Now that it has been announced publicly, I can tell you that we've picked Shelby Arena to replace our existing ChMS system.

Last year I installed the pre-Shelby version of this system and got to kick its tires. It is beautiful. When you finally get to see it you'll understand what I mean. Between Jon's eye, David's code and their combined knowledge of ministry needs, they have really created a useful ChMS system.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to sit with David, an original developer of this system, and look at the changes they've made to the engine (now an ASP.NET 2.0 package). With the 2.0 rework, it now appears that it will be possible to easily integrate your own custom code/assemblies into the package (provided Shelby still intends on making this a licensing option).

With Arena's ability to handle your web site content, it will become the platform for our "MyCentral" project we'll be soon working on.

In the upcoming weeks I hope to also share with you more news about Arena -- once I'm given the green light to say it...


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We recently installed a webcam on at our South campus for use during the construction of that campus over the next 9 months or so.

The webcam is pretty feature rich, but it did not come with any software that we could use on our web site to simply show the latest image. No problem -- its not too difficult to write some code to display the latest image found in a particular folder.

It's called LatestImageControl.ascx and I've made it a bit more generic so you could also use it. Both the folder and the filename extension are configurable.

Here's a page that describes the control.

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Here is a tool I use almost every day. It's called ScreenPrint32 and it is a must have utility if you do a lot of screen capture. It replaces your built in Alt-PrintScreen capability with a much more functional program. Gone are the days of 2MB image attachments in your email and documents.

In a nutshell, ScreenPrint32 will capture any area of a window you wish, convert it to the format you wish (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc), save it to disk (if you wish) and copy it to the clipboard.

The best thing is that it's free for educational use and for charitable organizations that qualify for tax exemption.

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We’ve been planning our next generation church portal for some time now. Since this portal is to be fully integrated into our ChMS system, we had to put this project on hold until we determined which church management system we were going to change to. With recent vendor developments which are still undisclosed, I can finally say we’ve decided to stick with our current vendor and use any new, upcoming offerings they may soon have.

In the beginning static web sites were fine. Dynamic web sites were a good step in the right direction, but live, personal web content is where it’s at. Can a member of your church find out what their personal next step is? Can they see their recent prayer requests, or the events, classes and training they are registered for? Can they see what their ministry leader is trying to tell their whole team about the upcoming weekend?


(larger view)

There were several goals of the system including:
• eliminating “information carpet bombing” (ICB) a.k.a. tell everyone about everything
• get personal – tell them things that are specific to their needs and desires
• get functional – let it be an essential tool in their hands

One of the problems we’ve had with our weekly bulletin insert is “space”. Since the space is limited, some ministries have not been able to publish information to those that may want to know. That is not good. Frankly, it’s unacceptable but in a large church I fear this can become the practice. Although a web page does not have this problem, the ICB problem must not get bigger.

Today, there is a flurry of information exchange between our “servant ministers” (you probably call them volunteers) and our ministry or staff leaders about upcoming events and serving schedules. While this has worked somewhat using email, there are still too many times where someone’s email inbox got the best of them and they were misinformed about when they were scheduled to serve. With the right tool in the hands of the leaders and servant ministers this problem greatly reduced.

How many of your tech savvy small group leaders are using Yahoo Groups to manage their group? Wouldn’t it be better for a person to “see” their group in your church’s portal? A tool that will let them see each others birthdates, anniversaries and such will help them to keep track of these important dates.

In the next part, I’ll review some of the functionality of each module in more detail.

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I've been using the ASP.NET Portal Starter Kit (PSK) for a couple of years, but it is aging and is coming to the end of its lifecycle. I've also been looking at DotNetNuke (DNN) as the replacement framework for any Web applications we build. Once the folks at www.asp.net endorsed DNN, my decision was finalized.

We recently hired a contractor to convert our custom Check-In Administration Console application (PSK-based) to the DNN 4.0 framework and I'm now in the process of testing the cut over/installation. Compared to the PSK, DNN has too many great features to list here, but I especially like the behavior of its integrated Windows Authentication mode: when a new user hits the application for the first time, they are automatically added as a subscribed/registered user to the application. That leaves only granting the new user access/authorization to specific functionality (if appropriate).

There is however some strange behavior that I have yet to figure out which happens if a user clicks the "logout" button. After doing so, the typical login box (username/password) is shown but it is not possible to login using the domain credentials. I did stumble across this page http://localhost/admin/Security/WindowsSignin.aspx which seems to perform the authentication check again and makes everything well again.

Do you use DNN, if so, for what applications? If you do not use DNN but do develop custom ASP.NET apps why aren’t you using it yet?



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