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At DrupalCon in DC this week, several people expressed interested in integrating Drupal and FellowshipOne. Fellowship Tech is demoing a new RESTful API, iPhone application, Facebook integration, ExpressionEngine, and ASP .NET MVC at the DC09 Developer Mini-Conference so the pieces may finally be coming together for a workable solution.  Some of the possible features that integration could provide are:

• Unified login – share logins between F1 and Drupal, so that once logged in they can comment, access restricted or personalized areas of the web site or make contributions, register for events, etc.
• Social networking tie in…Facebook app?
• Connect participation/interest from Internet campus and online classes to attendance/contact in F1.
• Tying small groups (or other types of groups) with content (small group materials, bible studies, etc.)
• Communications workflow – connecting news, events, schedule and activities in one place.

We have setup the project on drupal.org/project/f1 and are open for ideas, comments, questions and support.  Once  we get the vision firmly established, we may setup a ChipIn to get this accomplished.

Rob Thrush, the Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible is getting a Fellowship One Regional Users Group (RUG) going…last week he sent out a few details and also mentioned that a blog is in the works.

Greetings all,

I must start by apologizing for not getting our Regional Users Group (RUG) started sooner.  God has a way of adding new dimensions to life that sometimes need to be addressed before moving on to other things.  Nuff said on that.Well, the Fellowship One Users and Developers Conference is coming up in a couples of weeks (May 15-17, 2008).  If you haven’t signed up yet and still want to attend it looks like you can still do so by going to http://www.dynamicchurchconference.com/registration#.  On that note there is going to be a RUG Breakfast on Friday the 16th at 6:45am.  I mention this because I will not be able to attend the conference because of prior commitments (my son-in-law is receiving his commission in the Air Force on the 16th and I am part of that ceremony!).  So if any of you are planning on attending the conference and would like to attend this breakfast meeting and represent the Fellowship One Mid Atlantic Regional Users Group (F1MARUG) please let me know and I will pass that on to Fellowship One.

So. When do we hold our first meeting?  I have been struggling with this for some time now.  I had hoped to have our “Kick Off” meeting well before the conference but I am not going to be able to accomplish that one I’m afraid.  So, what’s a good date?  I have a couple of dates to throw out and see what your thoughts are.  We can discuss in more detail at our kick off meeting how best to proceed for future meetings, but I thought we could have the first, or Kick Off, meeting here at McLean Bible church.  I am trying to set up a conference bridge so that if you cannot make the meeting in person you can do so at least by phone.  So, the dates to consider are Monday June 9th, Tuesday June 10th or Wednesday June 18th.  I’m not sure what day of the week works best for everyone so I have thrown out a few different days.  I thought we could start the meeting around 10:00am and end no later than 2:00pm; or earlier if we finish all of our discussions; or later if we get on a roll.  I would like to hear back from you by Thursday May 29th , if possible, whether any of these days work for you so that we can finalize our plans.

…

Thanks,
Rob

I’ll post more information on the RUG as it comes along.

Tony Morgan of Simply Strategic fame, started off Saturday morning with his keynote speech, “10 Stupid Technology Mistakes that Churches Make.” Having made a few of these mistakes myself, the list is a great guide to remember. Jeff Bull has additional notes here. Next, Tony and Terry headed up a fun unconference session, answering questions about their various endeavors. My last session was an unconference about Online Giving, where I threw up a few suggestions for tweaks in the online giving and weblink setup.

After a great steak at Texas Land & Cattle, we headed over to Prestonwood Baptist Church for a tour. They weren’t joking that everything in Texas is big, I think the hallway in this church is larger than our sanctuary! We took a close look at how they process check-in for junior high, they use barcoded tags/stickers that the kids flash by a scanner as they enter. They encourage the kids to place the sticker on their cell phones so they don’t forget/lose them. The whole process for check-in takes seconds and they get a pretty accurate attendance count. As promised, here are all the pictures I took.

The last couple of days were nonstop so I didn’t get a chance to post on the rest of the Dynamic Church conference until now. Curtis Simmons kicked off the second day with a keynote address on where they are going with Fellowship One. The roadmap definitely looks exciting and I pray that God guides and leads them as they decide what has priority. Curtis mentioned the upcoming release of a Digg style site where Fellowship One users can submit and vote on what features they want.

Next up was Terry Storch, who introduced some of the out of the box ideas that he is a part of at LifeChurch.tv. They are using everything from Second Life to set-top boxes to “maximize reach” on the Internet. See posts by Terry, Jeff and Eric for more details.

Staying on the techie track, I headed over to Nick Floyd’s session on “Consuming DataExchange: Platform and Language Independent.” To give us a picture of what can be done with DataExchange, Nick setup a demo where he simulated a scenario between a volunteer on the greeting ministry and a first time visitor. He used his mobile phone to capture the contact info and push it back to Fellowship One. Nick wrote up all the details on how he made it happen here. Nick explained that DataExchange is Fellowship One’s XML-RPC API. He also, explained that they support versioning, so that if we write an application and they make an update it won’t break, they will always support previous versions. We are hoping to use DataExchange to provide a customized user experience on our next release of stmarkdc.org.

For the afternoon I took leave of the technology track and bounced into a session on “Check 21 and the Local Church” by Curtis Simmons. The session was informative, explaining the difference between Check 21 and ARC and how Fellowship One hopes to provide support for both in a single, integrated solution. I am sure our finance department will love the new tech.

Curtis Harris highlighted a few of the upcoming features on the roadmap, two things caught my attention. First, the availability of attributes via DataExchange, this would allow us to store and access any kind of user data and connect our website or any other application to it. Second, the release of a web site content management system (cms). A web site cms that is already integrated with Fellowship One is a great feature that will allow churches to establish a dynamic online presence quickly.

John and I hung out with my cousin Christine Eskander and her husband Mina for the evening. They are volunteers at Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Coleyville, Texas. We spend the evening talking about technology and service. The Wednesday night service at their church has taken off and they mentioned that His Grace Bishop Youssef will be starting a series soon. If you are in the area, it is definitely worth checking out – hopefully we will be able to watch online as well.

We started off the day at 3:30 AM, heading out to Dulles airport to catch the early bird flight to Dallas, TX. Thankfully, John and I both got a little shut eye on the flight. After a checking into our hotel and pick up some grub we headed over to the conference center to check in.

Of course, Fellowship Technologies checked us in to the conference using their check-in kiosk, all went smoothly and we were ready to delve right into the sessions. I chose the Maximize Technology track, where the focus is in web integration and data exchange (the F1 API). The first session in the track was given by Tim Hardy on Mass Synchronization with Fellowship One DataExchange. I ended up sitting next to Andy Lang from Bethlehem Baptist Church, turns out that they were already using the API to customize the web experience for their site visitors based on status (member, prospect, etc). In a very kind gesture, he copied the code they used over to my usb thumb drive so that we could use it as an example for our own site.

Tim gave various examples of applications for their Data Exchange API, most of them were about batch synchronization with other sets of data that are outside of F1. He walked us through how you can take data collected via a simple spreadsheet (name and email), convert into XML and using a small app he wrote upload it into F1. The app would work with API to check if the records already existed, if they did not it would create a new record with using a defined status.

As they continue to grow and develop the F1 API, they are working towards REST compliance, which would allow access to the data directly via http requests without having to use SOAP. That is great news for all of us copy/paste engineers because it would allow us much deeper data access without having to delve deep into XML.

Curtis Simmons, with quite a bit of spunk, delivered the next session, Dynamic Websites with Fellowship One DataExchange. Curtis illustrates the two different methods of integrating F1 into your church website, pop-up versus embedded. The pop-up method is just a snippet of javascript that you paste into your site that generates a pop-up login window. The embedded method is more complex because the church site must manage the cookies, but it does allow for a seamless user experience and user personalization.

Tara Coulson gave the next session on, Using CSS to Customize Fellowship One WebLink. A few of the tools she recommended while learning/working with CSS are W3 Schools, css Zen Garden and two Firefox add-ons, EditCSS and CSSViewer. The CSS allows you to skin weblink so that it matches the rest of your website. An interesting trick she mentioned is that you can use the visibility:hidden tag to hide items that you do not want displayed.

During the break I got to hang out with Matt Singley for a few minutes, he brought down a whole team from his church. Chris from Fellowship snapped a pic of the the bald bloggers.

John and I had dinner with Jeff Bull, the Technology and Internet Pastor at Capital Christian in Meridian, Idaho. Jeff just started full time over there and has also started blogging, make sure to add him to your RSS reader.

My coworker, John Basta, and I will be heading down to Dallas, Texas for the first annual Dynamic Church 07 conference next week. Dynamic Church is a Fellowship Technologies user and developer conference. We have been using the Fellowship One Church Management System (ChMS) at St. Mark’s for the past two years and we are looking forward to learning how we can better use its features in our ministries.

Any bloggers or church IT folk interested in meeting for dinner Thursday night?

The Non-Profit Tech Blog mentions a rumor that salesforce.com will offer discounted licensing for nonprofits with more than 10 CRM users – ballpark figure is 75% off the normal licensing fees.  The post also mentions that their have been successful conversions from Raiser’s Edge to salesforce.com.  I know that salesforce.com is a well regarded player in the commercial CRM market, have any churches looked into or are using it as a Church Management System (ChMS)?

ABC News just posted an article, “An ATM for God,” about a ‘Giving Kiosk’ that was released by Secure Give. Interesting concept, I wonder how difficult it would be to tie in with FellowshipOne. It would also be great if they could make it work with event registration as well as contributions.

I just sent Secure Give a quick email about these questions.

At the Innovative Church Conference last week, I met several people who asked about how we decided on using Fellowship One for our church management system. In the summer of 2005 we had a great volunteer intern, Philip Meawad, come in and work with us to research and select a new system that would meet our needs. Here is a writeup he did at the end of the summer. Please note that this research is over one year old and some things may have changed since then.

Day 1 of the Innovative Church Conference at Granger Community Church was definitely eye opening, they definitely know how to create an “experience” for their guests. From the walk in to the parking lot all the way into the auditorium, we were enthusiastically greeted along the way. I attended a breakout session on First Impressions that went through creating a “wow” first impression when someone first comes to the church based – check out Mark Waltz’s book on it. We got to meet up with Jason Powell and other church techies during an afternoon break and we will be meeting up for lunch today.

Got to speak a little with Fellowship Technologies and check out their check-in system, which we are considering adding earlier next year – it looks pretty slick, especially the bar code tags. George Kaldas, a deacon from our church in Chicago was talking to them about their basic edition, which is priced well for smaller churches just getting started to use church management systems.