Podcast Episode 62: Episode 36: 7.4, 8.0 and big RX2018 updates

Description

We've got new team members, new patches coming soon, the general release date for v7, and details on new features that will be in v8.

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 the Rockcast podcast. I'm Emily Forman with Spark Development Network, and we have Jon Edmiston, David Turner, and Nick Airdo here today. We're going to tell you a little bit about what's going on with Rock, where things are headed, what they look right now, and just kind of a a little bit of what's been going on since our last update. So speaking of what's been going on since our last update, the size and scope of our team has changed quite a bit since then. Tell us about it, John. Yeah. So we've been spending a lot of time over the last, probably, almost a year, knowing that we need to staff up. The community is growing exponentially, and we're trying to keep up. And so over the last year, we've been trying to find some great candidates to fill some much needed roles, and, we've been able to pull some triggers, over a a lot of work. So, Garrett Johnson's here, and he's doing all of our UI UX and taking a lot on a lot of that, which was a slightly part time job for for me for me. Now it's his full time. And already, I mean, there's some amazing stuff is coming out of that in just a few couple few couple weeks. So it's gonna be awesome to see over the next few years the upgrades we're gonna get in that area. And what also what I appreciate too is he's, , perfectionist in this area. He really knows down to the the the smallest degree of detail. And then he's already encouraging us and, and giving us feature lists of of small changes to the c CMS, which are gonna be amazing. , all those small features are a major feature. And then there's some major things too, , that, we're looking at. So just really exciting. We also have Gerard Powell. He just joined us last week, and so he is gonna be filling quite a few roles. Most importantly, probably, , he's a he's a a c sharp developer, strong c sharp developer. He'll also be helping us with some project management. And then there's a lot of tasks I think that just go unnoticed in an organization. Obviously, what you do, Emily, all the accounting and finance and HR and fundraising. There's so much detail to that, but there's also a lot of other details in IT, just trying to keep a small office going, licensed, networked, and all that. So Well, that's great. It's exciting to see that those little things that I think weren't a big component of any job at the beginning, but have been growing as the community grows are gonna be able to be fulfilled by someone else other than just one of the many hats that you're wearing, John. So that's good. So let's get our consulting update, David. Sure. There's pretty much two things. One is caching that NewSpring is sponsoring. So I think we mentioned it in our last one, but just redoing the caching framework to make it more extensive. And the other one is just helping Christ Fellowship, who is going live on Rock next week. So an exciting time for them. And just really helping them work through a lot of the small issues as they get ready to launch. So oh, one other small change, the champion forest wanted some check-in by gender. So that's something that will be in core in the next update too. Very cool. Now, you say next update, does that mean eight o or seven four? Actually, one's in seven four. Okay. I'll be talking about that shortly. Yeah. Now, actually. Why don't you tell us about that, Nick? Well, so 74 is about to go alpha in about two weeks, and lots of bug fixes. I'd say more than the last couple patches. So seven four is probably gonna say twice as big as seven three. And there's a handful of features of which David just mentioned one of them. But these features are not basically slated to impact you. So I'm not even sure. Probably the only mention of them will be in the release notes, not in documentation. Anything really big though would put in the eight o documentation. That's about it. So after a period of several weeks in alpha or maybe a shortened alpha, then we'll have a beta, and then it will be in the release to everyone. Right. And speaking of release to everyone, I think it's also key that we give out the date of the general release for v seven because because that's coming up next week, actually. I think it's on the April 30. So if you've been waiting to get more information on that on April 30, as soon as we've confirmed that everything's good to go, we will go ahead and get the general release out there, and then we'll put notification out as soon as that's ready. So that would mean seven o will be generally released before seven four is, available to everyone. Yes. Okay. That's great. But let's stop talking about seven. Let's talk about eight. So there are a lot of things in eight, and I want to run through some of them. But, I mean, obviously, this is not a a complete list, and I know I'm gonna miss stuff. So, forgive me if I miss stuff. , the big stuff we've talked about, group history, that's coming along really well. And it's pretty exciting seeing that actually working. It's really neat when you when there's an idea, then you get it on paper as a drawing, and then you actually see it working just almost as just it was in the drawing. It's it's kind of almost this little magic thing. And that's been sponsored by, Northpoint and what they're doing. Also, we have some notes updates, so you can have high hierarchical note list. And so that's a pretty big feature. And that's actually gonna to alert you when there's new notes of different types. There's also a feature that, was done quite a a while ago, called signals, and this was done by Shepherd of the Hills, and they submitted it as a pull request. And it's it's not a small feature. It's a pretty big feature. And that allows you to kinda signal when certain states of a person might meet certain criteria that you wanna know about. Now some of those might be completely informational, and some of those might be more safety and security related. But the goal of that is to provide you with that signal, but in a way that is very respecting privacy and and those types of things. So that's that's a really cool thing, especially from a pastoral perspective. Another big one that's really exciting is just a whole new UI. So in eight o, Rockets a new facelift, and it's, it's probably time. I think it's been a couple years. And it's it's funny going back because, , right now, we're all working pretty much day to day in eight. And so sometimes we have to go back into when we're doing, , feature, bug fixes for seven four, and you go back and you work in the in the current in the old, UI, it's it's kinda dramatic how much different it is. So that's a big one. Wi Fi presence, the final little teeny polish points will be put on that actually today, and that will be an eight o. And we have the documentation written, and that is a really exciting project because it's it's just cool to see that that level of engagement data so easily accessible inside of Rock. And so we have that running in our office, and it's just really cool to see, oh, I can go there. I can see when I came and when I left. And when if I went out to meet someone for lunch, I can see that. And, , in an office environment, that's not necessarily that helpful. But it when you envision it and you picture it happening in terms of ministry engagement, it gets really exciting. And we're we're super excited about the, organization that we're partnering with to provide, , the the technology to to push that data into Iraq, is FrontPorch, and the ministry heart that they have, and the cost affordability, if that's a word, that they're bringing to this space is is really good. I mean, it's 10% of what some of these other secular companies are bringing. And they are a secular company, but they have a ministry mindset and ministry passion, and the people over there have worked on church staffs, and it's just incredible. But that also, as a related feature, brings in something called personal device. So we can now track personal devices within Rock, and those will be the handsets or or tablets or the or laptops that people are bringing to to their your WiFi environment. Also, some registration, changes. So there's been a change where you can have a fee that's required. So you might say, well, your t shirt is required, but you just need to tell us what size. And that's pretty cool. There's also some additional reporting, kinda capabilities within your registration. So if you wanna see, , a fee report, you can see all the fees that were for a specific, registration. There's also a discount report right there on on your registration UI, and so you can see all that. Also, our friends at at Bema added a pull request for a feature called automatic discounts. So you can automatically apply discount codes onto your registration. So first, you might think, well, why would you wanna do that? Well, it solves two really fundamental, features that people have been asking for in in registrations. One is early bird discount. So you can say this discount applies between this date range and auto apply it, which basically solves Mhmm. Early bird discount. Yeah. And also another one people wanted was quantity discount. So the same structure can apply to that too. So pretty cool. Real excited about that. Let's see. There's another feature watermark has funded, which is basically to do some better auto matching on other fields. So whenever someone registers for something in Rock, we try to look at the first name, last name, email. If we find a person matches, we use that. Well, this allows you to apply some alternate capabilities. And one of the things that they really wanted was the ability to search for previous email addresses. So alternate email addresses. These are not you cannot email to more than one address in Rock. That is a hard fast. But this allows you to do matching for people who maybe that was their email address two years ago, and so you can still kinda do better matching from that. And that's a a really cool feature. Now I'm gonna pick up the pace here a little bit, but data automation allows you to automate inactivating, activating people, changing their campuses. There's some changes to content channels, which are really, really cool. , channels are gonna increase their importance within Rock, and we're adding a lot of features to that. Calendar feeds, so you can export your calendars into iCal compliant format. That's not iCal, Apple iCal, that's iCal, the open format, which is really cool because you can get this URL, you can download it as a file, you can import it into your calendar one time. But more importantly, what you can do is you can basically, in Outlook or any of your mail clients, including your phone, subscribe to a calendar feed in Rock, and it's gonna keep it up to date with that calendar. So you could do your staff calendar could be one calendar. Your public calendar could be another. You can filter it by audience type. You can filter it by campus. Super cool. That's another one those features someone requested. It's , oh, that's a good idea. And now that's working and you see the data and you actually put it onto your phone, you're , woah. This is really cool. There's a lot of changes to interactions. I wouldn't say changes. I I would say there's more improvements to interactions, additional capabilities, data model, everything else is staying very consistent. We're adding more capabilities to interactions. And I think if you look into the future interactions, it's probably gonna be one of those features that's gonna become more and more useful. The more and more churches that we talk to and some of these accelerator groups that we go to to talk about big data, Churches don't know it, but that's interactions is gonna solve a lot of their needs in terms of engagement, and measuring that. And it's super exciting. Also, ability this is kind of a techy one that you can have HTTP modules. So plug in developers can create these HTTP modules, which basically get the wrong code before Rock gets the code. So you can do all kinds of fun things, there. We also have some lava improvements. Lots of lava improvements. There's some more filters, some more capabilities, and just, even last night, I threw in a little feature where you can actually embed Lava now onto a master page or a layout. So a web, administrator can say, I I want this content and this lava to be not even in a block. I just want it right on the layout, and that's pretty powerful. And then there's lots and lots and lots and lots of micro features. I mean, we could go on and on and on with that, but, it's gonna be an exciting release. That said, we do not want this release, and it's actually kind of already trending this way. We don't want this to be the the massive release that Seven was. We wanna break these things down into parts, and we wanna get it out faster. And we want it to be less overwhelming. Although, gosh, what I just read is overwhelming already. And I think I missed about half the stuff. So we've made a really tough decision. And so one of the features you didn't hear us mention that it that's not done is volunteer scheduling. So we're gonna push that to nine. And when I say push, it's not saying push it further out in terms of duration. We're just gonna say we're gonna we're gonna ship eight faster than we than we thought. Putting a bow on eight. Right. So will this slow down, volunteer scheduling? Not at all. We're we're still gonna work on it in the same schedule that we were. We're just gonna ship eight faster. And so nine will be starting we'll start volunteer scheduling as soon as we put these final polish points on eight. We have a, , probably about four more weeks of of working on eight and getting those polish points done. And then, but even before that, we'll probably be starting to the initial development on nine. Because when you have, , a couple developers going, you can't you can't have to shift them on on different priorities. So it won't it won't slow down when volunteer schedule will be released. It'll just make some these other features available sooner, which is exciting. So that's eight in a nutshell. And I do think nine will be an even smaller release. My my hope and plan is this. Let's get volunteer scheduling done, throw in a few other micro changes, and ship that super fast. So the gap between seven and eight will be bigger than it will be between eight and nine. That'll be a smaller, even quicker release of nine. Great. That sounds exactly what people are looking for. Right. And, , the tendency is to say, well, we wanna makes we wanna ship more features, more releases faster, but then you get into the middle of it and it just use one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, two more things, one more thing. And we're just trying to say, okay, Stop. We're gonna ship this. Good. That's a lot of information. Yeah. Sorry. Did did I go overboard? No. You didn't. That's good. I think people have been, wanting to hear that. So this is perfectly timed. Another perfectly timed announcement is that we have our next Master Class here in Phoenix that's open for registration on the website. That is coming up on June. So if you have already taken the Master Class, which I know a lot of our podcast audience has, consider looking deeper into your organization now that you've been on Rock for a little while. Who else really needs that training? Let's build the bench a little bit in some of these so it's not just one position at your organization that knows how to do certain things in Rock. This is really a great course for those who need to be in some type of administrative role inside Rock. So do look at who else would really benefit from this training. We have a limited number of seats, so do evaluate that and and get them registered so that's ready to go. It's exciting to look at that. It's exciting to see, I think, the, MasterClass symbols inside our Slack community. I think that really helps give validity to the people that have been trained and that are, coming out of that. I think it also says a lot about our community Because these people are investing, their organizations are investing and sending, , one to three people to our class at a time, and those people are making the conscious choice to dive back into the community and to pour that back in. So, we see that as a huge positive, and what a major, coup for the community to have so many people who are so invested in moving literally the whole community forward, not just their own internal needs as an organization. So if you haven't yet taken the master class, do join that group of master class alum who are doing great things to really change the face of how people connect through technology inside the Rock community. It's a great group to be a part of. And, if you haven't done it yet, , just look at all those little master class hats out there in Slack. It's you probably wanna be a part of that. Fear of missing out. Yeah. It really is. So the registration's live on Rock r m s dot com slash master class. Again, the dates are June, so you'll wanna take advantage of that. Plus, really, you wanna meet us in person. Right? I mean, who does that? Yeah. I I think this is gonna be our best class. I think it is. For sure. I think I really gonna make this one the best one I've learned from the other ones. What what did you learn? About Rock. Oh, dear. Okay. Cut. Cut. The other thing I feel we need to talk about that's coming up is the conference this year. Rx twenty eighteen is August at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville. And we have been hard at work much earlier than at previous conferences because we know that this conference is going to be double the size of last year's. And you're right. Nick's making this sign over here of mind blown. And and all of us feel that way. So we wanna get ahead of that. This year, we're providing at least three times the amount of content that we had last year, wouldn't you say? Yeah. It something 60 sessions that you could go to. I mean, it's it's amazing. Yeah. It's really the shape is is different from last year's with so many subtracts happening. Right. And so the topics, it's a vast range. There are a lot of people coming in actually from outside our community that are bringing in best practices, that are bringing inspiration and leadership. And it's so exciting to see where this is going. I do wanna remind our listening audience that every year we seek active feedback on how can we make this better. And so we are constantly evaluating and incorporating that, and it's based on your feedback that we're doing this. So I think that, , you've a lot of great insights into what we can do to improve, and we're definitely following that line. So that said, I'm very excited to mention one of Garrett's first projects with us, which has been to build out the conference page, which is something that we've long dreamed of but really have not had the capacity to do before now. And the first part of that, should be released at the time the podcast is as well, and that's our speakers page. So there'll be a few different pages available there, but we've not before been able to really put that information out ahead of time. And it will be growing. It will not be a complete list of speakers, but our keynote speakers are set, and that's really exciting. We are going to be welcoming Don Wilson. He was the founding pastor and senior pastor at Christ Church of the Valley, recently retired, now running Accelerate Group, which is helping churches everywhere. And he was really the person that helped Rock become what it is today. It's his leadership and wisdom in helping set things up in a way that would make this something that benefits all churches and could grow and could move into a an independent state to do what it needs to do, and that is with the blessing of Don Wilson. So we're so excited to have him as a keynote speaker. Plus, I think he really challenged us and built us to Individually? Individually to help lead this. I mean, I've learned so much from Don. It's amazing. Absolutely. We're we're really thrilled that he will be joining us for this. And we're also thrilled to announce that Terry Storch, who is the Digirati pastor at Life Church, will be there as well to talk about the digital world and the digital age, and we're very excited about that. I'm sure all of our audience is familiar with Life Church's Digirati team, but if you've heard of YouVersion Bible app, which most people have, that is one of the things inside that. So those are two keynote speakers. We have a lot of people that you'll recognize from the community, a lot of people that you will probably recognize names from outside the community that are experts in their area, and we do encourage you to go online and check that out, rockrms.com/rx20eighteen, and you'll be able to navigate to speakers from within that. We also will be bringing, tracks to the website, so you'll be able to see ahead of time what tracks are offered. And we're encouraging people to kind of pick the area that you want to go to, and, it will be a a really exciting team. Bring more of your team this year. This is triple the content. It's in several different rooms and venues, and you will want to send people to different tracks. So when you register, make sure you're registering enough people that you're gonna be able to spread out and and cover what is going to be offered. Yeah. And if you're listening to the podcast and you're you've been waiting to register because you wanted to justify going, once the sessions list is up there, once it started, you should have exactly what you need. You can take that then to your to your boss and say, hey. This is what I'm gonna get out of it. I know that does apply to a a number of churches. Mhmm. And there is currently a very over a very broad overview of what those tracks are named that's listed there, but there will be more detail coming up soon. Alright. I think that's it for announcements, and and now you've heard what all is going on behind the scenes here. Thanks again for joining us and our team. Until next time. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing of screen out of social media. And Jim Michael does all the editing of the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together by Michael Garrison. 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