Podcast Episode 156: Episode 129: Check-Ins

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You're definitely going to want to check out this episode of Rock Cast- it's all out Check-Ins! Special guest and resident check-in expert Lee Peterson, Rock Star, joins Jon, Nick and Emily to provide lots of helpful information about check-in printers, features and themes.

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. This is the podcast where we talk about all things Rock. We're gonna let what's coming, about some recent things, and just really dig into some exciting relevant topics that are great for the community. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston, Nick Airdo, and our special guest today, Leigh Peterson. And we are so excited to get you all caught up. So I believe we'll be posting this soon after we air it, and all the things related to what we've put out recently and where we are should be super relevant if you're listening to it as soon as it's posted. So if you're not, don't forget to subscribe to our podcast so you can get the episodes as early as possible. Nick, tell us what is going on with the latest Rock version update. We have had some great participation in the version 13.4 alpha community. So they've been testing and finding a few issues and we've been fixing those. And we're just about to wrap up alpha testing. I think it goes until Monday. We might have adjusted the original date and then we'll start beta, I think on Tuesday. And yeah, we're excited about it. So if you have not yet done your alpha testing and you're listening to this, please get your results in. And if you're listening to this and you're on the beta team or want to be on the beta team, also let us know and we'll get you signed up. Yes, definitely. We can always use more hands on that. And don't forget, we are an open source community. So this is one way you can actively get involved. We know churches don't all use Rock the same. So the more churches we have testing things, the more ways we can flush out the features in what we're developing. I should end with version 13.4 is really large. There's a lot of things that were tweaked and adjusted and fixed. So yeah, it's a big release. And we love our tester groups. So stay active if you're in there. If you're not, that's a great way to get involved. And earn some points. Yes, you can earn points too. Of course, that's not why we're motivated to do that, but it is a nice little side gig. Some people are. John, what are some of the other things that we've been working on? Oh, we've been busy. We've been working on trying to get all the version 14 features kind of complete, and we're making good headway on that. Some of those features are tough ones, so you kind of feel you're getting most of the way there and then the goal post moves a little bit more. And so it just takes a little bit more time than you always plan. But we also are New features sneak in the side door as we're doing that. There's some pretty cool stuff coming for version 14, but we're real close. I think we just have a few more things to do on some of the personalization, which was a challenge because we're trying to do some pretty crazy stuff with personalization, being able to personalize when we don't know who you are. And just a lot of deep core things have to be kinda tweaked in subtle ways. And then the person profile page is making good progress. But again, there too, we're trying to use some of our next gen tool set to do some of that. And so that takes a little bit more time also. Oh, for sure. That's going to be really exciting to see that starting to come out and be visible, see what people do with it. Yeah. And then of course, conferences starting up. Yes. A lot of stuff to do with that and trying to get that kind of planned out and what's the strategy? What's the goals? And it is very exciting. We're definitely moving quickly on registration for the conference this year from sponsors, from attendees. I think the community is definitely ready to get back all together in one spot. And we've seen so much activity, really exciting, but definitely plenty to to put together on that front. We've had really great speaker session proposals as well, so this is gonna be a great year for content. Well, the topic of the day today is some best practices around check-in. Check-in is complex, there's a lot of flexibility, And it's something that people tend to have a lot of questions about in the community, whether they're kind of launching into the community and into Rock for the first time and ongoing. So today we wanted to bring Lee Peterson in. Lee's been a Rock star in the community for a long time, and he just has really gotten his hands around check-in from the ground up. As a volunteer, when he started originally at Flatirons Church, it just had to be figured out. And and they said, okay, Lee, you're it. Go and figure it out for us. And Lee's just done a really great job of doing a lot of investigation, understanding, and then pouring those learnings back toward the community. So Lee, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Emily. It's great to be here. I appreciate the introduction. Pretty much what you said, check-in is near and dear to my heart. Making electronics do physical things is near and dear to my heart. Printing kinda excites me for some strange reason. So glad different people have different things that excite them. And we need someone excited by check-in because there's so much to understand about it. There is. It's complicated subject. Pretty often when you talk about it, smile is glaze over, it's it's not meant for everybody. Specific people in churches will have an interest in this. I wanted to first lead off, we're hearing word from churches that there are supply chain issues with Zebra printers. I suspect they might be on a boat in the middle of the Pacific. And if you look online, Amazon's out of them, all the vendors that sell online are out of them. We're hearing possibly August, but we also just had a church that ordered a dozen printers and they were promised delivery mid June. So it may not be quite as bad as it sounded at first. If you're looking for printers, get in line quickly is would say my Yeah. I should shout out to churches who might have some extras that they're trying to get rid of. Maybe speak into the chat community and say, got some and maybe there's a barter trade. Just One person in the community actually offered some on Rocket Jout the other day. I thought that was outstanding. That's cool. That's awesome. I just wanna give you some technical information that hopefully it'll be helpful. Some things I learned along the way, a lot of them kind of the hard way. Speaking of printers, the z d four twenty one is the latest edition. The z d four twenty wasn't out for that long, and then they just released the four twenty one. I haven't seen one, but I looked at the specs, and it looks the difference is that they added wireless as a module that's not built in, so wireless can be added Do you apparently, any z d four twenty one printer, which is excellent. In the past, you've had to buy printers with wireless built in. Cutters. This is another thing that's really outstanding about the ZD series. Cutters can be outed and actually have to be outed. You can't buy them with cutters pre installed. Just a little soapbox tip. At my church, we bought printers without cutters and we discovered really quickly that people couldn't tear off labels, right? It's something that seems so silly isn't. Gotta go to class first to I wanted to get a ruler and start tapping people on the hand when they turn them off wrong, but they shot me down on that. No volunteer management for you. Yeah, probably not. So we actually, we replaced our printers without cutters after two or three weeks. We bought all new printers because you couldn't add a cutter. And so strong recommendation to buy printers with cutters. Along those same lines, printer maintenance, Zebra says you don't need to clean the dust off print rollers. And it's funny because if you clean it off, it'll be back in about 10 labels. And we had a big plan at Flatirons to maintain printers every month. Were gonna clean them and all that. And we've gone four years and haven't done a thing to any of them. And part of the reason for that was the cutters because when printers jam, adhesive gets stuck on the roller and then you have to clean it off. And so with cutters, we literally never ever have to have to maintain the printers. Interesting. Best thing ever. I'm gonna jump a little bit into ZPL, Zebra programming language, and this is where the eyes glaze over. And when you admit ZPL, people start to avoid you and avoid eye contact. Is it Klingon? I don't know. It's a little worse. Is funny. You don't admit that everybody that ZPL. It isn't common knowledge, but what you see in the label editor in Rock is literally what sends to the printer. There is no image sent to the printer. All of the work is done by the printer. So ZPL sends to the printer. The printer builds the image and does all the hard work. That means, among other things, that network traffic for ZPL with Zebra printing is very light. You're sending a few hundred bytes versus an image that could be 500 k or megabyte, whatever. And that's one outstanding thing about Zebra. Along the same lines, you can see exactly what the printer's receiving. All the Zebra printers, if you look in the manual, have a communication diagnostic mode. Push a couple buttons and it goes into commune into diagnostic mode, and it'll start printing out the ZPL. It won't render the label. You can see the actual ZPL the printer's receiving. That's come in handy a few times when I wasn't sure if it was the printer doing something funny or if if Rock was doing something funny and just just a tip for diagnosing things. It also prints out communication errors. So if you have a network error, it'll it'll print that on the label. Kinda cool. Kinda along the same lines, you can print to a file on a Windows computer, switch the driver to print to file, and you can see this ZPL same way. Speaking of drivers, it's sort of a common misconception because you can change settings in the Windows driver, you can change print speed and all that. It's sort of a common misconception that that actually changes how the labels print. It doesn't because all of those settings are built into the labels. The first three or four lines of every label contain the printer settings. So if you change them in the Windows driver, they're just gonna set be set right back by the labels. Mhmm. You would kinda know that because there really is no Windows driver or not Windows driver, a a driver you have to install on an iPad. And there are no settings you can make on an iPad. And so, again, the iPad or the PC are just sending the literal CPL, which is setting the settings in the printer, kind of a different paradigm. If you look at the first few lay first few lines on the label, you'll see commands SD, which is set darkness, PR is print rate, and all the other things that that make the settings in the printer. Mhmm. Switching gears as far as creating labels go, I learned early on to use two labels or two tools, labelary.com and Zebra setup utilities. If you haven't visited labelary, you can see that you can just paste the contents of a label, copy it out of Rock and paste it in Labelry, hit the button, and it'll draw it on the screen. I'll show you what the label looks . Interestingly, Rock actually uses the Labelry API to preview labels on the screen. You can also upload a file, a graphic image to Labelary, and it'll convert it to ZPL, and then you can copy it and paste it back into Rock. It's really handy, so you don't have to make a little change and print a label, make another change and print a label. Great great tool for kinda course editing. The downside is that Labelry doesn't render exactly a printer does. And so I always test on a printer after I've created the label in Labelry. Mhmm. Zebra setup utilities is a free download from Zebra, and one of the tools it has is a direct communication window. You can paste code in and it'll print, Hit the send a printer button, and it'll print directly to a printer connected to your PC. So, again, you can make a little change, hit the button, and print without having to go back into Rock and and do a check-in. Much quicker than than making the change in Rock and and doing another check-in. Some people use Zebra Designer, which is Zebra's program for creating labels. It's out of date. It's clunky. I have never found it too useful. When I first looked at ZPL, my first thought was this is not something I ever wanna learn, but it's actually you can make little tweaks and labels and it's not all that complicated. My suggestion is to learn a little ZPL and and do it there instead of using Zebra Designer. Once a little Zebra, you can be me and people will avoid you. Leigh, it sounds there's a lot of test it, try it, view it, give it a shot, print it, and see what comes out. There is, and it's it's more complicated than you think because you have to take into account how much data you're trying to put in a field, and Zebra doesn't have a way to condense it. It'll just print off the side or off the bottom. And so you have to you have to think a lot about what it is you're printing. And, , I have a test long first name, Michelangelo. So if you ever see Michelangelo on a label, it's it's probably my test of first name length to make sure it'll fit. Seems a good idea. Yeah. It it is trial and error, and sometimes you run into unexpected things that you just didn't take into account, but that's the that is the nature of it. I do wanna say something about check-in. We are running into churches, typically big churches that are running out of label codes. The three digit alphanumeric code, which is probably most common with churches, if you do the calculation, it seems there'd be about 42,000 possibilities, but for a couple of reasons. One, because not all the characters are used. Mhmm. Another reason is I call it the naughty list. Every every code is checked against the naughty list, and the and those are rejected. So the bottom line is there are about 13,000 codes that will print. The the difficulty comes because the way Rock creates a code, it creates a code and then checks it against the naughty list and to see if it's already printed. And if it does, it's rejected, then it has to go back and create another code, test that code. So the bottom line is if you've used up a lot of the codes, it gets slower and slower to generate a new code. And if you completely run out of codes, check-in will stop. You'll get a an error at check-in. So there's no set boundary, but I think it seems logical that if you're into the thousands of codes a day, it probably makes sense to start looking at four digit not digit character, four character codes rather than three character codes. And that uniqueness check is per day, right? Correct. Yep. Yeah. So you'd have to have about 13,000 per day before you ran out. But there are some churches, especially on their big days that do run into that situation. Yep, they are. And even though say volunteers typically don't have a code print on their label, they are assigned a code when they check-in. Oh, that's a good thing too. So there may be codes that you aren't even thinking of. Yeah, and there's for that, if it's a different check-in type, I would definitely recommend bumping that up in the number of characters. That way it doesn't overlap with the children's check-in where you need that code. A great thought, Nick. We did that at central. That's a good tip. Yep. My last item, we made an interesting discovery recently. There has been a special needs feature in Rock that was undocumented. And the bottom line is typically special needs kids are in an already belongs group and they might be a fifth grader. And so when they check-in, more than likely the parent will get a choice of rooms and churches have found workarounds for that, typically having them check-in at a different kiosk, things that. So the special needs feature actually puts an attribute on the kid, an attribute on the group, and it's a workflow action that automatically selects the special needs group, and they won't get the choice of the of the grade or age based group. And that's really cool. The documentation is in the check-in guide in v 13, tells you how to set it up and it's kind of a big deal. It seems simple, but it is a big deal to churches. I've learned over time, you can avoid giving parents choices when they check-in, it's ideal. They may not understand or they may make the wrong choice. Anything you can do to speed it up and not make people think when they've got kids crying and hungry and whatever. That is a good point. Well, cool. These are some great tips, Lee. Thanks. I'd to say that the check-in channel on Rocket Chat's always available. There are lots of people that are super happy to help. We've brought up some ZPL. I was gonna say fanatics. I'm not sure that's a good term, but connoisseurs. They'll they'll help. I can be reached there too. So thanks. Thank you so much for sharing those best practices. I think it can take people a long time to gather tidbits from different people in different places over time. So it's really nice that you've helped consolidate that and bring it up to date right here in this podcast. We really appreciate you doing that. Thanks. Appreciate all the help you give, Lee. Especially with check-in, it's one of those features that no church uses it the same for some reason. , There's just no standardized way of doing check-in. I think the people who design their check-in systems in churches are really passionate about certain concepts and ideas that they have that are unique. And so we've tried to make it really robust, but that also makes it a little bit difficult sometimes to configure because there's so much to look at and so many configuration options. Very much. And the other thing about check-in is it's so public. It's such a public face of the church. Sometimes people in the church don't quite understand that, but, , if it's the first thing somebody sees when they walk in your church on Sunday morning, they want it to work. They they don't want a difficult experience. They just want it to work. And it's always a fantastic goal to make it work so it doesn't disrupt people's day and they don't have to think too hard about it. Mhmm. Mhmm. It's best when they don't have to notice much what the systems are that they're interacting Very much. It's definitely a ministry moment at check-in. Great. Well, thank you so much. Let's talk a little bit about some community news that we have for the latest. One, we've had a lot of activity from new sponsors and partners, and I'm not sure those are quite up on our website yet. But keep an eye on that because we've been having some really great conversations with organizations that work with or want to work with Rock Churches. So that's really exciting to see of getting a lot of traction in that area. Keep an eye on that. Also, we're going to have some great sponsors at the Rock Conference this year that I think are really going to help offer things that are beneficial to your church. So something to keep an eye on. We have classes coming up. We're we're constantly talking about these, but that's because we get great feedback. And we survey after each of these classes to understand how we can improve, what people are looking for, and what we can deliver that meets needs. So coming up this summer, we have, June, the Rock one zero one and one zero two class. Keep in mind, this is kind of a high level Rock survey that gives you a demo instance of your own to play around with, access to a trainer for a q and a session every day for two weeks, and then access to some curated Rock videos. And let me tell you, it's so much easier to get that training content when someone says, here's what you should watch today. So it's just a a few hours in the morning, that q and a session in the afternoon in your own demo. It's really valuable, not only if you're kind of moving toward Rock and looking at Rock, but also for new staff or for someone that needs to just kind of have an overview of how Rock works. So less of an investment than Masterclass as far as your time goes. And a great thing to keep in mind, you might be thinking, oh, we're not really new to Rock, but look around. Maybe there's some on your staff who are who could benefit from that. So that's coming up. We have a a sequel for Rock Class coming up July. So that's always one that's been really well attended since we created it. It was definitely built around demand. So don't miss that. And then a master class, this is our one a year virtual master class. That's coming up July '15, and we have a few spots left in that class as well. So if the travel doesn't work out for you for some reason, this would be a good one. And we strategically placed it in July because July in Phoenix is less fun than other times of year. So you're welcome. The Rx plans I mentioned at the top of this podcast, we're really gearing up. There's a lot of good content. This is an exciting one. There's more momentum behind this conference at an early stage right now. If you're still considering your sign ups or you haven't booked your hotel room quite yet, you should know that the Sunday hotel room slots are filling up faster than we thought. So get those rooms booked quickly if you want to be staying at the Renaissance, which is where the, the conference is. There are plenty of hotels around there as well, but, you should grab those Renaissance spots while you can. That first day of the conference is going to be on Tuesday, but on Monday, the day before, we are having for the first time a totally free technical training day. You don't want to miss this. It's going to be the things that you've been asking for. We know because we listen. And then we need a head count. So let us know when your registration, no cost to it. You'll have a large open window for lunch, but this is going to be a great opportunity to get connection and additional training that you've been looking for. This is more technical than what you'll get in the rest of the conference. And then finally, we do have a presence on Capterra and your reviews mean a great deal to us. So if you get a chance to leave us a review there, we know people who are considering their next system are always looking for reviews that, give them kind of a a window into what to expect. And Rock is unique. There are a lot of things about it that are so community driven, and so those community reviews are super helpful. Check that out and leave us a review if you can. Thank you so much for tuning in. We really appreciate our listening audience. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we look forward to connecting with you again next time. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.