Podcast Episode 207: Episode 180: Community and Product Updates

Description

Join Jon, Nick, and Emily as they dive into the latest updates in Rock and the Rock Community. Discover how you can get involved and make an impact in the Rock Community, no matter your technical skills. Plus, get a sneak peek into their future plans involving CSS and AI. Don’t miss out on the exciting lineup of upcoming Rock Classes!

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome back to Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here joining us. This is the podcast for the Rock community, and we have lots of updates for you today. So let's dive right in. Nick, fill us in on where we are from the product perspective. From product perspective, we are on version sixteen six. That's the latest hot fix for version 16. And, , we're hard at work fixing some additional bugs. Think we've got our list down pretty pretty tight now, but there will be another patch coming out probably within the next month or so. You could probably expect that. Beyond that, it's always, , the next major version. So we're always working on that. We're doing some polishing of some of the major features in v 17 and pretty much the things we talked about at the At the conference. Yeah. Yep. Great. So that's a good platform update. Let's talk a little bit about the community. We had such a strong showing up of the community at RX. It's very exciting. And a lot of people still have a little bit of maybe lack of information about how to get involved if they aren't doing specific technical volunteer roles. And so it would be really great, Nick, if we could kind of just run through some of those options just for awareness. And there's always room for additional help and involvement here in the Rock community. And I guarantee there's something that's just right for everyone. Oh, for sure. Because even though there's a 63 Rock stars now, some of those are new. They they just made Rock star status, and they don't even know all of these things. And they didn't get all their points necessarily by answering questions in chat. So let's talk a little bit about some other options. So the other options are and you can all find this if you go to community.rockkarma.com slash get involved. It's also in the sidebar. There's so many options to pick from from including I'll just kind of rattle through some of these. Sharing your ministry story. That's really vital for the community to hear these stories. It energizes us. It energizes the core team. Mhmm. It share it it's kinda marketing material for other people that are wondering why Rock might be so awesome. So what does that mean though? Yeah. It it's the it's the thing that energizes us. Right? This is what we're passionate about. And sometimes we can forget in the rush of all the things we're doing to share those impact stories. So this gives you an opportunity to say, here's how the tools and technology of Rock, probably combined with some really good processes and some training, came together to support ministry in a way that left a lasting impact on people. And so we have the ability for you to fill that out right there. Now we know this is happening on a regular basis. It is something you might have to go request or kind of pull those stories from your ministries. They may not come right out and tell you, but you can see the little inklings of something happening at various times. And we certainly encourage you to go find that out and share them with us. In fact, we do get those coming in from churches, , time to time. You've probably seen the result of one on a fairly recent blog post. Leah Jennings shared something that they had done related to short term signups. And that came through as a ministry story and it was really cool and was something we were able to capture and share back out with the community in a blog post. So that just takes something that is already high impact and it gives it extra life and gives so many more people that that encouragement and that breath of fresh air. And it's something that only you have access to. We we don't have a window into your church. So when you hear those stories, let that be a reminder. Go jump on and and share that story with us. And I would probably encourage you, don't wait to hear the story. Yeah. Go get the story yourself. , ask for the story into the ministry. Might be the case that you're even not hearing about these stories. And I'd say that's important not only to give to us, I mean, obviously that impacts us, but I think it's gonna impact you. If you can hear the difference that your work makes, it's gonna fill your tank and then you can pass it on. So somewhat selfishly do it for yourself and ask for those stories so you can fill your tank and then you can pass it on too. Another one, we often talk about this right around the conference time, it's think about what you wanna present at next year's Rx. Yes. You have a whole year to think about, well, less than a year because you wanna have it done before Rx, but think about what you're gonna present as the the next several months are unfolding. Mhmm. You're gonna run into a situation. You're gonna be , that's the perfect content to share with my fellow Rock That's right. People. And some tips since we're fresh off the conference as you're beginning to think through these ideas, we just encourage you to give it lots of time to percolate in your thoughts, right, and figure out how you can We often hear something that starts with here's a problem we ran into, or here's something we need to solve, or here's a ministry initiative we need to support. If you can start with that context and that and state that problem upfront really well, and then talk about your solution. And you don't even have to get into really, really technical details. Some presentations you do, but in many cases, you can get into a discussion of how the features kind of came together without all the details and then talk about the way that it was delivered and the results of that. Right? So don't forget to set up a success metric for your projects and then and then discuss that impact as well. And then you have the ability to provide takeaways. They can have the very specific technical details. But you just remember who is your audience for this as well and kind of tailor what happened and don't forget to craft a story around it because those are the the presentations that have the most lasting impact. And also make sure that you fill your time. I know it's so easy. I can say this personally, and the two of you can probably experience the same thing. But when you get in front of people and you have a stage and a light in your face, it's easy to go through your material super fast and in super early. So make sure you're practicing and that you're adding the right supporting information in there because it's familiar content to you, but it won't be to your audience who hears it for the first time. Provide enough information to really draw them in and spend the appropriate amount of time sharing your story. But this is the time to start looking at what that could be and start thinking about it. And some other ideas on the get involved page, which really directly ties into the last one we just talked about, publishing recipes. Oh, yeah. If you've got an Rx presentation, you might consider making that a recipe either right before or right after you give your Rx presentation. That's a good idea, Nick. Answering questions on the q and a board. That's still a popular thing and needed. And here's one we don't often talk about, writing a review. Go to a system where our church management systems Rock are being judged or or at least, , evaluated by other churches and write a good review if you believe in Rock. And then one of my, well, favorites, obviously alpha and beta testing. Yes. Know, requires a little bit more tech and know how, but That's alright. If you think you've got the capabilities, we would love to have you join us in finding bugs during the alpha testing of the next release. It's way more efficient for you to help find those bugs then and get them fixed before they're released. That sounds a win win. So if I'm working at a church, why is that a great idea for me to get involved again? What does it do for me? Well, it's it's almost as if you have a developer now on your staff because if you find that bug during alpha testing, you get that reported. We have a high probability of fixing that bug. So it's it's almost you you fixed it. Mhmm. By reporting it, you kinda fixed it. And I think there's a new thing starting too where the alpha and beta team are being told after pre alpha what's new in Pre Alpha so they can actually go test it on the Pre Alpha server. So even if you don't have the ability to create a whole environment, you can still get involved in testing things ahead of time, which is a huge service to the community. It sure is. Yeah and when we talk about pre alpha, that's really the the next version of of Rock, the next major version. And there's a specific server that has every two weeks gets updated with the latest stuff. And I don't think many people really fully know what that's all about. And then one more, hosting a roadshow. That was one of my favorites when I first started with Rock is going out and looking at other churches in my neighborhood and then dropping off a letter, , trying to meet the person who is equivalent to the IT or the, , the database person and share Rock with them. Yes. So roadshows, let's talk a little bit about those because we're gonna be having a bigger push for those soon. Roadshows are the best way for other churches to find out about Rock. Rock in general can help so many churches, but what we found in talking to them is that until they really see it in action, kind of see a church that's using it and can understand it, they may not know whether or not they are interested. And, , of course, as a nonprofit, we don't have a sales team. So this is really helpful to the Rock community growth, but it's also helpful to churches that are stuck in systems and they don't realize what else is out there. And so it's a way to take what you're already doing and just give a little bit of information in a time that's really fun and high connection with the people that live near you and give them a chance to learn a little bit about Rock. And here's the here's the great thing about it. It doesn't take a lot from you because what we do is we give you a slide deck that has all the information about Rock itself, the the product, the platform, the model, and you give that presentation. It would be, of course, in your facility, you'd be hosting it. We can put a registration together for you if you need that. But then you host, you give this presentation, that's give or take about an hour, and then provide another hour or so of q and a for the churches that have shown up, and they can ask those specific questions that otherwise may not get answered. And those are the hurdles to adoption. So we'll be giving a new updated slide deck out soon, reaching out to the local communities about hosting roadshows, but we're really excited for this next season of roadshows, and we need roadshow hosts. And and and don't think you have to invite 40 churches. We're talking about two, three. The the more intimate, the better. That's right. They're you're really just sharing information and you're you it's an outreach of love It is. To help your fellow churches in your neighborhood. But your personal invites and your ministry team's personal invites to other churches are what makes those well attended. It's it's definitely dependent on reaching out and building the local relationships. And it's a good precursor to sharing it Rx. It is. Gateway. Yep. So highly encourage you guys to consider doing a roadshow. Boy, that's those are the main ones. The last one we won't even talk about, fixing an issue. That's highly unusual for a church to be in a position to actually fix an issue. Yeah. Some are different skill sets and different number of people that might have access to them. That might be a slightly I don't know that anybody actually does that right now. But that's okay. But there is one more where you can have a conversation with the church and help a church understand Rock better, whether that's an existing church using Rock that just needs to understand a feature set, or maybe it's a new church that just wants to understand the value of Rock. And you can report that and then you get points for that too. And that's more one on one where a roadshow is a little bit more presentation based. But this just might be a video conversation or meeting up for coffee or Yeah. And you can report that right on the community site under your profile. So don't forget, I have spoken with quite a few churches recently that do this all the time and forget to log those conversations, but they will give you community points, which of course can lead to Rock star status. Yep. Okay. Well, and speaking of community, let's break it down even a little bit further. We've been getting some great traction with regional communities. Now regional Rock communities are based in areas where there are quite a few churches that are using Rock or or maybe that's growing, maybe that's building up and something a church wants to invest in. And so we will have regional communities kind of come together with two co liaisons that are typically from different organizations that will be kind of the conduit between the core team and the regional community. So we have a communication point. They'll help organize meetups, which are typically maybe three a year give or take. Some do more frequently that because they just love getting together. We have some really established and large regional communities that I think have a more frequent cadence. But it's a great opportunity to have some of that camaraderie and community you might associate with RX all year long. And that includes the meetups. There's also a chat channel in Rocket Chat. It's a great place to just kind of have a little dialogue, but it builds those bonds with those right around you that are also using Rock. I thought it really cool at the conference. You saw a lot of the regional communities getting their picture taken together in front of Chip, which I think that's a good exact example of the micro community that you can create. We wanna keep building the macro community. Of course. But as the macro community gets bigger and bigger, these micro communities are actually really important. Mhmm. It's really cool to see some of those happening Mhmm. And to see them posted on social. Yep. And we should be we're working on a web page that will come out at some point here in the next probably couple of months that will give an illustration of where our current regional communities are and give you a link to the chat channel so you can jump right in and get involved. We also have a form you can fill out for an interest list. I think we had that up at the conference. But if you're interested in something and right now aren't sure, just go ahead and send us a quick email and we'll help get you connected. Okay. That is quite a lot. This community is exciting. And I think coming off of the conference, it's good to just give everybody a reminder of how they can stay connected and engaged all year until we see each other the next time. And community is really, it's not easy. It takes energy, everything, especially entropy really enters into the community if you don't continue to put energy and sometimes there needs to be lot of strategy that goes into So are there anything strategically that we could do better to improve community? Absolutely. One of the most common ways people are getting involved is in the chat channel, That's the probably most well known and easiest way to get involved, but it's also the one that can show a lot of activity or not enough activity. And so people sometimes feel , oh, if I'm not involved in chat right now, there's no space for me to get involved. In fact, we've heard that from a couple of people recently. And I think maybe what we need to do is consider we have a a very strong vast majority of group of people that should be getting more involved in chat. We need to hear your voices more. Doesn't mean you need to know everything, but there are things that , and and there are ways you can contribute to community without even answering questions in chat. And most people would probably fit into that bucket. And there are are a small few people who might be jumping in to answer questions a little too fast, which could prevent some other people from feeling there's space for them to jump in. And that's the feedback we've received a little bit. We have. Yeah. We've gotten a little bit of feedback on that front. And, , we'll be providing some coaching and things on that topic to try and help get those all evened out. But, , we ran into the same thing way back in the day when we created chat. We had a vision for where it should go, And leading the charge sometimes feels get out there and answer everything. But in fact, we realized we needed to step back a little bit and provide a little space for questions to to sit people to to get their answers together. A well considered answer is exactly what someone is looking for when they post a question. I think for us it was, in the beginning it's spinning the top, you gotta put energy into it. Gotta get it going. But then as the core team, we needed to actually step back. Otherwise we would turn into the primary answering. And we actually heard that, , well, we're afraid that, you you guys know it better, we're gonna get it wrong. But we had to actually let some of those questions ferment just a little bit to allow someone else to step in and take a swing at it. And if we hadn't, it would literally be a very very small thing that only a few blessed people would And that's not what we want. We want everybody to be able to jump in there. Because that would not be community. Yeah. And the feedback was specifically , I don't know how I can be a rockstar when I can't even get my voice in. Right. Because I have a job that I have to do and I just need thirty minutes or sometimes sixty minutes be able to answer a question, and we want to make sure that we give that space. Absolutely. And again, most people out there, we could hear a little bit more from you, and it would be Or a lot. Yeah, the community really can support that and wants that and needs that, so don't forget to jump in. Don't think it's all covered. I think one of the dangers is as the community grows and you see a greater number of people or accounts that you might think it's all covered, but it isn't and it needs you. Yeah. And there's more than one right answer too. That's right. So you might have a different perspective. So don't feel if someone answered the question, if you have something slightly different to say, say it because that diversity of thought is really important. It is. Especially in Rock because the most common answer to any question is, well, it depends. And so we wanna hear your use cases and your alternative answers because they might be just as good or better than the first answer. And all of that together is what makes it really great. So please do get involved. And if you've been racing to jump in and be the first to answer a question, maybe step back a little bit so other people feel the space that will allow them to have that option as well. And by all means, if the answer has fermented Yes. And no one has been able to Yes. Then jump in and get Please answer. Yes. So we we were doing in the beginning, we would go get the stale questions. Mhmm. It's what I when I say stale, mean maybe two hours. Yeah. ? The ones that no one knew the answer to. Yeah. Jump in for those, but give leave some space, especially for some softball questions. , if it's a question that you think a lot of people could answer, don't answer that one. Yeah. Let them your teammates jump in and answer. Let some of the people who are desiring to be Rock stars, but don't feel they have an opportunity. Let them grab some of the easy ones. Yes. Because that first question you get to answer is such a confidence booster and we want to share that experience with new people. And if that person does jump in an answer and they get something slightly off, you could always message them on the side. I know I did that way back when. Say, hey, also mention this. And then they get to supply that answer and get the points. Well, quite commonly if I see a softball question, there's someone I know who wants to be a Rock star, I send them the question, , here's a good one. Or if they're, , I might say, , you you would stick in this channel because that's the channel that's gonna have a lot of questions that I know you can answer. Yeah. So it's about , not as getting as many points for yourself as it is getting as many points for the community Yep. And spreading those points around. And making sure people's questions do get answered. But , we often use the hashtag better together and I think there's no better visibility into that that's easy to pick up on than that chat community. And it's important that you are a part of it too. We need everyone. And we have a strategy too of trying not to create a lot of policy. we don't really have a lot of policy in chat, and we don't want to create that. So instead, when we see areas that we think we can improve, we're just gonna do coaching on the side. We don't need to have a lot of policy. Yeah. No one wants and needs that, that kills community. Yep. But instead, I think it's just coaching. , we could institute policies, but that's just not the spirit of what we want to Police state. We don't want a police state. No. We don't want people second guessing what they're allowed to do or , we'll just work with folks who, , maybe just needs to hear that message. Yeah. And communicate we are today. Yep, Exactly. Okay. That's exciting. Can we swing back around to some product things and what we're working on and and just some ideas that are going along behind the scenes now? Yeah. We're trying to be more communicative of just things that are in the dream state. So I want to be very clear. Everything I'm about to talk about will not be in 17, will not be in the next release. These are just things that we're thinking about. And I think it gives an opportunity for you to hear kind of what we're thinking. And maybe if you have some ideas or some experiences, maybe you can, , reach out and and share your experience or share your desire to to, , water some of those ideas. So the two areas that we're gonna talk a little bit about today is a new UI framework and some thoughts about AI as it relates to search. So we call that semantic search. So first, the UI. So the UI, when you look at it, a lot of it's what does it look , That's a piece of it. But what I wanna talk more about today is how does it work? So UI in the web is is really defined by CSS. So this is a technology that basically styles your your markup. Now, the thing with CSS, it's it's great. It's a little weird, but it's great. But it it's not a programming language, so you can't, , put a lot of, , logic into it. But we and Rock need that logic because we want you to be able to quickly and easily pick things colors and fonts without having to learn CSS. So if you go into the theme builder, you can kinda change a lot of stuff in there. So we need to add logic to our CSS. In the past, we've done that through a technology called LESS. So that was a way of adding variables and just different ways that you could change your CSS really easily. And LESS is still around and there's other counterparts, a big one now is called Sass. So LESS and Sass are kind of seen as the same thing. SaaS is a little bit more modern. SaaS did not exist when we chose LESS. And we chose LESS back in the day because that's what the foundational library that we use Bootstrap was using at the time. They've since moved to SaaS. So we actually have a less compiler on the server. So as you're changing those variables, we're compiling the the less again, that is really tricky to do on the server. In fact, I think we're one of the only products I've ever used that actually does server side less compilation for you. And, , there's a lot of things we don't about that, but we had to do it back then. And it worked. But now there's newer technologies. CSS has added some capabilities to do some kind of dynamic things. So that has the concept of variables now. And they're pretty well supported. , they've had it for a while, but they weren't well supported. Now we feel this is supported enough. So our goal moving forward, and again this is in the future, not 17, is we eventually want to get rid of less compilation on the server. Now we're gonna keep it for a long long time because a lot of you have themes that have very highly reliant upon that less technology. But we wanna create a demark, a line in the sand that say, hey, going forward, you should do it this way. And then almost kinda deprecate or basically say, hey, don't do any more of that, but it's eventually gonna go away in a couple years, that less stuff. But first we need to give you a new path to the future. So this new path to the future will be highly dependent upon CSS variables. And we're gonna really try to standardize that and create a component library. We have a great component library today, but we need to change that component library to use these new technologies. Now in the source code, we'll probably switch to use the SASS. You won't have to do any of that though, because we plan to ship you just CSS. You may not even have access to the SaaS, but we're just gonna use that as component developers and UX experts to help simplify our work. But we want to deploy to you just some really great CSS with some great variables and you can just kind of pick and choose. We'll also build a really great theme builder that allows you to change some of those CSS variables and do some other things that maybe, , CSS itself can't do, but we can do smartly and easily in code and it'll be highly performant. So we're gonna make this this theme builder. But the the good news is, it's gonna allow us to do some very dynamic things and much easier. And so we're really excited about that. It's a lot of work though, because it's CSS, if you've ever done it, easily and even in a small project turn into a bit of spaghetti. In a large project over ten, thirteen years, you can imagine. Even though I think we've done a good job of keeping it straight, you're gonna get tangles. it's just what it is. Especially when you've had a lot of hands in it. So even as we move into the next gen, we've got some necessary spaghetti that was created there that we need to kind of comb out. So we have a lot to do there. We're also working, , I talked to those two parts about UX is the things you see and then the things that are behind it. We are working on the things you see too. We have some pretty cool polish, I think that we've are considering putting out pretty soon. I think the cool thing is it's great polish, but if we do polish too often, it's a lot of work because the manuals then don't look they should. Right. Rock U already has some issues, it already has some of them that have some very old UI and it's just a ton of time, thousands of hours of investment in that. And that needs to be kind of in Rock use case redone. And then the manuals has to be re screenshotted. So there's a lot that goes into that. So you can't just drastically change things because you can do some drastic changes pretty easily in CSS, but you can't make drastic changes a lot. Otherwise, you go around either with sloppy documentation or a ton of extra work. So we're considering possibly making some UI changes in 17 that are not the framework, but are just a UI polish or possibly pushing that to 18, not not quite sure. So it's exciting though. That is exciting. I think, , I think Rock even today looks good, but it does look a little it needs a little bit of a polish in a in a modernization. Luckily, I think our markup is good, so we can do amazing things with just some little bit of CSS. So it's just a matter when we pull the trigger on that. The next topic I thought I mentioned is is on the AI front and that semantic search. So what does that mean? In the past, we've had a search that was basically the the whole world had searched based on on a word you give and gives you back matches that have that same word. So , , Google for it for instance. If you search for cat, you were not gonna get pages that had the word feline because it wasn't cat. In this new age of semantic search, these large language models that a lot of AI is built on know the difference. , they have their models can say cat and feline are actually kind of the same concept. So therefore, I will give you this even though you say cat and this says feline. And it goes way deeper than that, the complexities that they can do. So we want to introduce that kind of search into Rock. So how do we do that? There's a lot of ways we can do that, and we're not certain on which way we're going to go. I just want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we're considering. So a lot of that technology is based on a concept called RAG, R A G, Retrieval Augmented Generation. That sits on top of other technologies. One of the ones that's most needed for us is is called a vector database. So think of , you have a database in Rock, right? It's a SQL database. It's a relational database. It's it's a bunch of , you think about it at high level, it's a bunch of Excel spreadsheets all linked together. That's the best analogy to a relational database. Vector databases are very very different. Same concept, you're trying to put data into a structure that you can get back out performantly, but you're storing different types of data. So it takes your text and it transforms it into a vector matrix basically. So this is when they told you math would you never need it. Oops, yeah, yeah, you need it. Now hopefully, , as a rocket industry, you don't have to understand this stuff, but it's interesting. So these vector databases, you take this taxi, you turn it into this vector, and then you store it in the database so you can retrieve it really fast. So we need something that in Rock. Now, if we're anybody else, if we're Netflix or any other company that only had one server farm or or one environment, this would be very easy. We just go get a vector database. And there's many of them that you can run yourself or you can use as a service pine cone. There's a ton of them. And we just implement that and we just use it. But we have to be very cognizant of the community and the community doesn't need another thing to go purchase, set up, configure, administrate, maintain all the things. So we wanna make sure that's easy. So we haven't ruled out requiring, , for for semantic search possibly requiring another service. We we did that a little bit with Universal Search. In the very beginning, you had to have a Lucene instance, which you could run yourself or you could go host, , provide a Lucene I'm sorry, Elasticsearch. You could go get it yourself and run it yourself or you could go, , buy it. And then we came back shortly after and supported Lucene, which is a self hosted, you didn't even know it's there, it just ships in Rock and it kinda works. There's some limitations if you have a web farm, then that's probably not the best route to go. But we're trying to figure that out. So there's some technologies within SQL Server that you can emulate a vector database fairly easily. So we're looking at that as pros and cons. It's only a matter of time and by time in this space is probably months that SQL Server will have a better vector ability. I mean, there's already rumors that it's in pilot, but, know, we obviously we don't have access to that yet. Every database platform is the relational database platform is running in that direction. Postgres has a side on package. I mean, it's open source so they can kind of do things a little bit differently. Postgres by itself doesn't have that, but you can get a version of Postgres that does. So we're we're analyzing all of that. There's also the thought, well, maybe we should not do all of the, , retrieval augmented generation work ourselves, we should just farm it out to another service, kind of how AskCHIP works. That's a whole service that does everything for you. You just upload your content and it does all of the rag. It does the vector database. It does all the searching itself. And then you just, , plug and play. That's very simple. It's it's yet another thing you have go purchase. And it also limits you. You do certain things that product doesn't do, therefore you can't do. And so it's just this trade off about which way do we go. On a little tangent side note, we did upgrade Ash Chip to a different model. We had to use a model that, , we were on ChatGPT three because of costs. When ChatGPT four point came out, we were able to upgrade to that. So, Ash Chip should be a little smarter. And we're working, continuing to add more content to it. But even that platform, we're not really sure of, , we're always looking for others. And so there's this whole, , I would say our whole thinking in the space is the space itself, spaghetti. Know, there's Microsoft's got some great things with what they call Copilot. And that's that's a lot. They have so much stuff with Copilot. But we're also looking at other things that are Copilot, but not Copilot. So just trying to figure that all out. We do believe that semantic search is important as we especially as we work with more and more content and delivering more and more content to our attendees. We don't think semantic search probably is that helpful in looking up, , Ted Decker. , if you wanna find Ted Decker, I don't think semantic search is needed. In fact, it might actually be not great. Because it returned to you people you obviously didn't want. But it's more around content. And because, , Rock is a powerful content platform. That's why the semantic search is is is even more important. So if you, , perhaps search for Jesus, you might get savior. Scripture, Bible? Yeah. They're equal? Yeah. And so that's that's really important for the content. That's why we're passionate about understanding that. That said, I pine for the days of when we only had when I only had a service one organization on one platform because you could go do a bunch of stuff quickly and easily. And if and if you try to to change your mind, you could change that quickly and easily. But when you have to solve that in, , four fifty some odd instances, which you have no control or access to, it's way different. So we had to make sure that we, , move very intentionally. But there's a ton of time and effort and thought going into these and and research where we are actually prototyping, , some of these ideas within SQL Server to just to vet them, make sure that they're gonna work. I think sometimes we're some people would would would say, well, , you guys, it's always SQL Server for you. , why don't you go look at Pinecone or these other vector databases? Trust me, we would love to And that and that again, we might have to on this. If you see us being trying to being limited to a certain toolset or to a certain framework, it's because we're trying to maximize what Rock can do for the most number of churches. And so we're trying to make it easy for them. It's it's not a we drink the Kool Aid with Microsoft. We know what we love about Microsoft and we know what we don't about Microsoft. That said, we're trying to solve this for a community, not for ourselves. And how do we give the most power to the most people? So that affects a lot of our rubrics Mhmm. In terms of product search. Yeah. Those are two that we are looking at right now. And there's a lot more, but we'll save those for another podcast. We wanna make this more of a a point to the podcast as a talk about just stuff we're thinking about. But please don't as we open up and talk more about that, please don't drag it back out and be , when's the vector database coming out? Wasn't in '17? Or it wasn't in '23, . These are more advanced long term things that we're we're considering. And then we have a whole host of them going on right now of things that we're just prototyping and thinking about. Mhmm. So And always have had things that we're working on kind of behind the scenes because it's not the first to the end zone when you have a platform Rocket. It has to be well considered. You have to have knowledge and trials and those kinds of things. But it's fun to share. Just don't hold us to anything we just said. There's in the corner, there's Q's little lab just James Bond. Yeah. Occasionally things blow up and it's , okay, well don't well, let's not do that. We try to do the blow ups in controlled ways, not with inside the main platform. Yeah. And this is just a goal of just talking about those and even maybe talking about some of the blow ups and saying, well, yeah, we tried this, that didn't work. Yep. Well, one thing you can know for sure is that there's always something new going on with Rock across the board. And that is also true when it comes to classes. So if you have not yet heard, we do have our first ever lava class coming up in November. Now this is something that is here by popular demand. We had about two years worth of requests, so that class is finally coming to light. But I have to tell you, a class that takes a lot of work to pull together, considering your audience, what they need to hear. There's a lot of content, there's a lot of strategy, there are a lot of assets and resources to pull together. So there's been a huge investment in that and we're so excited about it. If you go to our classes page on the community site, you can see that there are active lava class instances available for registration. There's one in November and one in February. So we did mention that at the conference a little bit earlier this year and we have great registration numbers coming in, but I am kind of surprised that some of you who've been requesting that class have not signed up yet. So hopefully we'll see that coming in pretty soon. We're really excited to roll this class out. One other note on classes in general is we have a class, a masterclass coming up in October that is now going to be held virtually instead of in person. And that was kind of listening to community demand as well. So we typically offer those once, maybe twice a year. If a virtual masterclass is necessary for you because of work commitments or travel costs or something that makes that the only way you can do masterclass, you'll really want to get signed up for this one in October because it may be another nine months before we have one available in that same format. So check out the classes page on the community site, make sure you're up to date on the classes that you need and definitely check out Lava if that's your next area of learning and the virtual masterclass. Thank you so much for joining us for another conversation about Rock, the platform, and the community. We love being able to share insights, thoughts, and ideas with you and appreciate that you tune in to listen. 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