, Arena integration with CCV's Asterisk phone system. Among its features include the ability to click on a phone number of a person to call them from your office phone, using the phone's micro-browser to lookup people in your "lists", displaying the Arena notes on a person that are set at "display" on a person's record. Lastly, he outlined all the features that will be coming in future versions of the Asterisk. All of this is part of their effort to get people to pick up the phone and call people more instead of hiding behind emails.
One of the excellent things about the way they designed the phone integration is that it uses the Provider Model. This basically means only a bit of 'driver code' needs to be created for any other IP phone system (like Cisco's CallManager) to integrate with Arena as CCV's Asterisk system does.
Jon's presentation covered topics such as understanding 'what we are building' and, among many other things, a really excellent
list of how CCV prioritizes additions/changes to Arena (features that make a large church feel small, dramatic staff productivity enhancers, leaps in innovation, clearer picture of the state of their members, etc.). He explained the secrets of the roles they have used (Mad Scientist, Architect, Technical Support/Developer) to go from "idea" to "code" and gave all of us some advice on how we could be successful with our own module development efforts. Lastly, he listed the upcoming features CCV is working on in the next 6 months.
After Jon's presentation, there was lots of discussion about how the core Arena team might focus its resources in order to remain true to the path that got Arena to where it is today.
The afternoon's open discussion focused community documentation or the like. One idea is to create 3 minute videos (using something like Camtasia) for training users. The idea behind this is you've only got 3 minutes to communicate what you need to communicate to the user -- anything more is too much. Keep the pace quick and get to the point by showing them how in the video. Professionalism is less important than the actual content here. It sounded like there might be an initiative to make a place on the community site for such videos. The other part was regarding the ArenaWiki for documenting both Arena and custom developed modules. Dallon and I originally set up the ArenaWiki as a quick prototype but everyone agreed that it's a great idea to allow us to have the power to update the content and that it might be time to move it officially into the Community site.
We concluded the day with a trip to a local restaurant and again got to enjoy sharing stories and information about ministry and Arena.