Podcast Episode 57: Episode 31: Rock v7.2, v8 and New Office

Description

The Rock team is trying to keep pace with the growth of Rock, and get the latest on upcoming v7.2 and some 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. Hello. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Rockcast. Today we have Jon Edmiston, David Turner, Nick Airdo, and myself, Emily Forman. We're all part of the core development team with Spark Development Network, and we build RockRMS and the community and ecosystem that goes along with it on a daily basis. We wanted to give you a little update on what's going on around here, And I'd to start with some of our most exciting and recent news, and that is the fact that our team was able to move offices here pretty recently. And as we did that, we basically hopped from one suite to another inside the same building. But we've been doing that quite a bit for the last couple of years as we move incrementally to accommodate little bits of growth. And this time we've moved into a space that has some adjacent space available, so we should be able to stay put for a little while, which has made it possible for us to make it feel a little more home. So we have been enjoying things adding a Rock logo to the wall, putting splashes of orange everywhere and you can see it too. We'll be putting a video out online for you to take a little tour with us around the office and see some of the fun touches that we've added. we've mentioned how Rock is quite a bit using Legos and so we've incorporated a little of that into our design as well. Anyway, make sure you look for that tour because that'll be a fun one. We also have been talking for a long time about the latest release and we are very thrilled to have the kind of update that you want to hear right now. So John, why don't you tell us a little of that? Yeah. So v seven is coming along. We're really close to being able to push that out. I think what's holding us back just a little bit is we keep getting additional bug reports, and we really wanna make sure that when we put out that, really, that that general release, that early access release, that all of those major bugs is bugs are fixed. I I would say the bugs that are coming in are not huge, but they're not just they're just not the kind that we want to to to ship with. So when it goes out for that first early access period, it'll actually be version seven dot two. So normally, we to do a a dot one with with those bug fixes. But even our seven one, we found a few things that we thought, well, let's just tweak that just a little bit more. And so, today, we will be packaging up that seven two. We'll do a super quick alpha test on it just to make sure that everything's good. The very small tweaks, so it should be fine. And then we'll get that out, and we will finally have version seven out there for early access. And even beta shouldn't be that long, right, for 07/02? Well, for 07/02 on the beta, we may not even do a beta. Right. So yeah. Good. We just there's just a couple little tweaks, get those released. Again, they're nothing major, but we just it's we kinda have the high high bar. There'll always be bugs, but these are some bugs that we want, to really address and make sure that they're they're good. And we'd to thank the community for jumping in and helping test these things because that's a huge role for the community when it comes to Rock. So we've been getting constant feedback on that, and that's great. Thank you. Another thing we've had some questions lately from from some people who are newer to the community, wondering what events they should book for the year. So we have quite a few opportunities event wise and they have different purposes. So I thought we would just do a quick rundown on what those look . First of all, you may have seen that we have lots of road shows on our schedule on the calendar, and those are all over the country. So they're pretty well spread out. And they are actually run and hosted by some of the Rock community members in churches that are using or getting ready to use Rock and are very familiar with it. And the road show is great if you are looking at Rock and not quite sure whether or not it's the right tool for your organization. So you're able to go to this for free, take your whole team or your team of decision makers, and then we'll have a presentation, on what the features are of Rock, what the community is , what you would expect, how Rock can provide for your needs and what makes it a little bit different than some of the other providers out there. So that's a great thing to do as you're kind of in that consideration period. It also has a question and answer session at the end. So you're able to take your questions about what would migration look ? Am I able to have the same features I'm enjoying today? Whatever your questions are that are unique to your organization, you'll be able to get those answered as well. So we highly recommend roadshows for churches that are in that stage of consideration about Rock. It's also a great place to connect with the community as we do have some other Rock Church community members that will usually attend those and and that's a lot of fun. We also have registration open for master classes And those are great for your administrative staff. So your database administrators, the people who need to go deep into Rock and really function as that liaison between Rock as a product and your staff. You need to have the experts on hand and the Masterclass is a great way to take someone on your staff in that role from zero to 60 in three days. So we do have an agenda we can send you if you want to see it, but basically we're covering all the features, everything you need to know. There's a lot of classroom style training where you get tips and tricks from the people that really know what they're doing. If you come to the Phoenix Master Classes, you will get that from the Core Team. There are also larger format classes that are scheduled a few times a year at various locations around the country, and that's through a licensed provider, Bema. And in both of those instances, you're going to have the chance to do hands on activities, connect with other churches and really learn from people who know what's going on. So if you are ready to put someone on your staff through the training that makes them the master, make them a superhero in your organization, you definitely want to sign up for a master class. We typically see people send between one and three people from their organization to one of our classes. Those are on the website at rockrms.com/masterclass and I failed to mention the roadshows are roadshows. So you can find those registrations there. And then we also have our conference which is an entirely different type of event from either of those. So none of these replace each other. They're all very unique. Nick, can you tell us a little bit about what sets the conference apart? Conference is really the place where you're gonna you're gonna come and see the latest of what's going on with Rock. Rock Futures, it's a place where you would bring your leaders from your church, the the ones that are innovatives, the innovators that is. Those are the guys that want want to know what's possible with Rock. And we usually John tends to go pretty deep into that, the futures of what you could use what you could be doing with your church in Rock that you're not currently doing. So there's a lot of great ideas there, and it's the best place to network. So you're gonna have a chance to talk and and see what other churches are doing and really go deep and build relationships with them. In fact, from previous conferences, that's where you you'll have the best ideas for, , your church. You may see something that a church is doing, and you'll just take that and maybe go talk with that that church leader, dig in, and you can then sit down and implement it right then and there. , a lot of people will do that in the evening hours or in the lunch breakouts. So it's kind of our Slack community is just a little taste of what you get when you get to the conference. That's good way to put it. That's very interesting. So who should be coming to our conference on your staff? , how many people should you be thinking about sending? As many as possible. But, of course, I would bring your your your technical leads, the ones that are, again, leading and innovating. And the I don't know. Who else would you bring? Well, we are introducing quite a few more tracks this year. The the cool thing about the Rock Conference is it's not just a tech conference. So you get a lot of that technical information there that you need for your tech team. But there will definitely be content and even tracks for people that want to look at analyzing data and how to use it for communications and web. We hear a lot of requests for that. So we're adding a track to meet those needs as well. Leadership, administrative type things. So there will be several tracks and I think probably most of the team can benefit if there's someone that would interface with Rock as a product. So if they use it on a regular basis or if it's a tool that could move their ministry forward, they probably should be there. Sounds good to me. I mean, I'm a leaning developer, so I tend to hang out with other developers that are at the a a conference. I don't wanna say bring your developers unless I'm authorized to do that. But I know when developers are there, we tend to kinda get together and talk about what other things we could build separately as plug ins. Exactly. And there's a lot of that across different types of positions too. So we definitely see the developer developers coming together, sharing ideas, collaborating and coming up with great things. And then we see that in other positions as well. So it's a great place Nick said to network and to connect with people. And then you've kind of got that base for the rest of the year where if you have a question about something or you're wondering how something else is done or needing to bounce ideas back and forth, really have that group of people you've connected with in person, which really makes all the difference. And you can connect with them online and keep going forward. But honestly, most people that attend our conference are back the next year. So we see very few people say oh I've been, I've done it. We're really careful to reinvent the experience every year based on the feedback and based on current community needs. I think this year is going to be quite a bit different from last year and it's going to be quite an experience. That registration is also open at an early bird rate right now which is $3.49 and we'll expect that rate to go away within the next month or two. So you'll want to make sure and get that if that's in your plans for this year in your budget, you'll want to make sure and lock that in here pretty soon. And that's at rockrms.com/rx2018. Now as we have been growing, we've moved offices and as we watch this community growth, so for instance with the conference, we're seeing our conference attendance double every year. We're seeing the number of organizations registered with Rock that have downloaded the product double every year at least. It might be even increasing beyond that now. The number of churches running live on Rock is doubling. Across the board, the metrics that we can measure on everything Rock community oriented is doubling. And so we, as , are a very small core development team and that brings a little bit of pressure to keep up on our team and we're really excited to be able to do that and want to continue meeting the right needs for the Rock community technically. But that requires us to do some growing as well. So it's that time of year where we're planning and digging in and we're looking at how can we make sure that we're growing at a healthy rate that matches our community. We've actually done quite a bit of back work in connecting with people and have some really great candidates that are technically skilled and have a heart for the church, which is kind of hard to find, but really exciting when you do. And we'd love to be able to start putting some offers out there that would help our team grow and help us bring you features faster. But we're looking to just make sure that we have the funding in place and the way that we measure that is through the pledges that churches bring in. So it's hard for us to know exactly what our income is and therefore what we can commit to someone else without understanding a full picture of what's coming in for the year. So if you're a church that's running on Rock or you're working on implementation and you have not yet pledged, then we don't actually know that you're planning to donate to Rock and we can't use that in our planning right now and we won't be able to extend offers until we see the funding come in to support that. So right now if you are pledged and donating, this is a great time for you to reevaluate and see if you might be able to put a little bit more toward the new hires that we'd to make. And if you have not yet pledged to support Rock, please do that soon and let us know where you are so we can put those numbers together on our end and get those invitations out to the right people to grow our team and to meet your needs. We're very excited about that prospect but we just don't have the picture fully clear yet. It's a little bit fuzzy. So if you guys could help us out, help make that very clear. We know that that you're a very supportive community and that you're excited to see Rock grow as well so that is one way that you can help us right now. And one of the other things that we do is some consulting work and that helps meet our funding needs as well. And David's really been taking the lead on that lately. So David, could you give us an update on some of the things going on in that world? Sure. First of all, just wanna say we really appreciate our consulting partners because they really help sponsor a lot of the features that end up making it in Core. NewSpring's a big sponsor. And they're some of the things we're doing for them is the whole interactions UI that we just finished, I think, for 7.1. That was all sponsored by Newspring. Right now we're looking at some caching improvements that they'd that will be in core. Just making caching a little bit more granular. Another thing that we're doing for them is national change of address blocks so that we can easily download or upload a database of your people, get the change of addresses, and have that automatically updated in Rock. So So that'll be a nice feature that's in Core two. Christ Fellowship is another one. There are a lot of things we're doing for them is some adding some jobs that automate a lot of the data that changes, whether that's a person changing campuses or whether they're inactive or active. So we're adding some jobs that automate all that. Of course, we're still helping Willow Creek. I think hopefully a lot you got to tour their care center at the last conference. That went live a year ago, but they just went live with their cars donation project that we did for them. And so we're helping them through that and finalize some of that. Another feature that The Crossing sponsored is a family pre registration block that lets families register online and say that they're coming to your church and what date. And you can launch workflows to help them get there. It can also be used as just a registration right on on-site as a kiosk. So there's lot of cool things, lot of cool features that our consulting partners are sponsoring that actually make it into Core. And where are those in Core? Is that a V eight or a V seven? Both. A lot of those made it into V seven, some of them are coming in V eight. And just for a little clarity sake, that is through our consulting arm, which is called Sparkability Group. And Sparkability Group really specializes in working with organizations that have projects that will touch core code or that are larger projects that would then be gifted to the whole community. So I know sometimes you're scrolling through the partners page and wondering who does what. Well as far as it comes to Sparkability Group, we don't really specialize in helping with one off projects or migrations. We have a lot of fantastic partners that can help you with those. Sparkability Group really we work with those larger features and the things that touch core because we want to, it's just a sort of a generosity thing and what churches are doing that needs to be funded and isn't currently funded it helps the whole community grow. So we're very thankful you said for those partners. And as we've been doing all this planning and working, we are constantly talking about what's up next. And what's up next is V eight, which has some features that have been getting a little bit of buzz in the community as well. John, can you tell us what to look forward to? Oh boy. Yeah. So I feel we haven't even finished up v seven and we already have some pretty significant work on v eight and that's, there's some challenging features in v eight. So the big huge ones would be group history, which we're working with Northpoint on really finalizing some of those requirements and and they're gonna help fund good piece of that feature. But we've also had a ton of requirements from from the community. And so I've read through that. It's copious amounts of requirements, which is great. I I love having all of these ideas ahead of time versus afterwards. And it's really changed the way we've thought about group history and the other big one, volunteer scheduling, is is another one of the big ones. All of the requirements that you guys have provided us have been very helpful, and it's, I said, drastically changed how we kind of see this. But group history, the the the point of that one is is basically to see changes to groups and group members over time. Even if you delete the group, you'll be able to see people who are in a group of that type, and you'll be able to go to the person profile record and see all of their activity. And, , Rock is all about tracking people. And the fact that we don't have that that level of of data today is is really something holding us back. So we we're really excited about this feature. The other one, I mentioned, is group I'm sorry, is volunteer scheduling. And we kinda went into that with a pretty what we thought was a pretty good plan, very simple and light. But then we got the requirements. And we kind of saw the perspective of where the community was coming from, and we kind of scrapped our plan, and we're taking on these new ideas. And so but at the same time, trying to take these very complex ideas and make them simple. I think that's been the trick in in terms of some of the the UI. So both of those features have been mocked up, and and we've talked about the requirements. And we've posted those right now inside of the GitHub issue area. So if you go into the GitHub issue list and you filter it by discussion, I think there's a type discussion, you can see those. You can look at them. You can comment inside there. And so now is a great time to be giving us that feedback. We have not started development. Now is the time to discuss that. But those are two features that, , they can get very complex pretty easily. So we we do need to limit a certain point what they do. Another bigger feature for VA is we wanna enhance the notes, within Rock so you can have replies to notes and you can follow notes. So if you if find a certain note type, you wanna be alerted every time there's a new note of that type, you'll be able to do that, which is pretty exciting. And then we have a whole host of smaller features that we've been working on. A lot of them came right from the community. So when you put something into the Black Book, it doesn't go into the ether. It actually does get read and it does get prioritized. And so a lot of the other features that we're kind of adding in right now are not small features, but not new features, just kind of tweaking them. For example, someone wrote in that they love the fact that you can sync a group to a data view, but they wanted it to be able to be that syncing to be able to be done by role. So for instance, they said, well, I use it a lot for the members of the group, but then I wanna manually add the leaders. And so that is a perfect idea. That is great. The way it was, you can only sync it to one role and it used the default. So you you kind of you can't couldn't use those other roles in in in a way. And so this will allow you to do it by role. So you can have different data views by role, which is which is really cool, a great idea. And so there's lots of ideas that. We might even see some UI tweaks in version eight just to kind of polish and improve what we have on the internal portal. But that's those are the major features of of v eight. That's exciting. And I love the fact that what sets all of this apart is that the community is is very helpful in collaboration, puts the information in there. We really, really do read it. So if it comes in on surveys, if it comes in through the Black Book and a host of other ways, we take all of that to heart and we try to make this constantly improving. And really none of this would be possible if it wasn't for everybody working together. And that's what we love about Rock. Well, for joining us today for this episode of Rock Cast. Have a great one. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing of putting out on 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 Harrison. 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.