RX 24 - Rock Product Keynote - Jon Edmiston

Transcribed Content

Good morning, Warriors. We know why you're here, Chip. We see you guys taking your pictures before we start the keynote. And we know that you love Chip, and that's why we made that video. Now, there's a few things that we know that you're going to want. We know you're going to want access to that video, but we have a problem, a conundrum. You see, that video is a parody video of a Notorious BIG song. They parodied it off of Duran Duran, but one thing we know about Notorious BIG's people is they're a little dangerous. Right? Just ask Tupac. And we don't want to be a part of that. Don't want to be a part of that. But we know you want access to this digital content, so how are we going to get through that? Well, we thought about that. We know that you love to collect all things chip. We know we need to give you access to this digital content, but at the same time we need to be careful. So we came up with this plan that we would actually be able to give this to you his first EP, which is called Claw to the Core. Yeah. He's making waves. We're going to make this accessible to you in a special digital download that you can get at the promo shop. It's going be on a three and a half inch floppy. We feel like this is going to protect us from the BIG crowd. Now this is limited edition because we know you guys like limited edition. There's only 50 of these. Yeah, $3. The m p three file does fit on this three and a half inch floppy, so you can grab that floppy and that's how you can get access to it. But we also know our community. We've been with you. This is our tenth Rx, so we know you pretty well. We know that there's some in this crowd that are going want something just a little bit more exclusive. Right? Well, before I show you that, how many people have actually used a floppy drive? Yeah. Okay. Better question. Who hasn't ever used a floppy drive for its intended purpose? Okay. Did you all think that that was a save button when I put it up there? Probably, maybe. Did any of you wonder like why do we call that a floppy? It looks like a firm piece of plastic. Okay. That leads us to our next collectible, which is a five and a quarter inch floppy. Yes. Yes. Does this have the m p three file on it? I don't know. You guys can figure it out. But I would probably guess no. But imagine putting this up at your office in Cuba and all the conversations you can have on this historical data storage capability here. There's only 10 of these, so you want to beeline out to the promo shop to get that. Now, maybe there's some of you who want something even more exclusive. More than one of 10. One of two, how about mainframe data reel. These are legit. These are legit tapes. Don't know what's on them. So whatever you find on them, it wasn't us. We bought them off of eBay, but they do come with a chip sticker and they are numbered. All of this All these items are numbered, so you'll get one of 51 of 10, or one of two. Now we thought, maybe there's someone in the audience who wants to just be the only one. What is a more historical way of storing data on computers other than like a tape reel? Exactly. Punch cards. Yeah. This is the only one you can't actually get because we would need 36,000 punch cards to store that mp3 file. And we thought, you know what, we didn't want to source that many punch cards. We did source some punch cards. So if you want to go to the promo shop, you can actually touch and feel a legitimate legacy punch card. You can see what that was all about. It was really interesting. Now when I made the order to get these punch cards, I wasn't paying attention, and they didn't come very soon. So I looked at my order and I realized, oh, I had ordered cards from the Ukraine, and it was going to take a while. So me being kind of the nervous type, I'm like, well, I better make another order. And those came and those came from America. So now I have Soviet era punch cards and American punch cards, so you can compare and contrast the two. They're all the same. Just slight color variants, maybe. But you can go and touch a piece of history at the promo shop. So you definitely want to get to the promo shop right after this, because again, those are kind of limited editions. Okay. You guys talk, we listen. Last year at the keynote, the feedback was great, but you said it was a little long, you needed a bio break. So we listened and we're splitting the keynote into several different keynotes. So we have daily keynotes. Today's daily keynote will be on the product, all about the technology and the feature set. Tomorrow's keynote will be about the community, where we'll talk about rock stars, we'll talk about the Hall of Fame, Circle Awards, and where we see growth going in the rock community. Beyond that, we also have what we call product keynotes. So today, after this keynote, if you're interested in Rock Mobile, a deep dive into Rock Mobile, we'll have a platform keynote on that. We'll also tomorrow have a platform keynote on TV apps. We'll be talking a little bit about Rock Mobile and TV apps today at a very high level. But if you want to go deeper, we'll have those sessions available for you. So let's get officially started. Please welcome Emily Forman to the stage to kick us off and We are so excited to get started with our keynote this morning talking about our product. So the first thing we want to do is talk about what we've done over the last year, and then we'll talk about where we're going. One thing that our team has been focusing heavily on is TV apps. In particular, we've always had Apple TV apps available. Well, now we've added the Roku TV app platform. And while it's not exactly as powerful as Apple TV, it is pretty powerful itself. We are working on the first Roku TV app in partnership with the church, and the reason we've, gone into this platform is because of community requests. So in this platform, you'll find many of the same features that you find in Apple TV, including dynamic content, full lava support, login, watch map support, performant page caching, and so much more. If you want to know more information, as John mentioned before, we do have a platform keynote tomorrow morning at 10:15, and you can get all the technical details there. Alright. Beyond TV apps, what else has our team been working on? And I can tell you that we've put a big focus on quality this year, specifically in terms of open issues. Now you know that we have an open GitHub repo, and if you don't speak code, that means that as we write rock every day, we push our code up into a repository that kind of saves it there, It's publicly visible and available. It's also the place that we request issues to be reported. So if you run into a bug, you can report it publicly there on GitHub. Last year about this time, we had around 200 open issues that had been reported for our team to work on inside that repo. Now if you think about the hundreds of churches that use Rock, and if you think about the dynamic and extensible components of the platform, this is actually a pretty low number, especially if you consider what might be the number of open issues inside some of the platforms of other church management systems which are not open for public visibility. Well, we've been working really hard on this, and I can tell you that as of last Friday, we've reduced the number of open issues on our entire platform down to 16. This has been a huge effort on the part of our development team, and we're so thrilled to be able to do that. Now, let's keep a couple things in mind. Please don't run out of here and open a bunch of issues. We do want you to report significant issues on GitHub because that's how we are able to to take care of those for you. But minor issues or perhaps something that might actually be an enhancement request because of a unique way that you're using Rock, that would not be the right place to put those. So we do thank you for all the work you do, our alpha and beta testing teams and, and everyone who works with us to improve the quality of the product. So we've been working specifically on quality. We've been working on TV apps. Let's talk about Rock Core. If you were here last year, you remember that we announced v 16. It hadn't come out yet. In fact, we delivered it in October of twenty twenty three after our last keynote. But we did cover most of the major issues in that major 16 release, so we won't cover those again today. However, we are going to talk about some of the features that we hid inside of the dot releases that have come since because that's what the team's been working on and we wanna share those with you. So let's talk about what's included in the 16 dot feature releases, starting with observability metrics. This has been a very important feature to our team. The observability feature has opened up the ability for you to see inside what's happening with rock performance. And it there's a world of data that comes in and allows you to get the information you need to address potential issues. We definitely recommend setting up observability on your rock instance now before you might need it with any potential performance issues you run into. And I think I saw last night there was an observability party in the lobby with some people hooking it up already, so you're ahead of the game. Also in '17, we released the pin note to top feature. Have you ever run into a situation where you really needed to have a note at the top of the page but it wasn't alert worthy? A different kind of note? This is the feature that will address that for you and just with the click of a mouse. One click unsubscribe is a feature we delivered in '19, and I can tell you it was not on our roadmap this time last year. I don't think it was on anyone's roadmap. Google kind of dropped a bomb on the industry when they determined that this needed to be done. And not only did they surprise everyone, they created aggressive deadlines and didn't really give us the recipe for how to meet their requirements. So there was a lot of effort, focus, and work on that, and we did deliver it. We haven't really heard of other platforms that have been able to keep that same pace and deliver this as quickly as Rock did. Okay. So those are some of the past features that we've delivered. There are a couple coming up yet in 16, and let's talk about 16.7 payment plans. This allows you to have flexible event payment options inside registrations. It's a feature funded by Christchurch of the Valley and you can enable it on your registrations. In the first step, you can determine the frequency of your payment plan. Once you have that set up, then Rock is smart and it knows how many payments it will need to have for you to reach that. When this is all set up, it means that the person who's going through your event registration right at the checkout experience will have the opportunity to set up that payment plan inside event registration. Another important feature that's coming in sixteen point seven is interaction intense. So we know that not all web pages are created equally. Right? Some are there for marketing or promotional purposes. Others might be administrative or there might be discipleship content. Interaction intense is the feature that will help you categorize your content based on its purpose, which makes it then trackable and measurable. You can have Interaction Intents on two things, pages and content channel items. And either of these can have more than one intent. So you'll be able to report off these items. And in the future, our core team may add additional reporting directly into core. So our current focal points have definitely been on v 16 items, on Roku TV apps, on product polish, and getting our quality up to standards. But the other thing our team's been working really hard on is requested RockBlock updates. So sometime last fall, we realized that some churches had been working with partners to clone core RockBlocks in order to have some enhancements that they needed for functionality that was required for their church. Unfortunately, this can make your system unstable over time, preventing updates and creating issues. It's costly and frustrating to maintain. And there was a misunderstanding that these enhancements or slight tweaks to RockBlocks can actually be requested of the core team. When that's done, those are built directly into core, and guess who maintains them going forward? Not your church. So that's the best way to go. So we've clarified that misunderstanding and worked with many churches in the past year to provide directly in core the enhancements that they were relying on from those cloned blocks, allowing them to move their Rock instance back to a Core state for easy updates in the future. And if this is something that you would like to do, we have made it a little bit simpler for you as well. There are two ways to present these to CORE, and it's based on whether you want to rely on community priority or on your priority at an escalated rate. So we have created an ideas and changes page, and that will allow you to either put an idea in for the community to up vote to then be included in core. Or if it's more urgent for you and more important and you'd like to fund a project, you can also do that in that request directly on that page. Alright. Our team's been very busy in the last twelve months since we met together, but we have so much more to talk about going forward. Please join me in welcoming John back to the stage to talk about where we're going next. Thanks Emily. I'm here to talk to you about where we're going forward into version 17. 17 is going be an exciting release and has a ton of new features. The first feature I want to talk about is adaptive messaging. We know personalization is a critical feature inside of your digital platforms and Rock really excels at personalization. But we want to make that even more powerful and simple. So what adaptive messaging allows you to do is it allows you to take maybe a point that you want to get across to folks. Maybe for instance you want to do something about giving. You want to put a message out about giving, but you want that message to be tailored and personalized to each person coming into your mobile app or your website. So what you can do is you can go ahead and say, I want to create a message about giving and then provide several different adaptations of that message for different segments. So segments are a feature within Rock where you can put filters and classifications onto people that will be put them into a segment. Then you can message to each one of those segments with a different message. So for instance, you might say for your personalized giving message, if the person is not actively giving, you can give a message to that. A message about heart change and how when you trust God with your finances, it deepens that trust that you have in the Lord. Or maybe they are actively giving, but you want, but they don't have a scheduled gift. You can encourage automating that and making that a regular part of their giving. Or maybe they're giving at a very small amount and you can encourage them to trust God with their first fruits, their first ten percent. Or you can just provide a default message. Adaptive messages allow you to do something that you can do today, but it will be much more powerful and simpler. So that's the first feature. The next feature I want to talk about is the communication wizard. We know the communication tools in Rock are critical to the function of your church. And we've worked hard to provide some really great tools. The communication wizard is a tool that already exists. But we want to reimagine what that tool can be. And especially around the user experience. So again, this tool is like a drag drop interface where you can create rich email communications. And we want to make that much, much simpler and smoother, On par with a lot of the tools that are out there in the secular space, but that don't integrate into your database. One of the concepts we want to do for this is to provide this concept of a templated row. So you can create these row templates and you can drag it in and then personalize that content in those rows for your communication. The hardest part about this feature is how do we integrate this feature with the one I just talked about, which is the personalization segments and the adaptive messaging. Getting these two features to work just right is what we're really struggling with to make it right out of the box. And so that's after the conference, this is going be our primary focus, is just finalizing the design of this communication wizard. Now there's lots of ways to send communications within Rock. In fact, sometimes it can even be a little hard to talk about because there's so many different tools. The communication wizard is one of the primary ones. But another block that's very often used is the communication entry block. Now this is used by not only staff but a lot of your lay leaders to send emails and other types of communications. This block has been totally reimagined and polished. We're really proud of it. It just was finished actually last week. And we're excited to get it out into the pre alpha releases where you can start to play with it. So again, we've reimagined the user experience, really polished it up. And it also includes a brand new rich text editor inside of Rock. Trying to make HTML easy to write through rich text editors is really, really difficult, especially when it comes to emails. So we've thrown away the SumnerNotes editor and we have implemented TinyMCE, which is a really, really first class environment for creating rich text. And so we're really excited about getting that out. Not only is it easier, but it also is much more capable in terms of copying from Word into your emails. Still don't recommend that. But when you need to do simple things, it works really, really well. This block is not only good for emails though, it also is really great for SMS. Now SMS typically, you're not sending rich text in SMS because those are just text messages. However, we have created and embedded an emoji picker. So when you want to add the emojis to your text message, no longer do you have to rely on the operating system to do that picking of the emojis. You can just kind of pick from right in there. This block also does push notifications and we've really polished that out. And that's why this block is so pivotal to the communication process. It's such a rich and powerful block. And we're really happy to get this out to you and you guys can start playing with it in pre alpha in the next few weeks. So that's what the push notifications will look like. The next feature is one that we have not talked about very much, except for a few select churches. A few churches, Christ Fellowship and Church of the Highlands came to us and said, hey, we love all the things we can do in Rock, there's one thing that we want to add to Rock, something big. In fact, it's probably the biggest feature we've added to Rock since its initial release, and that's a learning management system. Yeah. Now this isn't just a small learning management system, it's a quite capable learning management system. In fact, I would actually say it's two learning management systems. We call them different program types within the feature. The first program type that you can do is an on demand program type. This is the learning management system I think most of you guys are going to use. You can set up a program that might be something like, I want to help people understand how to be a volunteer. Here's all the volunteer training. And they can go through a series of activities to accomplish that. Or maybe it's a spiritual content that you want them to walk through and understand, maybe a deeper understanding of the Bible. Again, can have them go through activities and complete that. The second type is what we call an academic calendar. You can almost run a small university using this feature because it has things like semesters, courses, classes, instructors, students, and all kinds of different ways to track their progress through a whole academic courseware. For those of you who have residency programs or similar programs like that, you'll find this feature very, very capable. But everybody will be able to use and get value out of the on demand program type. Let me just give you a taste of what it looks like. It's nearly complete. We just have a little bit of fit and finish to do. And we'll get it into pre alpha in the next couple months. So here we're looking at a screenshot of what one of your members or attendees would see as they're using one of these on demand classes. On the left you'll see a series of activities that they need to go through one after another. And on the right hand side we're actually showing you the content for one of those activities. This activity type is one in which they must watch a video till completion. They can't move on until they finish watching the video. In this case, maybe after watching the video, they need to take a quick assessment. And so you can actually build out a quick little test for them to take. These tests can be auto graded if they're true, false or multiple choice. Or if they're a short answer, the instructor can come back later and grade that. These are just two of the activity types. We're going to ship with many more. And it's like everything in rock. In the future, we can plug in different other types of activities as you guys give us feedback and what you need. We're really excited about this feature. We really feel like it's going to fill a big need for many of the churches. And also too, I think it's going to save churches that have a learning management system a ton of money. These learning management systems are not cheap. And when we can build it into Rock, not only are you going to get a great feature, you're going to save money, but you're also going to have access to all of that data that's in Rock in your learning management system. And your learning management system is going be saving all that data back into Rock so that your other personalization and website capabilities are going to be able to access that data. We really feel like it's going to be a huge feature for you guys. Another feature we're working on, this one's much smaller, but we really do feel like it's impactful enough to talk about, is a redesign of the dynamic data block. This is a block that many of you who write SQL use quite bit. And you see what you do is you take your SQL statement, you paste it in this block and it just makes a really nice looking grid. So what we've done is we've used the next generation grid. This grid is really powerful. It allows you to do all kinds of filtering and sorting, just in a really smooth experience. So we're excited to get this out to you. We still have a little bit of fit and finish to do on that. It is in pre alpha and we'd love to get some feedback. We've already gotten some feedback on that to date. Okay. The next feature I want to talk about is another one that we really haven't mentioned yet. And you're in the right place because you're going to be able to deep dive into these features later in different sessions throughout the conference. And that is around generosity reports. As we were preparing for the conference, we wanted to make the audience for this conference a little bit wider. We wanted to make sure that other roles within the church could get a lot of value out of this conference. And so in talking with Life Church and Rodney Ross about coming and having him present his experiences and his knowledge at the conference, he pointed out a couple of generosity reports that they use. These generosity reports are amazing. And what's amazing about it, again, is the spirit of which we look at this type of data. It's not about the money. It's about the heart change. It's about encouraging people to trust in the Lord with their finances. Because if you can trust the Lord with your finances and time, we know that that is a deep relationship that you have. So let me just give you a quick peek at some of these reports. I'm not going to really try to explain them. We don't have time. And there's a session that Rodney will be going into, not only to show you the reports, but more importantly to talk about the strategy behind these reports, and how you can coach and communicate people through that. It's really invaluable content. The first one has to do with volunteer analysis. So it shows the giving patterns of your volunteers and then you can help coach them through that. I'm not even going try to go into all the strategy with that. Rodney can cover that in his breakout and I can't do it justice. The next report is a tithing overview. Now tithing is really hard to look at at a micro level, but this report is actually at a macro level. We've gone out to the census data and we've brought in a lot of that census data right into your Rock instance. That was not easy. The census data is free, but it's not easy to download or figure out. But we've done that work for you. We've put it into your Rock instance. This allows you to give you a macro look at giving by campus. Again here the purpose is to help your campuses coach on generosity. And it's all about life change. So if you're interested in those, I'd highly recommend you go to Rodney's Breakout where he'll unpack these reports in detail. Another feature that might seem small to you, but boy, is it nice, is the new settings menu. So if you go under admin tools, we've always had a category list of different types of settings. You go into that one of those items and you see even more settings. I feel like I know Rock pretty well, but I even sometimes have trouble remembering which category a certain setting is in, if I'm being honest. And we wanted to fix that. We've added so many more settings since version one. So what we've done is we've reimagined this list and we now have brought up some of the digital platform tools that didn't exist back in Rock version one, but are so critical now to what we're doing. Rock is no longer just a church management system. I feel like we lead in that area and we excel in the area of church management. But ever since probably version two or three, we've really been focusing on digital publishing. And we really feel like that is the area that Rock can really change the world. And so we've moved a lot of those digital publishing tools up into this menu. We've also taken all the settings and we've added them to a single page. And you might think, woah, that's even going be harder to find. Except for the advanced search at the top. All you do is type a few letters and boom, it auto filters. Yeah. I can tell you firsthand this feature is amazing because we run the latest version of Rock in our internal instances. Every two weeks we deploy the latest to our instances. So we're already using this. Unfortunately, I have to go into a lot of your systems as I help you guys. And I'm like, oh, back to this. So you know a feature is great when you have to go back to another version and you're like, oh, is how do how do I work like this? I can't wait for you guys to have it because I want to not have to use it on your system. I'm selfish. Okay. Let's talk about another feature that has been something on my heart from almost the beginning of Rock, and that's pure networks. I hope all of you have spent a lot of time on the person profile page. That's probably the most popular page in Rock. You guys feel like you know that page pretty well? Yeah? Let me ask you a question. What does the peer network block here do? Yeah. Absolutely nothing is the answer. Yeah. Why? Well, in version one, we wanted to put this in but we just never got to it. We had to like sometimes you just got to ship the product and we just kind of left it there because we're like, version two, we're coming back. We'll be the first thing we do. Well, you guys started using Rock and you started giving us your to do list and we've been focusing on that. But we've always had this in the back of our minds of what we wanted it to do. I'm surprised how many people have never really asked why this is there. I'm kind of glad you didn't ask though. So no longer does it look like this, in version 17 it looks like that. So what we're doing is we're going into the gold mine of your rock data and we're finding relationships, patterns that are already there. And we're providing you with a lot of switches and dials to tell us about those relationships, to allow us to measure them. For instance, you can go into a group type, maybe your serving group type, and you can say, hey, the people in these serving groups, they really know each other. They work shoulder to shoulder with each other and man, the relationship is strong. And over time, it actually even gets stronger. So just being in one of those groups will build the relationship and give it a relationship score. As they continue to be in groups of that type, it will deepen that relationship with each of the individuals in that relationship. We also know that when you leave a group, it's not often that that person just becomes dead to you, right? You still have a relationship. You would still say hi to them, of course. So when you leave the group, it's not that the relationship just immediately goes away, there's a parameter where you can actually start to decrement that relationship and you can smooth it out over time. Maybe it takes two years and then maybe we don't want to track the relationship. So we give you a lot of dials into how to tell us and map these relationships and there's lots of different overrides and it can basically create this list. Now for many of your volunteers, this list will be quite long. On the person profile page, we'll only show you the top 20. However, at the top of the block, can click to go into a further page which will show you all of their relationships. Not only that, we will show you a visual map of those relationships. So you can zoom in and out on this, you can roll over it and see all kinds of details. This is an amazing tool because these relationships exist in the physical world. We've just never been able to visualize them. This is important data because as people are connecting with folks, that tells you something about them. But even more importantly, the people who are not connecting or the people who are pulling away from relationships. This gives us the ability to step in and take action. This also will lead us to a whole new area that we can work on which is called social network analysis. Now when I say social network, I don't mean Twitter, Facebook, X, all that. What I mean is it's a different type of statistics. There's a whole world of statistics called social network analysis. And we can start to build metrics using this. Now initially out of the box, want to give you the tool sets and the visuals that I just showed you. But just know, as we continue on in the product development of Rock, we want to continue to build out these metrics for you. These metrics can be at the individual level, where we can measure the number of connections a person has and the trends of those connections. Imagine if you could easily see that these people are disconnecting rapidly. You can step in and take action. Or maybe that you can see that this person has no connections. You'll be able to go into your database and say, show me all the people who have no connections. And now you can strategically try to put them into connection. On top of that, we can have organizational measures and we can start to look for a degree of connectedness within your organizations. And once you can measure something, you can then put plans to move the needle. Sometimes it's hard to put a plan to move the needle if you can't really see. It's almost like driving your car and you can't see out the windshield, or having no visibility to your dashboard inside your car. We want to be able to provide those metrics for you. We can also see trends. Are people connecting more or less within your organization? So we're really excited about this feature and how we'll be able to unlock a whole new world for us, is social network analysis. That's v17 in a nutshell. And your question now might be, where are we in the development phase of that? Well we've been working really hard on it, on top of all the things that Emily mentioned, on top of all the quality that we've been putting into it and decreasing issues. So it's taken us a little bit longer than we had hoped. Here's a completion graph roughly of where we are. I would say that the last thing that we need to work on is just the communication wizard. That's the last main feature. We had to complete that and then we have to finish out a lot of fit and finish. But we hope to have this done probably nearly, hopefully by the end of the year, and then probably start alpha and beta testing early next year. So that's v 17. But we have a lot more to share. The next thing we want to talk about is our next generation platform. And you might be new to Rock and you might be thinking, what is next generation? Well, realize when we write a product like Rock, we have to build it on top of a technology platform. The technology platform we've chosen to write on top of is Microsoft.net. Every ten to fifteen years, these technology platforms get major updates. And then it's up to us to rewrite our platform to support the next generation platform that we are standing on top of. And that's what we've been doing for the last three to four years. This is a lot of work. We're choosing at this point not only to put the work in and put the effort in to upgrade, but to also do a lot of fit and finish around rock, to take the opportunity to really have a whole next generation of rock as we do this. We're also trying to do this in a way that's going to be low, low impact to you guys. Hopefully this is going to be a transparent update and we're doing it in pieces. You already have a lot of it, honestly, in your systems. Because we know implementations take a long time and cost a lot of money, and we don't want to put you through that again. So let's talk about some of the new things in next gen. Of course we need check-in. Check-in is the one feature that every church uses. It's often the first feature you use too, so it's really, really important. So when we were looking at check-in, we tried to make a few commitments as we do this. The primary commitment is we don't want to take away features that you're using. There's a few teeny tiny micro features we might remove, but we've done a lot of talking and surveying with the community to make sure those features are in use. So the first commitment was that we wanted to make sure we didn't take anything away. Another commitment we made was we're not going to add any features. We really just need to get this done. That's a lot of work. So we're not going to really add a lot of features. That was another commitment we made. The third and final commitment was that we wanted to make it much faster. Yeah. We wanted to make it twice as fast. That's really, really hard to do with technology. We did miss that mark just a little bit. It is actually 25 times faster. Yeah. This is a huge deal. This is a ton of work. I wish you could go into some of our meetings because we would be arguing over small, small units of time. A small unit in time for programmers is usually a millisecond. There's a thousand milliseconds in a second. But we were arguing and fighting over microseconds. We were not wanting to give up microseconds, and that's what led to this 25 times. And that's a very conservative number. It's probably much faster than that. So what does that mean? It means your check-in is going to be faster. The user experience will be faster. But more importantly, the impact to your servers is going be drastically reduced. Which means that you can use that performance for other things. Or you can trade that performance back in for some cost savings. I would say that most ROC servers I see are under resourced. So I would probably say your server could probably make do with those extra resources. So let's take a look at the user experience. We've really polished this up and smoothed it out. For those of you who did not do the express check-in at the conference, you were actually using the next gen check-in. So wow, it's almost done. We didn't change it in a way that would confuse your attendees. We just polished it, made it much more smoother and easier to theme. One of the commitments I told you about was speed and we kind of missed the mark there. We also kind of missed the mark a little bit on adding features because we added a few features. The first feature is what we call check-in ads. So this allows you to place ads and rotate ads on your welcome screen. A lot of times your welcome screens are just sitting there. Well, we might as well put them to use. If you used the new check-in instead of the express check-in at the conference, you saw some of those ads. You saw an ad for the promo shop and for some other things. These are all just a content channel. So you just go in the content channel, add in your graphics, add in some information, and boom, it just goes right into your check-in environment. The other feature is more around configuration. Check-in is not always the easiest feature to implement, is it? What's the hardest thing about implementing for check-in and configuring for check-in? Labels? Does anybody love ZPL? Does anybody feel like, is this a second language? Yeah, I only know one person who speaks ZPL as a second language. And so we said, let's reimagine what a label experience could be like. And so I want to introduce you to the label designer. Yeah. You're watching a label being created with with the real software as we speak. So we're creating a very basic label here, just dragging fields in. Almost all of it is drag and drop. You can get access to different merge fields within your check-in data, and you're just dragging them out. Graphics? Piece of cake. A lot of people use the out of the box labels because they don't have the time or can't put the effort in to redesign them. No longer. Just drag your graphics out, grab your text, drag it out. It's powerful experience. So much so that we really feel like you're probably going to go a little overboard on label creation. We know you guys because we would do the same thing. Now when you create labels now, because we know that, we're going to allow you to put them in categories Cause we know that that list of labels is going to get exponentially bigger. And we're basically just creating a whole new label for you. There's lots of conditionals here that you can do. So if you need that birthday cake, but you only want it to show when it's their birthday, no problem. You don't have to write any code, just drag it out and put the conditions right there. So features that the label designer includes are conditional fields. So again, that's putting criteria of when a field should be displayed or not displayed. You can have conditional labels. So maybe the whole label shouldn't be printed out unless certain conditions are met. This is great for using with streaks and achievements. So maybe the kid has attended 10 times in a row. Now they can get a coupon to go get an ice cream or a little treat. You can also do adaptive font sizes. So if you want to put a field out there but you're afraid that maybe the last name could be quite long, you can just adaptively resize the font size to make sure it fits. And you can still do a lot of the other advanced things like dynamic text. So if you still love your Lava, you can still bring your Lava skills into this. We're not trying to take away features, we are just trying to make it much, much easier. Speaking of labels, labels are great. And we've actually tried to innovate ourselves out of the need for labels, but we just feel like they are so important, not only to give the kid a name tag, but also for security. So we don't see that labels anytime soon will go away. But there's another problem with labels. It's hard to print to your local networks from your remote server. Most of your servers are in a cloud, but cloud servers have a hard time talking to your internal network because you have this thing in the middle called a firewall and it just blocks the server from having direct access to your network, which is a good thing. Some of you have put in complex rule sets to allow that kind of traffic to go through, but that's complex and often breaks. So our next feature that we want to talk about is what we call Cloud Print. This is a small device that you can put on your network and it keeps a persistent conversation and channel open to the server and it's going to route all those labels right to the printers that are needed. You use that again at check-in. If you use the express check-in, you just tap that little NFC token and then the label just print. Well you might have wondered, how did the label just print? Your server is in the cloud, how did it print to that printer? There's no kiosk there. That's because we were using Cloud Print. And so you can install this little bit of software on several different computers so you can have redundancy. We have redundancy built in, so if one of these go down, the next one will pop in and start handling printing. And you can print right to your labels. This is going to allow some really great check-in experiences where you don't even need a kiosk. You can simply put a printer in every single room and now your server can directly print to that. I feel like that's going be a really powerful new tool for check-in. Yeah, you can clap. Let's talk about some other next gen updates. We'll just go real quick. Last year we talked about the improvements in the grid and how much more powerful it has with capabilities like sorting and filtering. We've done a lot of implementation of that grid into the core of ROC. And so the next few versions you're going start to see a lot of the grids change to this new grid. We've also rewritten all, 100% of all of our controls into the next gen platform. We had over 180 controls that we had to rewrite. You might be saying, well what's a control? Anytime you have a picker, like a person picker, a page picker, a checkbox picker, those are controls. We have 180 of those controls. Most products in our space have controls too. Some of them have like eight to 10 control types to pick from. We have 180. That took a lot of time to rewrite all those, but it's 100% done. Last year we also talked about the API v two. That's been developed. We haven't pushed it in to the developed branch yet, but it is written and ready. And we figured out our plug in pattern. What makes Rock unique is its extensibility. One of the key extensible technologies is our plug ins. That allows us to not have to do all things for all people. We can allow other people to come and put plug ins into Rock to allow new features to be implemented. Those patterns to allow that kind of programming are very, very difficult. We've recreated the pattern for that inside the next generation platform. We'll be talking a little bit about that in some of the breakouts in the next two days. We're not going to go super deep. We want to wait another six months because we want to shake out this pattern. We want to get a few plug ins working to make sure that we've removed any trip hazards. But we're very confident and we're very proud of what this new plug in architecture will allow. It will make making some very advanced plug ins much easier. So where are we with the next gen project? Kind of feel like we're about there. It's a little fuzzy where it is. But I'd say it's a little bit more than 50%. The good news is we've got a lot of the hard stuff done. We've really worked on the hard stuff first. And at this point the rest is a lot of just implementation of the hard work that we've done and rewriting every single block within Rock. We have hundreds and hundreds of blocks that need to be rewritten. The good news again, we've rewritten a lot of the hardest blocks already. So that's the next gen platform. We couldn't be at a tech conference without talking about AI, right? AI as an industry is just moving at warp speed. Already today, Grok two was announced, and it's just every time you look, there's just a new technology. And AI is being put into so many different types of areas. Did those AI songs kind of blow you away this morning? Like that was all generated with AI. We gave it using other AI, we created lyrics and we polished those lyrics. We just put it into an AI and it wrote that whole song. It blows my mind what it can do. So let's talk a little bit about AI. The first thing we've done is we finalized how we're going to support AI within Rock, what we call the provider framework. Of course we're not writing our own models. That would be crazy. There's so many models out there and it takes billions of dollars to train these models. But how are we going to leverage these models that are out there? Well like everything in Rock, we want to be extensible. We don't want to pigeonhole us to just one provider. Out of the box we will ship with provider, and we do ship with a provider for OpenAI. We feel like they are market leader. We should support them. But we're also going to allow plug ins to write and support other providers. So again, out of the box we'll do OpenAI, but we know plug ins are already being developed for Anthropic and Google Gemini. So this will allow you to pick the model that you want or to have multiple models. You could have all these models running inside of Rock and you can tailor your usage of them. The models here are kind of the proprietary models. These are the hosted AI platforms that you have to go get an API key for and you send your data to them. And then they process it and send it back. The licensing on this and the legality of this is pretty good on privacy. They say they're not going to use your data for anything else. And we feel like you could probably trust this at this point. But if that's not good enough for you, you can also today with this provider model bring your own self hosted models. So you could use Olama to have a completely self hosted AI experience if you'd like. So how are we going to use these AI models? The first thing we're going to do is prayer automation. This is a feature that we actually have completed and will be in version 17. So when someone enters a prayer request, you can optionally send this through AI to auto categorize it for you, determine the sentiment of the emotions inside that prayer request for reporting, to remove names, either first name and or their last name. Sometimes from a privacy perspective, you want to make these prayer requests public and you don't want that content in there. You can have AI take it out for you. It's also very common that as people give you a prayer request, they're not really worrying about the formatting as they're typing it in. At the same time, you want to share these prayer requests publicly and you want them to look kind of professional. It's a little hard to read rough formatting. So the AI can just simply reformat it, capitalize when appropriate, put periods where they're needed, and adjust your casing. Moderation is also important. What if someone were to put something about a self harm inside of a prayer request? AI is very good at detecting that and then can alert you through different workflows that a trigger was caused. But also they can help us determine if the prayer request is appropriate for the public. We see prayer requests as a critical part of your digital strategy. Prayer was added into Rock as a feature in version one, but we really haven't added a lot of features around prayer since then. There's been a couple, but not a lot. We want to change that. We really feel like from a digital strategy, getting people to pray for each other is critically important, not only for their individual spiritual growth, but also for building community. The problem is it's also an administrative burden. The AI, in a lot of ways, can reduce that burden for us by determining if a prayer request should be available for public consumption. And flag it if it's not. And then a human can step in and figure out what to do. So this prayer automation is done and will be in version 17. We're really excited about it. The next way that we can use AI is for auto note approval. Did you know that notes could be approved inside of Rock? I kind of doubt it because we never put UI for it. There's always the support for that, but we never fully implemented it in the UI. And why did we do that? Because we felt like no one's ever going to go through every single note and determine whether it should be approved or not. That's just too much administration. Well now AI can come and do all of that work for us. So as you create note types, you can provide guidance on what types of notes would be appropriate and what types of notes would be considered inappropriate for the use case. And then it can auto approve it for you. Now how would you use this? Well it goes back to prayer. Because in prayers, comments on prayers are just notes. Now when you're thinking about prayers as building community, that's one thing when you're praying for an individual request. You're kind of building community there. They're like, oh yeah, know them. But you could really build a rich community if people can go back and forth and converse about a specific prayer request. Now they're talking to each other back and forth. The problem is that's always been an administrative nightmare. You're too slow to approve them. It's too much of a burden to approve them. But now you can have AI actually look at those comments and determine if they're shareable or not. And so that's why we've added it to notes. But it can be used in so many other different use cases. So our initial use case is to auto approve prayer comments. You can also do AI completions. So this allows you to configure every time an entity is saved. So an entity would be like a person, a group, pretty much anything in Rock, any time it's saved, you can run a completion on it. A completion is just a fancy term for just a set of instructions that you tell AI to do. So you can wire up a completion that says, maybe every time I save an event, please go create 12 sample tweets for that. Or six sample Facebook posts. And every time you save the event, it will go out there, run that and provide it for you in the user interface. So that's going to provide a lot of information for us and a lot of automation for us. The next feature is really about, I really want to talk about a way that we're doing some research and trying to figure out what the best usage is. And that's around using AI for insights and recommendations. There's a tendency right now in AI just to say, well outsource my whole job to it, just send all the data to it and just have it tell me what I should do. That doesn't work very well. It's slow. And oftentimes we know better exactly what we want to show. So take for instance, if we took all of Ted Decker's information, just pushed it into AI and said, tell me what I should do with Ted. Well we know that certain steps are very important to us like baptism, being in a group. That's best left for badges where we can build UIs that really show that really well. Instead of sending all that data, waiting maybe thirty to forty seconds and having it come back, we need to put that into the UI. We don't want to be lazy. At the same time, AI is critically important for doing things like, hey, here's a whole bunch of prayer requests from Ted. Tell me what I should know about that. We can't build logic. There's only so many if statements you can write to try determine and parse all that data. And that's what large language models are really great for. Looking at this unstructured text and telling us insight from that. Same thing with notes. Ted might have a whole bunch of notes on his record and AI can tell us what's unique or important inside those notes. So we're trying to do some research and put some effort into just finding out the practical and the right ways to AI to find insights and recommendations. We think it will be something like you guys will be able to configure what attributes and what parts of a person that you want to hand to AI. And when you land on a person profile page, there will be a button there that says ask for insights. And then it will send the data to AI along with some parameters about your church and what's important from a steps perspective for your church. And then it can provide back some results. So don't look for this necessarily in version 17. I just wanted to announce and talk about where we see AI going in that direction. In the same vein, we want to add something called semantic search over time. So you can do a lot of different types of searching within Rock, right? If you want to find Ted Decker, you can type Ted Decker, we'll find Ted Decker for you. We also have universal search, so we can search across lots of different types of data and we can bring back information about the query that you provided. In universal search though, you have to provide the right term. Semantic search actually uses the large language models of AI. You can put terms in, like maybe you were searching for something about the Bible. Well in universal search it will find all the references to the word Bible. In semantic search it will actually bring you back other results that maybe uses words similar to the Bible like scripture. Now in the universal search, scripture and Bible are completely different words. It doesn't know anything about the relationship between those two words. But using AI and large language models, it actually knows that those words, while vastly different in spelling, mean the same thing in a Christian context. So we want to provide the semantic search. Again this is something we're researching, don't look for it in version 17. But just know that this is an area that we're looking into. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about Rock Mobile. Rock Mobile is a huge platform for us. It really is unlocking a lot of capabilities within the product set. The first thing we want to announce is MAUI. MAUI is officially released as of today. Now you might be wondering what's this Maui thing you talk of? It's the same thing as the next gen framework. Maui was the mobile platform that we wrote on top of, or it's the new platform that we're writing on top of. Microsoft moved the cheese on us a little bit too, used to use something called Xamarin Forms and they upgraded it to Maui. And so we've done all that work to make sure all of our development now works in Maui. But while we're at it, we said, well, let's do a little bit more. We want to do more than just supporting Maui as a new technical platform. We actually did a whole complete refresh of the UI. So your apps will look much nicer with little to no styling. Today, to get your apps to look nice, you had to do a lot of styling yourself. And there's a rich diversity of apps within the Rock mobile space and a lot of them look amazing. But it took a lot of time and effort to do that. We've simplified that. So now they'll come out of the box looking much nicer. We do feel though that it's important that our apps don't all look the same. So you still have the capability to change all the styling. We didn't take away any of the styling styling power. We just made it out of the box look much better. We also made light and dark mode just work out of the box without having to do anything. That was a lot of work before. You could support light and dark mode, but it was kind of on you. Now we've put that burden upon us and we've made it a lot easier to do. Again, you can change it all, but it comes out of the box supporting light and dark mode. You're going to want to hit the platform keynote to see this in person. Braden's going to show you before and after shots of some of the blocks. And it's pretty visually striking how much nicer the blocks look. We've also worked hard in partnership with lots of churches, Life Church being one of them, in terms of building staff apps. Now for many of you, your staff app can be the same app that you currently have for your members and attendees. But this allows your pastoral staff and your staff in general to just interact with the rock data that they normally would have to go into the web UI to use right directly in a native experience. So you can build out things like person profile pages. You can handle connections within your Rock mobile app. Do all kinds of crazy amazing stuff within your staff app. We've also had the ability to actually add a connection request using Rock mobile. Before you had to use the web for that, you could process a lot of the connections, but you couldn't add one. So that's been taken care of. I talk about how we have 180 controls in Rock. Well we've added another important control to Rock Mobile, that's a person picker. Now until the staff apps, that really wasn't the control you needed because you don't want your entire attendees to be able to search your database looking for all the people in your database. That would actually be a bad thing. But as you start using staff apps, becomes really important to be able to pick a person. Person picker would seem like a simple thing, but it actually is a very complex thing for us to write. But that's available now for your workflows in a lot of different areas within Rocket Mobile. We've also added page transitions. So as you go from page to page, you can have different animated transitions. It just adds an extra layer of user experience to your apps. Almost every one of your apps has some form of media, whether it be for sermons or for other videos that you're showing. The media player has been completely redesigned and just looks really nice. It's a first class experience with media. At the same time, we haven't removed any of its power because if you've been around Rock for a while, you know the power of media within Rock. We not only are playing those videos but we're pulling very complex analytics about those plays. And so you can do things like start watching a video on your Rock powered website and you can finish watching the video. It will take you right to where you left off in Rock Mobile. You can even go into the analytics and watch where that person played. You can see a heat map of that video and where are they watched, even where they backtracked and watched it several times. You can see all of that. And you still have all this capability right inside of Rock Mobile. We've also added support for Entra Single Sign On. And this is very helpful for staff apps because a lot of your staff are already using Entra, which is Microsoft's new term for Azure Active Directory. So if you haven't heard the Entra term and you have heard Azure Active Directory, same thing. So you can use Azure Active Directory now to log into your apps, which keeps your staff from having to have multiple passwords. We've also added a content channel view block to Rock. The content channel view block is a powerful block on the website. It allows you to take content from multiple different content channels and search it in a really polished user experience. We've added that same kind of capability to Rock Mobile. Let's talk about a few upcoming features. So everything I just talked about will be in the MAUI release that's available today. Let's talk about where we're going. One of the features that's in many Rock mobile apps, especially the ones for your members and attendees, is the ability to give. To date, you've had to do this using web views. You can either push out to a web view or you can embed your web view into your app as long as you follow a few guidance points from Apple and Google. That's great. And we continue to urge people to keep using those technologies. Those technologies are doing a good job. But we also wanted to support native giving right within your application. So this is native UI right inside of Rock. Now when it comes to giving, it's hard in Rock because you guys all want a lot of different features and have it work in a lot of different ways. And we've tried to support the mainline features that you guys want. So this block is actually, while it looks kind of simple, it can actually get kind of complex. And that's made it difficult. On top of that, making the difficultness even more of a challenge for us is all the security that has to go into providing financial transactions within a mobile app. Google and Apple make this really hard. And it's for good reason because we have to make sure that we reduce the fraud within our mobile spaces and to make sure that this is a highly secured environment. I mean this is money being transferred back and forth. A lot of this have saved cards and saved payment information. We have to make that very, very secure. And Apple and Google of course want that. So they make it very hard to write this kind of code. There's a lot of digital certificates that have to be flying back and forth. All the stuff that you don't want to have to worry about, and trust me, we don't want to have to worry about, but we do. We had to get that all figured out. So we were able to work together with the MyoEL engineering team to figure out how all this was going to work. And the good thing is that they're going to be able to support a lot of that capability in terms of managing the digital certificates and making sure that is all easy. And so it's been a real blessing to be able to work with that engineering team on this native giving experience. Another thing that's coming to Rock Mobile is mobile check-in. Hopefully a lot of you guys got to experience mobile check-in a bit with the check-in experience here at Rx. If you took the FastPass lane and went through the enhanced check-in, you got to use this new block. Now we do have mobile check-in today, but it's mainly Web based. This is a completely different, entirely different thing. This allows you to use native experiences to check-in using your mobile app. And you can use it in a lot of different ways. We see the vision though is using technologies like short codes, QR codes, or more importantly, NFC. And that's what you experience today. When you went and just touched that sticker, there's an NFC tag right inside of it. And so when your phone touches that tag, it can activate an activity or an action. In our case it was check-in. That little NFC token has a URL built into it. And when you touched it, it said hey, let me open up this URL which deep linked you right into your mobile app. And so imagine that as we use our devices to interact with our physical spaces, we can really drastically simplify check-in. And if you can start to piece together all the features that are needed to that, you can start to see the importance of what that cloud print technology was. That's what's going allow us to not even need these kiosks but still get our tags. Now we kind of took this to the next level too. A way that you can use short links with NFC. I mentioned that the NFC chip had like a URL in it. You can embed any URL in there you wanted. But if you embed a URL that's actually a short link, so you can go into Rock and you can say hey my website is mychurch.church. And then the short link would be a short bit of characters after that. So it might be like, give now. When I put that give now URL into the NFC chip, when I touch that chip it will go to Rock, say hey my short link is this, where should I be redirected to? Rock will tell you what URL to be redirected to and you're done. So it's a pretty nice synergy between these features. But that wasn't enough. Sometimes you want that short link to change and you don't want to go around all your tags. Like imagine having to go into your tags every day and change what short link they should go to. So we came up with this concept called scheduled short links. It's the same short link, but now you can provide different redirection targets based on the schedule. So in the morning maybe you touch the tag and you're doing a check-in. But then in the evening, you have a concert maybe going on and you want to use the same spaces. When you touch that same tag, it will let you into maybe a concert event or provide you a concert ticket. These schedules can be based on times of day, it can be based on different days of the week. You guys have used schedules before because we use them all over Rock. That same scheduling technology you can now apply to short codes and boom, you have different URLs based on the time. Short links also provide another capability which is analytics. Every time you use one of those short codes, you're getting information about its usage. The problem is that data is stored in Rock but it's a little hard to get unless you're willing to write some reports. So we changed that. Now within a short link you'll be able to see analytics about that short link usage and you'll be able to partition this by not only UTC codes that you might have put into your short link, but also by the scheduled partition of what you've configured. So you'll be able to see how your short links are being used. We feel like this is critical not only for check-in but for other experiences that you might be looking at, like your giving experiences. Some churches are going around putting NFC and QR codes on the back of all the chairs and now you can just tap to give. This capability not only helps us with check-in, but it also helps that with giving. And so you can now work with your giving partners. Some giving partners are getting really into this and are already ahead of the game in terms of NFC and they're talking with churches about how to integrate their platforms with NFC to do that. And we wanted to help provide some of the plumbing to do that so that we can keep that plumbing all within Rock and give you access to analytics and personalization all within Rock. So that is just a little bit about what our team has been working on. We've done a lot of other things that we probably couldn't fit into the keynote. Those are the highlights of the platform