Podcast Episode 29: Check-in

Description

In this episode we discuss when check-in will be available, what features it will have and our vision for check-in in the future.

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 to episode two of our Rockcast podcast. We are going to talk about children's check-in today. So big question, when is it coming? That's a good question. , first our first priority right now is get the beta out. So we're hoping within three to four weeks of having the beta out. I think, , looking at where we're at, especially this week, we were making a lot of progress. I think that's very doable. After that, it's really going depend on how that beta goes. That beta could go really well, we'll be jumping on to just getting the features ready for version one point zero. But we might find some issues, and we might have to of backtrack and do some cleanup. So definitely check-in as a part of our one point release and we'll be jumping on that as soon as we can get the beta out. Now, funny thing is most of the functionality is actually already done. It's actually ready. What's missing is a documentation. We really just we can't roll that out without documentation. People have to know how to configure it and use it. And that's really important. And there's a lot of just small polishing features, things having quality labels for printing, and a lot of just small little details that if we release now, I think it would just be a little bit frustrating for people. But the actual functionality is working and has been working for, well, several months. In fact, that's going be the hardest part about this podcast probably is just dusting off our knowledge of this because we've actually finished it so long ago. So in the beta, will I be able to, have any visibility into check-in and just not use it or is it not going to be there at all? We didn't hide it. If you go into the administrative screens you'll see some of those. If you look at some of the documentation that will be available in administrative guides it will reference at a super high level what that is. But what I'd probably, , give out as as advice is , , you can poke around, but I wouldn't tweak anything. And I wouldn't try to jump the gun on it. Having a solid configuration you're checking, I think, is really important. And I hate for someone to maybe jump ahead and and try to figure it out only to maybe misconfigure it. So we could take a peek but don't start using it or think that it's reliable in its current state just yet? Yeah. Right. And we actually ship with some sample data You can actually get in and see what the screens look , the different themes for it. Talking about themes and features, what will check-in actually do? Doctor. At the root it's just to let families check-in their children. It's tracking what people check-in to, where they checked in, when they checked in, and how they checked in. I think one of the beauties of Rock is that it really especially check-in highlights the benefits of working with other churches. I mean, CCB does check-in very differently than next Church Central. So in working together, we've really tried to come up with a solution that doesn't require a church to rewrite a check-in if they do something a little differently. Out of the box we can do a centralized check-in where everybody goes one place to check-in for different locations or we can put check ins in each room. Our goal really was just to make it extremely flexible and really let churches do check-in they need to do check-in. And right out of the box it pretty flexible in that your church has printers at your check-in kiosks. And in our church we have printers in our rooms. And so you could walk up centrally and check-in and print out in the rooms. And I think we learned all of this from our previous run through with the another product and creating check-in systems for those. I think that's the reason why it's gotten to the point where it's so flexible and can pretty much handle, I would say almost any situation a church can throw at it. Help them not throwing down the gauntlet. No. We've worked with a lot of churches, not just our two. And so I think we have a pretty good idea of all the different scenarios that people need in a check-in system. Interesting. I've never thought about it, but this is actually really our third check-in between all of us that we've actually Right. I mean, I think it's important that the check-in is based off workflow. It's very, very, very extensible. It can really do almost anything. But, I mean, that that comes at at having to have some knowledge, some technical knowledge too. I mean, out of the box, there's configuration UI for a lot of of small tweaks in configuration. But if you're really if you're gonna do something crazy, it can probably do it, but it's gonna require some code. So just to kinda, , manage expectations a little bit, it's super powerful. It it can be customized quite a bit just through pushing some buttons. But if you really wanna go crazy, it it it could, , require some custom actions be written. And the cool thing is you can share those actions. And and once you share that that code, , the the UI can see all those those custom things and and allow you to, , configure them through a nice graphical interface. But I also want to manage expectations , yeah, I can do anything, but there's only so much you can do with a limited knowledge set. So it's ready to go as soon as I have it installed. But if I want to do something special or custom or change it up quite a bit, I have the possibility if I have the right people to do that. Right. And there is a lot of customization you can do through the UI. Even things we really wanted to spend a lot of time on labels because we know every church has different labels that they print out for the kids. So we're using some really cool technology from Zebra printers. You can graphically kind of lay out your labels. That just takes time and us helping them understand how to install it, how to use it. It'd be easy for us just to throw someone to set up for that little configurator tool and say just have at it. But having set it up and getting it talking to the printers, it's not hard. We want to give you a nice guide that just walks you through the steps. Because I would have wanted that. , it took me, , two hours or three hours one day to figure this out and get everything just right. And the whole time, going, this is actually not that hard. But I had to piece together all these various knowledge points on on different websites to get it all working. We want to provide a nice single flow guide that will make that a lot easier. So I have a question. Out of the box, it'll have a label, I'm assuming, right? And if you didn't want to customize that label, how complicated would that be to get that label set up on your printers? That'd be pretty easy, I mean, because it's going to come at the sample data. So, , one of the things in Rock is we want ship it with meaningful sample data that's close to what most people want so that they don't start from scratch. , that's really hard to start from scratch. , I don't even know what I'm supposed to do now. I have to do all this rather than getting just, oh, I see how this is set up. I might just tweak that a little bit and tweak that a little bit, and I'm done. So, yeah, it's going to have labels. So if if you're not quite that fancy, then, , you can get started really easily. And we want to have different things too. , some people want, , graphics on their on their labels and icons for certain events. The church logo. Right. The church logo, , you can probably set that through the the the label program. But if you wanted to say , well, if it's their birthday, I want this icon. And if it's the first time visitor, I want that icon. That's a little bit more tricky. We can definitely do that. It requires some built in fonts into your printers and stuff. And not hard, but a little tricky. So we'll we'll walk you through all that too, but that's optional. We want to make it as easy as possible day one and then show you incrementally how to do fun things. It's all possible though. And just shipping with sample data, the check-in does run off Rock. It uses the power of Rock's ability to change themes pretty easily. We are shipping it with two really nice looking themes. It is very easy to create an own you have a web designer, you can create a new theme if one of those themes doesn't fit the style of your children's ministry. Right. And once you understand how to make a theme, really, you can make a new theme. If you have a Photoshop design of what you want it to look , you can really make a new theme in less than an hour. And we even have some Photoshop templates to give out to folks. But once you have that look in Photoshop, it's actually really easy to convert that into a new check-in theme. Can we also talk about some of the other sample data scenarios that I think are pretty powerful and We took what we did in our previous checking system and added it into Rock. So out of the box, the nursery groupings, child groupings will even let you segregate or break out your kids based on their ability level. So if your kids are, let's say just still crawling, you can have those kids from a centralized check-in get routed and put into the right classroom based on that ability level. And I think again, sample data has three, maybe four ability levels infants, crawlers, walkers and potty trained because we've heard that request a lot that kids who aren't yet potty trained can't go into the class for the big kids that are potty trained. So being able to break that out by children's skill level is important. And what we do is we ask as they're checking in if we need to know what their skill level is or if it's changed, we prompt them on screen. And all of that was achieved through the Workflow System that John was talking about. So out of the box, it just had that basic workflow system. So we added some custom actions and a custom block. And now the system out of the box has this cool ability level filtering. Yeah. And if you don't want that, it's easy to turn that off too. Absolutely. But it's easier for us to ship that configured than it is to ship it unconfigured and tell you how to configure it. Mhmm. Yeah. There are some things people probably should know if they're thinking about using check-in, with our label technology, we are limited to only Zebra printers, Which to me, we've had a lot of experience with printers over the years at CCV and working with other churches. The Zebra printers really are the go to printer for label printing. I think a lot of times people look at the initial cost on them and because they are a little bit more than, , some of the dynamos and other stuff. But the labels that you buy from are so much cheaper that it's not very long before you've made up the cost just in buying supplies. And they're Rock solid. Mean, they're They last for a long time. And we've had some of those Zebra printers for five, six, seven years. Well, we have some probably ten, almost eleven years. And they've been printing crazy every weekend. And I don't I can't remember me ever, , taking a Zebra printer and putting it in the trash. , they're they're still all going. So it's pretty pretty amazing. So that is one thing that just to kinda throw out. That is one of the things that we picked. Is it impossible for a church that's really insistent that wanted to develop their own labels and label whatever to use a totally different labeling system? That's certainly possible. I think that'd be a little tricky. Might, I definitely wouldn't think that'd be worth the effort. by the time you're doing that, man, you could have bought a ton of Zebra printers and some stock to go with it. So, , I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. But, if Zebra also tanked tomorrow, it would be a replaceable component in the architecture. Right. So But we, , what about, there's other things to talk about too, what kind of devices can check-in use? Right. So do I have to run out and buy Elo workstations or does it use a Mac? Can I use an iPad? Can I use a cell phone? And I think the answer is yes. We're targeting being able to use any of those devices because it's basically just a simple web app. I mean, it's just a webpage. There's a special component, however, for the printing, if you're printing local to an iPad that involves a little extra, , something more than a web app. But for the most part, yeah, our intention is that you're going be able to run this on any device that has a browser. Right. And the printing was tricky because we wanted to be able to print both from the server and from the client. The server is nice if you're hosting your own server on-site. That works well. It's printing by TCP IP address to the printer directly. But if you're in a more of a hosted platform that works outside your network, it's really impossible to print through your firewall or not impossible, but probably not the best recommended recommended security setup. So we do print locally too. So for that, we created a iOS app for iPad that basically hosts the website and then handles a lot of the printing for you. So that's something that we'll be putting up in the Apple Store and and you can download for free and use that. Are working right now everything's printing via networking. So your printers have to have network interfaces, which can raise the cost a little bit on some not a lot, but a little bit. So we are looking at and hopefully by one point we'll have a solution to be able to print over USB too. So that's one thing we're still working on. That will probably require a Windows application, to be installed on every device. But, there's a lot of new features there too that we're going try to use some of the new Windows eight apps that where you can get it from their app store and make it really easy to deploy. So if a church does not have a developer on staff and they want to use check-in right out of the box, they go to open the documentation that you're writing right now. Will they be able to read it? Yes. We we are writing that document with normal people in mind. , people who don't know the intricacies of Rock. So we're not going to expose them to some of the backend madness or awesomeness, depending how you look at it. We'll step them through and show them screens. We won't insult her intelligence as one of our laws. And, but yeah, it'll be simple and easy to read and you'll help us with that. Emily, I can certainly help with that. But if we want to get into the more detailed information, we'll have that available as well. And we're looking at talking to both groups or one group. Yeah, I think that documentation might take a bit longer. A lot of it is kind of written. If you go out and search inside the wiki built into our GitHub repository, you'll actually see how to write some of these custom work flow actions for check-in. I'm not sure we're ready to just quickly link right to them because they're a little overwhelming. Yeah. , a senior developer could figure that out and do it, but I'm not sure it's up to our, high bar of quality of what we want to put out publicly. But it's certainly there in the open for everybody to look at. Right. Because we use, again, we use that to communicate internally between the three teams that were part of the check-in component, which was NewSpring, CCV and central. But yeah, that document will probably get polished later on down the line and brought into the Rock RMS site. But for right now it's the technical, the really deep technical four zero four level stuff is on the Wiki. Right. I mean, anybody suffering from insomnia has a wealth of information on that Wiki of how Rock really works and it's open. That's, we're not hiding anything, but really pretty dry because it's it's it's meant to be very useful to a senior developer. , it's really meant for us to document for ourselves. Right. So we can remember what we were doing and how that works. But it's all out there. It's it's amazing. If you go out and look under the pages, you'll see a ton of stuff, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's more than I would wanna see for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's not light reading. Well, so if that's coming in the future somewhere down the road as we polish things up, what else can we expect to see in the future? Just from the check-in itself but , we're a little bit of documentation as well. I think that's the frustrating part of of Rock is that, , for the last couple of years, we've been really focusing on going back to square one. , with with our current systems, we're we're at square 20 maybe. And we're having to go back to square one and write the ABCs again, the foundational stuff that you just need. , , we're having to rewrite a lot of stuff from scratch, the functionality that we already have. And so but yet, in our minds, we're always thinking about new, , future stuff that we really want to work on that no one's working on. That would be so cool if we could just do that. But we have to put a lot of those ideas in our little black book and get to them someday. And it's nice that we're actually getting close to that someday. The things we want to do is mobile check-in where you can geo fence your campus and allow someone to check-in based on where they are. So you can check-in from home and then never show up. But we know, hey, now you're on our campus. Let's pop up something on your mobile device. Let's allow you to check-in. Definitely iBeacon is is huge technology for us for a lot of different things. But one of them would be check-in. , we could tell not only what campus you're on, we can tell what building you're in and and what room you're standing in front of. And that would just definitely limit your choices. Why give you, in our campus it would probably be 30 or 40 choices of rooms if you're standing in front of one. Maybe it's down to two or three rooms. So just really personalizing that, making it, , checking harder. Maybe in the future we don't even need checking hardware. The checking hardware is everybody's phones. Know, so there's a ton of technology that we want to be using. And we have the foundation to use it, but we just don't have the bandwidth maybe in the next six months to get that. But the black book is full of great ideas, especially in check-in. What are some of those other ideas? Well, that was the one I was thinking of. I mean, that's, I don't want to say the holy grail of check-in data, but the ability to not just check-in kids, but everyone, adults. And we've talked a lot about checking in kids, children, but this would also work for junior high, high school, out of the box. Classes that you might have, you might have a membership class or stewardship class or whatever. Yeah, you can check-in for anything. And what about checking in your volunteers as they come on campus? Definitely we do that today and this was meant to do that. , I think we also want to work on a lot of reporting and analytics on check-in. There's going to be some and, , initially when it comes, it's going to have what everybody has type thing. Hopefully it's interactive and some cool graphs. But we really want to take that further show real time. But also on the person's profile page, just be able to really see at a snapshot, high level, how often is this person coming? How often is this family coming? Other systems they look at are nice. You can go to a child's record and see their check ins. But you always have to click over a child record. You guys have to click over someplace else. But to see that as a family unit, , it would be really nice. So working on that. So analytics would be a big piece of that. And even bring it down to looking for check-in patterns and then finding differences in those patterns. Either they're coming more often or less often. Possibly being able to notify certain people that you care about , Oh, that person's attendance patterns changing, FYI. But really the sky's the limit. The only other thing I am thinking of that we haven't touched on is how can they get ready now? And I know the way I've been telling people they can get ready is by understanding their ministries in the way they do check-in today. So if you're not the children's director and you don't really know all the details of which kids go into what room and at what time, go collect that information. Jot it down on paper. We're gonna provide a worksheet in the check-in guide that will help with that. But for right now, it couldn't hurt to go capture that information because then you can sit down when you get Rock, non beta one-zero and go ahead and put that in. And then you can present it to your children's ministry as, hey, check this out. And that includes things what ages does each ministry area allow kids to check-in for. How granular is the check-in? Is it just elementary kids? Is it first grade, second grade, third grade? Are they all separate? Just getting a clear map of how kids should be able to check-in. I think sometimes looking at best practices maybe at churches around you, I think most churches do check-in pretty similar and maybe one or two or three buckets of similarity. But occasionally, , you run across many issues with very specific and different requirements. And, , sometimes I would just kind of say, , make sure that the reasons why you do that really are required or not just someone one staff person's preference because you're really going to limit yourself. Really going to have to means that you have to go get a developer to actually implement that. And that would be a shame. Think if you can look around and if a lot of churches are doing it the same, those are best practices. You should probably just, , use one of those best practices. And we've written the software based on what we've seen other churches do. Not necessarily what our church does because I don't think, , what we do would work for a lot of churches but we're looking at lots of different churches that we've worked with over the years and trying to make best practices that match what they do. So, sometimes you go, you run into that one off situation and sometimes that can be a little resistant to change. Just understand, well, why do we do it this way? And does that make sense? I think as you move into new software, this is a great time to look at best practices and say, well, I know we've always done it that way, but why do we do it that way? Does it make sense to do it this other way? Look churches around you and see what they're doing. All right. This is some pretty exciting stuff. So take some time, evaluate what you're doing on your end. Collect that information that you need to get set up and you can take a little peek at it when it comes out in beta and and get ready for the big check-in with one point o. 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.