Podcast Episode 39: Episode 12: Big News For Rock

Description

In this podcast we discuss the latest news going on not only for Rock, but also many of the churches using Rock.

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. Welcome to the Rockcast podcast. We have some big news to share with you today along with some updates you've probably all been waiting for while we've been behind the scenes getting things things done. So let's just kick it off with some news you've probably heard a little bit about and get straight to the facts. Yeah. I mean, think everyone's probably seen the blog posts and the tweets that went out about, some of the news in terms of some of the long term direction of Rock. It's exciting news that David and I are going full time into Rock, dedicating everything we're doing, all of our time to Rock now. In the short term, looks basically us consulting 100% with CCV, continuing the implementation. That has to be our first goal. We have to get CCV up and running on Rock. And that's going well. We'll talk a little bit about that later in the podcast. But in October, that changes a little bit. We'll be consulting on Rock, helping other churches get their custom development, their implementations done on Rock. But really, that's not our strategy. That's just a short term bridge strategy. Long term, we want to be 100% dedicated to the core development of Rock through the SPARC Development Network. And that really depends upon donations coming in. So this consulting timeframe is really just a temporary timeframe. It's a bridge to be able to work on the core for the rest of our careers. If anybody needs that kind of consulting, look for us in the October time frame. If you have questions, there's an email address on the consultancy website we set up, which is minecartstudio dot com. You can email us through that now, but really, we don't have a lot of time to take on projects until the October timeframe. But again, it's just a bridge to get to a fully sustainable model of Spark, which is something we've always wanted to do. Yeah. I'll just jump in real quick too. I think our passion has always been to have to Rock be available to churches, especially for those that don't have a lot of resources for free. And but along with that, , we we hope that donations can come in and that we can, , support that full time on Spark, just developing the core. And I mean, because that's really our passion, is just making it free for churches that can't afford it, and just hoping the community can come together and support kind of that direction. And I'll add to that. And because donations aren't super fantastic at this moment, would say, I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in my next blog post. Kind of a follow-up to Aaron's post on Shoulder of the Boulder, which you guys should be reading. And because we don't want David and John to have to go out and get secular jobs to pay bills. Long term, we want donations and, , eventually the Rock store, some aspect of proceeds from that going in to help fund the Spark Development Network, which at this moment has just been really funded by sponsoring churches and free time, everyone's personal time. And so again, I'll touch on that in a blog post that I'll be posting up on Shoulder of the Boulder. Good. Everybody make sure you check that out. Rock has always been meant to be community supported. And that includes a community of developers, a community of users, and a community that also contributes financially. And we're looking forward to seeing Rock and Spark development move from one stage of its infancy into the next. This is almost kind of the bird leaving the nest. And that takes faith and that takes risk. But to David's point too, nothing about the strategy has changed in terms of how Rock, what the vision is for that. You can go back through our podcast and that vision is going to be the same in the future. Good. Well, we wanted to talk a little bit next about an upcoming patch. Yeah. 3.3 was released a couple weeks ago, but we're already working on a 3.4. One thing's different from three point zero than two point zero. A lot more churches are using it, finding a lot more things. So we're patching things a little more often than we were previously. 3.4 includes some performance updates, especially around caching, which affects check-in. There's a few bug fixes around financial gateways, but that should be going to alpha and beta, probably next week. Good. And in terms of upcoming things, we also have a couple of events we want to talk about. We've been getting some questions. Yeah. So we've mentioned in previous podcasts that we'd be doing a Rock Day, or a Rock Conference, this year, and we still plan on doing that. Same time frame that we've been talking about, it's early November. We're still trying to lock in on the dates in facilities. So as soon as we get that nailed down and we're actively running on that, we'll be putting out a lot of communication about that. But you might be protecting some of that time or talking with the leadership of your churches about that time frame and about that opportunity. We see it as a two day conference, But it's going be a full two days. So it's not one of those conferences that you want to just leave halfway through the second day. Yeah, you won't be going golfing that afternoon. Right. So most conferences might do a three day. We really want to compact it down to two days. But they're two legitimate solid days. You don't want to miss the last session on the second day. We're pulling that together, working on that. So definitely that is happening. Keep your eye open for that. But you might be starting to do the pre work in terms of getting approvals or budgeting for that, event. Good. More details to come for sure on that. And we've given a lot of information out already here. Let's talk about what else is coming. Yeah, so again, we're heads down really putting into a lot of features that are needed by the sponsoring churches. I think when you see the next release, it's gonna be a big one. We're actually taking features from four point zero and five point zero and of smashing them together, mixing them together. It takes a lot of time to do a full release, a four point zero, a five point zero, to get that all done, packaged up, integrated, documented. I mean, there's just a ton of work that goes into that piece. And with our time being really focused on getting it installed at Central and CCV, We're trying to protect that time as much as we can. We are still working crazy, mad crazy. But we're really working on core features. So some of the stuff that's coming up, and it's super exciting, I can't wait for you guys to see it, is I'll just kind of go down a list here. Merge documents. So imagine taking what you love about Lava and being able to do that inside of Word. That's what's coming. It's kind of already here. We're in the last stages of just doing some final tweaking on that. I was working on migration last night, just adding some sample merge documents. But it's super exciting. So that could be used for things doing name badges, doing mailing labels, doing envelopes. Really, the sky's the limit. And it's just so cool to see that same power you have in LAVA today inside a word. There's a ton of new LAVA filters. Those are actually documented up on LAVA documentation. If you just kind of go through there, you'll see a lot of things labeled four-zero. So you can kind of look at that. There's a new block too that Mike wrote called the report data block. So imagine taking a report that you do today. And if you're familiar with reports, that reports operate off of data filters below them. So there's all these filters that you've defined. Report sits on top and presents that out. Now imagine taking that report, pointing a new block at that report, and in that block, looking at all those filters and going, hey, , do you want to expose any of these filters to the end user to allow them to tweak on the fly? And so now you can take these reports, are very static, very rigid, and allow certain filters to be adjusted by the person at runtime. It changes so much. I mean, there's so many reports that we've written in our previous system that you'll see 10 different versions of it, all with slightly different criteria. Maybe it's a campus that changes. Maybe it's just a date range that changes. Now you can smash that down to one report and give people just the filter items that you want them to tweak. All the rest of the filters are stay the same as they were defined. It's really cool. So less exporting to Excel and to do stuff. In fact, sounds you can do things that you can't do with just by exporting to Excel. Yeah, a lot less of taking the same report, adjusting it one filter thing 10 times for 10 different campuses. We also have a lot of reports that people have to go in and edit every time they want to use it to change that one little thing. There's no more of that. And our current users don't mind doing that, but it's kind of ridiculous. I mean, totally game change that. So really excited about that. We see that a block as a block that will release, , obviously in the next release, but that that will be a block that we're constantly, , , making better, adding more features to because it's kind of the dynamic data block. Once you understand it, , it kind of changes the way you see everything. Another one is event registration. David's working heavily on that. I think we have a very good conceptual model of how that's going to work. One thing I might just throw out on this is this is one of those features that conceptually works really well. The challenge is going to be trying to get a UI that makes that conceptual model easy to use. And I think we have a good starting point, but it really is a starting point. We see creating blocks that make setting up these event registrations even easier in the future. Tied to that is calendar. You kind of need a calendar to do event registration. So Central's working on that for the core team, and that looks good. There's another feature that David just finished up, which is group member workflow launching. So basically, you can go into the administrative section of Rock and you can set up different workflows to launch when people are added to certain groups of different types or certain specific groups. So imagine this. , imagine you want to work for the launch every time someone's added to a group with the status of pending. You can can wire that up, it'll fire off your workflow every time that happens, or every time someone attends an event. So that's super powerful. It's a very easy user interface to set those up, and it gives you a ton of power. Also, small little feature, previous names. You can now store previous last names on an individual and be able to search for them through the interface. There's another feature, benevolence, which is a finance feature. Every church a lot of churches do benevolence. This is a way of tracking that. We actually have that one rolled out here at CCV, and it's it's it's going well. And then we also have some UI cleanup that we're doing, just small little things to make everything look a little bit better. So those are just a few of the things coming. And there's a lot more on the board , that you'll see in the road maps. Those are all valid too. But those are some these are some of the things that are actually kind of done or almost done. Event registration is almost done. So it's pretty exciting. Sometimes as we're using these features, keep exciting features to look forward to. Another exciting thing that we enjoy doing here is just being able to follow all the churches and organizations that are in the process of launching Rock. That's really, really exciting to see when you've been working on something a long time behind the scenes. And we also really enjoy getting feedback from the churches as they're going through that and hearing how that's working out for them. So do you just wanna share a little bit about what we've heard recently? Yeah, so these are just the ones that we know about. I think one of the cool things about the community is sometimes there's stuff going on that don't even know about. I'm always surprised to see new people in the Q and As asking really intelligent and well thought out questions that until that question came through we didn't even know that they were working in Rock. So that's kind of an exciting thing. And one of the features we're going be rolling out next week is we'll probably be sending an email to everybody in the Rock database that we have, just saying, Hey, update us on where you're at with the implementation. We already have an organization page of those organizations who are implementing or have implemented, but we haven't really pushed that out to people to fill out that information. We're pushing that out next week. But those that we know that are having a lot of success, obviously, New Point in Ohio is fully up on Rock now doing check-in and lots of other things with Rock. Actually, this week was a big week. Willow Creek is now up on Rock. Just got a few tidbits from them on how the week went really well. They trained over 150 staff. And some of the feedback coming back from that was that in each session where trained staff, were literally cheering for the features and for the functionality. So That's great. That's really cool to hear that. , sometimes I think it's I don't worry necessarily that some of the technical people would Rock, but will the end user, will they get it? Will they understand it? And it's really good validation to hear that they get it and they it. Some other kind of interesting tidbits from their rollout was one of the things that they told us was that the workflows are really saving a ton of development time. With workflows, can give technically minded end user administrator, not a programmer, the ability to customize logic. And that saves a ton of development time. But overall, the excitement level of the staff and volunteers was really good. From an implementation perspective, things at CCV are going really well. We're getting a lot done. I think right now our critical path is along features, getting features written. But that said, we've already rolled out check-in partly at our largest campus here in Peoria, but also fully at one of our other campuses in Anthem. And next week, we're going to do two more campuses. And we're kind of circling the valley doing campuses. And that's going really well. It's great to see more and more data being sourced into Rock and then watching us be able to report out of that with the Rock tools. But I think in a sense with CCV, we're really in a good groove right now. We've got the way we're focusing on getting this stuff done. It's just fun seeing all this happening and everything kind of clicking into place. So that's kind of what we've been doing in some of the rollouts. Good. Well, we'd love to continue to hear from you as you're considering Rock and working toward a launch on your end. That's information that is really helpful to us in what we're doing, and we love to be able to share it too. So don't forget to let us know what's going on, and thanks so much for tuning in. 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.