Podcast Episode 30: Beta Release

Description

In this area we announce the beta release date (kinda) and each talk about what we're excited about and one thing we're nervous about.

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. Alright. Let's get started with episode three today. What are we talking about? Well, first thing I think we have our beta release date nailed down and it's coming up soon, so that's pretty exciting. And if you're one of our newsletter subscribers, you already know the date. If you're not, well, you need to find one of them and find out what the date is. We've told them we're gonna give them first access. So, , you can still subscribe to the newsletter. We might send out another reminder of what that date is. But for the most part, just wanna reward people who are on the newsletter. But it is very soon in a matter of weeks, not months. So that's pretty exciting. That's really exciting, actually. It's years worth of exciting. It is years worth of exciting. It's it's nice to actually have it in in place and now we're just working mad to to reach that date and there's still a lot to do, but, the dates is is out. So if we missed the date this first time around that it was announced, how will we know when it's live, when it's ready to go? So when you go to the the Rock homepage, when it is live, you'll see right now, I think there's a button that says prepare now or something that. It'll it'll say get getting started. You'll click on that. You'll be able to download the very small installer and you can kind of go from there. And there'll be all kinds of instructions on how to get started if you want to internally host or externally host. Mason on our team is doing a great job writing some great guides on how to get started hosting it on your own server. And he's put a lot of detail, a lot of good detail into that. I've had a few people kind of play impressed with it too, just getting from a brand new server to fully running Rock. And he's also running on creating an externally hosted guide. So he walks you through three different web hosts and how to go from I just paid for it to I'm ready to go. So that should be pretty easy. And that guide or those guides and others are going to be released during that beta week? They'll be released that beta day. Yeah. So and and we might even try to sneak out. I'm not sure if it's gonna be possible. We might try to sneak out another manual or two next week, even before the beta. You can kind of read about how, , how to configure a person and a family if you wanted to kind of get some pre reading done. A lot of that content is written. It just needs to be assembled and screenshots. But we're working at a fast clip on that too. We hope to maybe get out one more book before the beta. But at the release of the beta, you'll have the two install guides, external and external. You'll have how to manage a person and family, groups, and the administrator's guide too. So there will be quite a bit of documentation ready day one. Also, there will probably be a book on our manual on reporting, So that will be exciting. There is still a lot more documentation to come, but a lot of documentation is going be relying upon check-in and giving contributions which isn't quite ready yet. So that's that's our update on on the release date. We're really excited about that. Another thing kind of paired with that is, , Rock's kind of a crazy thing. It's it's a it's obviously a product you can use, but it's also a whole ecosystem, it's a whole community. And creating that community in those tools has been a really big undertaking. So this is the Rock website, which runs on Rock. Of course, that took time to make. But we also created some tools for helping to support the product. Obviously, there's no paid support. There's no one you can call at the end of the day and say, I have a question, answer it. We are hoping that the community steps up and does that. We have written some question and answer blocks. David, do you want to talk a little bit about those? Sure. Our goal is to provide a way for people using Rock to help each other. So on the Rock site once think beta goes live we will open up the question and answer site. And it's really just where you can go and any type of question on how to use or even if you have developers how to extend Rock. But how to get things installed. Really anything you want to know about using Rock you can ask there. And our hope is that other people that have already been there, have already figured it out, can step in and answer those questions. We have a whole kind of, developers use a site similar to that called Stack Overflow so we have kind of modeled after that. We really want to reward people for participating. Our goal is to really get a huge participation there. And of course, John, you've kind of banned us somewhat from using it initially, but we're going to be the only ones that know anything. So can we jump in and answer a few questions that first week? Yeah, the first week, I think, , we'll be answering some questions. , one of the things we don't want to do is just become the answers. We want to really raise up the whole community to be able to answer these questions. So, , you might see us taking a step backwards and saying, well, let's wait a few days and see if someone answers that question. And then if no one does, we can answer it. But we really don't want get in other people's way. It's , if we keep answering all the questions, , we actually damage the community because they're , well, that's not my job to answer questions. My job is to ask questions. And also, too, I think we got to be careful because I've seen this in other communities where people get afraid to answer a question because they're , well, David knows that better than I do. And maybe my question, it might be right, but it's not fully right. And I don't want to be corrected in front of everybody. And we definitely are not going to do that. Right. If anything, we want to be the encouragers of the community. But we need to be careful that we don't become the only people who are the answering. Absolutely. And I hope even on beta that, , we have great documentation. , people probably read it, but maybe they missed that part. So maybe someone else, , can answer it just by reading other parts of the documentation. , there is a lot of documentation, so I'm sure people are going to miss parts. I think another part of it, too, is you might have a question about, well, how does that work? But you might have another question as well, what's the best way or how are you doing that? Because the product is so configurable. There's no right way to do it. There's just several right ways. So I kind of envision a lot of questions. What are people doing in this area? How's the best way to set up this type of ministry? And I look forward to seeing a lot of that because there's probably a lot of ways that we had never even thought of how to use it. In fact, writing the documentation on groups at the end, we have some strategies about how to configure your groups. It's just kind of interesting to be thinking about, wow, we have some ideas, but I'm sure over the years, we're going to be adding in all everybody else's ideas to this because they just had some new creative way of using these tools. So yeah, real excited about the question and answer. I would say get in there and use it. It is, again, a lot of code. So beta might actually have a few bugs in the question and answer. Just be patient with that. But you can only test it so much before you get bored with asking questions that are just silly because it's test questions. But so that will be releasing that same day. We thought about releasing it early, but really it's kind of hard to have a question about something you can't get your hands on. Now, one point on that we were talking about earlier is, too, is that questions is really for , how do I or what's the best way to if you do hit the beta and you have a bug , hey, I found this. It blows up when I do this. , probably don't put that in the questions. We have a GitHub account that we use for tracking issues. Probably better to use that. And if you go to the question and answer page, there's actually a link to the issues. And isn't it also going to be on the footer of their page? That's a good point too. It does say at the bottom of the footer right now, Rock beta report issues. Eventually that'll go away. But for the beta, we'll have it there. That said, if you if you ask any question answer, we're not going get mad. Just, , you don't have to worry about us getting mad about stuff that. It's just trying to get everything in the right place. So I guess it kind of touches on the on the downloading process too is when you first go to download or do the question and answer, really need to have an account. We really want know who you are. We want to be able to track your questions and provide that kind of thing. There actually is a registration process on the site too. That's actually live right now and actually quite a few people are finding it and using it, which is fine and good. So when you go in there, we just want to know you your name, your email address. But then also we want to pull together the concept of what organization you're with. Because as we make more advanced tools, those tools are going be more at an organization level, your church. So you'll see after you create your person account that you need to enter in some information about your organization, just the name, address. Now, if someone already in your organization has already done that, it gives you a quick little find tool where you can find organizations that have already been entered. And you can just join those organizations and there will be tools to allow them to grant you access to that. Kind of realize that that's coming to and what the goal of that is, is to provide a nice profile of you, but also of your organization so that we can build these really powerful tools in the future where they can be more at an organization level so that data is kind of centralized at an organization level. You could even get started and do that today. Probably not a huge benefit to doing it early, but if you just wanted to play with it just realize that too is beta. Yeah. That's probably what we're working the most on right now is just getting that Rock site solid for both the registration, the Q and A just so that it's a tool that people can use. Even the documentation. There's a lot of code written just to throw up the documentation and version it and provide tools to view it. There's a lot more to that than probably what it looks . Mean, we even have a ton of documentation on writing documentation. It's it's kind of crazy but what's cool there is there's there's innovation there too. Know, we've kind of tapped into something called HTML book, which is really being developed as we speak by O'Reilly Yeah. So we're kinda working off of their advanced kind of workings, trying to make something that's very standardized and So what if people want to know more? , when can they actually come and meet the developers? That's part The US. That's part of The US. It's on our little outline there, isn't it? One concept we've thought about is, , we we definitely we have the documentation. We have the question and answer. But what if you just want to ask a question? What if you just want to meet up and talk about this? , we don't have anything, , in concrete yet, but we're thinking about having a special day where if you wanted to, you could fly into Peoria, Arizona. You could have an all day of ask anything you want. We'll answer anything we can just in case you just really want to learn more. Optional. Just if people are interested, we would be able to put on a day that. One of the concepts we have, too, is this kind of interesting, is that there's also CITIT conference in October. We thought, well, we could do one maybe in April and then maybe we could do one in October. That way we kind of, , can do it twice a year. And ironically enough, the one in October is in Peoria, Illinois. So we thought about doing a Peoria to Peoria tour where you can either fly in in April to Peoria, Arizona, which is where we're at. We can show you and answer questions. Or you could hook up at the CITRT meeting in October and you can hit a great conference there and maybe have a pre day where if you want to have any questions about Rock. And of course we'll be there through the rest of that conference too. There'll be extended time after that and refresh cash and Yeah. So for people who maybe aren't familiar with that term CITRT, it's the Church IT Roundtable, also called the Church IT Network. Great group of guys. Definitely, you guys if you're not part of that group, should get involved if you're at all involved in IT at your church. Right. And throughout that conference, there'll be breakout sessions on Rock, too. But we think maybe just a pre session where if you have anything you want to ask, you can ask it. And then if you want to dive deeper into some topics all throughout the conference, we'll be doing stuff that. So mean, there's a lot of open topics that we could talk about. But I thought it maybe be fun just to go around the table and each just share one thing about what we're excited about for the beta, and maybe one thing that we maybe are a little worried about or maybe a frustration that we have that we can just share. Who's going to start this? David, why don't you start? Well, the fact that we are getting to betas looks exciting to me. It has been a long road to get here. So just getting this in other people's hands and getting feedback I guess. I just love for Rock to be kind of a I was going say a household name but a church name, guess. A lot of churches are using it and that it's helping a lot. We've had a lot of churches come to us and see kind of what we're doing and want to be able to do that and they just haven't had the tools to do it. So being able to provide those and helping them to do that is what's probably the most exciting thing to me. What am I worried about or a frustration? I'm worried about the Veda. As soon as more people start using it things are going to obviously turn up that we haven't uncovered. I know that we will be pretty responsive to getting things fixed. So talk about kind of our plans for that beta week in terms of doing some of that. Well, we kind of will be watching and listening and seeing what people are running into. And we do hope we are going to be very responsive about getting things fixed and updated so we have a very streamlined update process that we can release updates pretty quickly. So if things are uncovered that stop people from being able to use it we can release an update pretty quickly. We plan to do probably a few that first week. For sure. Yeah it's going be fun. It really is a one click update. You just go to one page, hit update, boom. You got latest code. How about you Nick? Oh boy. So yeah, similar to what David was saying, maybe I'll say it differently is not knowing what's going to happen. Know, that's what I'm most anxious about. just not knowing what we don't know yet. So we'll know that week I'm sure things that we, maybe oversights but I'm also excited about being able to fix those right away for people. But what I'm most excited about is really the future. It seems for the last several years, , we've gone from idea to a base of code, a lot of good infrastructure and tools and tooling. But now the next six months to a year, I just envision a whole bunch of features rapid feature deployment coming. So I feel that's something really to be excited about. And I guess that goes hand in hand with the Rock store eventually, having an easy place for other people to submit and put their solutions and features and tools and then letting the church community easily just one click install to download and get those going on their system. That's what I'm really most excited about. Are you making me nervous even thinking about all those features that we still have to figure out? how's that going to work? Yeah. Don't worry about that. Yeah. I know. One at a time. Yep. I think the thing that I am, most excited about is the individual stories that will come out of this. So looking at how Rock, is able to help a church of a few hundred, how it can be implemented differently at a church of a few thousand, and the stories that go along with that. We're really excited to hear those and, definitely would love for your feedback on social media. We'll be asking for it so there's a little plug for that in advance. But we're very excited to see how this one application can meet so many needs on so many levels. Something I'm probably worried about is the potential volume of questions or concerns. I know you guys are dealing with bug issues and major things but some of the minor things I think we could have a pretty high volume of that going on right away. We'll get to you as quickly as we can. Monitoring very carefully. But it may take a little bit if our volume is pretty high at first. That's a good point. I think we just really need to manage expectations on that. That Rock is an open source church management system and it's not officially supported. Now the first week and as we go through the beta, we're going be very responsive. We're going to be doing the fixes. We want to continue that, but we can't be, hey, this is broken. How do fix this? We really need the community to step up and and be that kind of backstop for us so that we can be behind the scenes writing code and fixing code. And it's just gonna be hard to manage that and and set the expectations for that. But you're right. The first week it's, , we'll be on almost full support. But can I add something before you go, John? Kind of ties into anxiousness. And one of the things that's been on my mind is what, what are people's expectations? Because it's been so long in coming and we've been talking and thinking about it for so long. Is there a possibility that people are gonna see it and go, Oh, that's all it is? I think, yeah, for sure because, , it really is just a seed. It's a small start. It's got some of the basics in there but in terms of what Rock is going to be, it's going to be so much bigger than what it is during that initial beta. So that's sort of one of the, I don't know, anxious feelings I get when I think about what are people going to perceive Rock on that beta week. Yeah. And that's actually my biggest fear too is this. You're right. It is going to be some more, but it's actually funny how more it is now that you can't even see because we haven't opened up those areas and we haven't finished the documentation or the polishing or that last little feature that just will open up a whole new, , broom of of Rock that we just couldn't get into the beta. So I'm a little nervous that you might , you said, say, oh, well, this is great. , does this, this and this. But we also need this. And it's , well, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually almost there. But we just need to fix these one or two little things and polish it and do the documentation. So I guess it is what you said. We don't know what people's expectations are. So are we going to meet them? Are we going to not meet them? Are we going to exceed them? I think sometimes we're our own worst enemies on that. It seems for a lot of churches, even when you get day one on beta, it's going be incredible. But you never know. But I think what I'm most excited about too is just seeing it in real use. And we've been kind of doing a lot of testing. I said, Mason, our team has been doing documentation and running it in the real world. And every time we run-in the real world, we find out one gotcha, , oh, we didn't think about that. And it's just fun for me to fix those and and see now it's going to work even if that happens. So you mentioned using it in the real world. Can they start using it in the real world during beta? Sure. As long as they don't mind running beta in the real world. Yeah. Okay. So depends how risk adverse you are. Right. , you don't really have anything else and you just want to play with it in the real world, sure. Do it. Right. But realize it's beta. And our plan is to attempt to really keep that beta in all your data sustained. Right. Through the coming out of beta. Right. That is definitely the goal. Now could there be something that comes up that just doesn't make that possible? Possibly. I don't don't see how we couldn't always write something that would fix something, know, smartly. Right. But I don't want to guarantee it. , that that would probably not be wise. Our goal is to not hose you up. Exactly. So even though there are no guarantees, there's a possibility that we could even write an exportimport tool if we got painted into a corner. Right. But I would say there's nothing as nice as a database backup. Back up your database, that's a good thing. Yeah. sometimes too when you get a new tool, one of the things you can do wrong is to try to use it the right way the first time. Sometimes it's just good to install it and just go, what? I know I'm going to blow this away in two weeks. I'm just going to have fun. I'm just going to pretend I'm using it in the real world, but I'm going to be Okay if I make a mess because I'm going to start over. I think that's why. So I think a lot of people kind of start and they as they're trying to figure it out, they're making a mess. And then they try to clean the mess up and then go forward. It's , well, you forgot that a long time ago you made that one little configuration change and you didn't really know what you're doing back then. Now you do, but you forgot about it. And you're going to it's going to come up and bite you , , six months from now when all of a sudden that configuration change is needed for something. So I would say it's sometimes it's nice just to install it and have no fear. Just go in there and start tweaking everything. And if you get in an admin section, you're , don't know what this setting does. Well, tweak it. Worst case, you're blowing it away in two weeks and , you'll be fine. And it's no big deal because the installer really is that easy. Right. So I would say have fun with it and don't worry about getting it right the first time. But make sure you have that expectation going in. don't enter all 2,000 people in your church and then, , enter the first. And then , go, oh, I don't the way I did this. And now it's , oh, that's a lot of work. Very wise. , it's do 20 real families and then kind of play with them. Do families well, your friends that way because their contact information, what they should look . So when it's not right, you can identify that. If you put in some strangers, you may not know their contact information. But I guess another fear of mine that as I keep thinking about it. And again, there's two parts of Rock. There's the product itself and then there's a larger ecosystem. And the more we work on this ecosystem, the more we realize how much this is costing us. In terms of time and money, hosting, it seems rather trivial to put up a website. But there's so much more to this website. I mean, we're running it on Azure. We have all these fancy deployment schedules podcasts. And there's just a lot of services that we're using that cost money. And we're trying to be a low burden on the churches that are helping to fund this by putting resources to it. And every night, last night, I was , okay, well, got to we actually start to paying for our podcast service because some user last night got cut off because we hit our bandwidth. Sorry about that. Yeah. Were you on the free version? If that was you, let us know. We'll send you a t shirt or or a sticker. I'm not sure we have any yet. But but you could , you keep hitting all these services, and you're , oh my gosh. , we that one thing's not gonna break the budget, but Together in total. Right. These are all monthly costs. And, , we have this concept of, , we would people to donate. , it's understand people white people aren't donating yet because we don't have something to ship yet. But we hope people kinda catch on that vision and realize that there's a lot cost to this. They're not huge, but it would be nice to have, , we're not having to live nickel and diming Right. Our own churches. And just to be clear, if it isn't already, I mean, of the donation money goes toward just paying for services. Nobody makes any money off this. , we're not making salaries at all. It's purely just to keep everything running and better the service. Right. Yep. So and and that's that kind of worries me a bit because I it seems almost every night, it's , Well, we have to pay for that. Okay. Well, we need to pay for this. And, when you start seeing more money go out than you see come in, it's , oh, no. , that's not sustainable unless you're the federal government. Oh no. Then you guys print more. We can't print one. So hopefully people are thinking about that and and would consider, , helping out with that and assisting with that. So because, , another thing too is, , sometimes you try to do something cheap on the cheap and it costs you more time. Mhmm. Because all of sudden that stopped working and now you gotta it's double effort. And that just gets frustrating too because our most valuable commodity right now is time. , we have so little time. If if people knew how many how many hours are going into this Mhmm. It'd probably blow them away. But, so we just really need to be able to protect that. Yeah. And so when, when is our next podcast? It's right now, right? No. I mean when will we do this again? I kind of the two week kind of schedule. I mean, Okay. I would say if someone has a topic, they really wanna know, , tell us, because we're kinda just picking them out of air right now. So, hopefully, this is of interest. And but Yep. But now that we're paying for these met do we have now have metrics? So we'll be able to see. We can tell if you're listening. Right. Although, by the fact that we ran out of bandwidth, someone's listening in or someone who's trying to listen. So, I mean, that's kind of the the excitement of of today. So goodbye until next time? I think it is. 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.