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Newsletter #15 Having trouble viewing this newsletter? View it online |
Dear BVCMS Community,
This newsletter contains tips, information about new features, and announcments of upcoming events. See past newsletters.
User News & Announcements
This is where we keep users informed. Here are the latest news items and announcements from BVCMS.
We have added several new goodies relating to Contacts. There are new columns on the Contact Search page, so now you can see both the Contactors and the Contactees, as well as the Ministry, Reason, Type, and the Results for each Contact in your search.
In addition to the new columns on the search page, we added a new filter so you can search by Results in addition to the other options.
There is also a new report—the Contactor Summary Report—which is a nice tool for analyzing who is making Contacts. Read more about Contact Features.
Wow! Have we made this easy or what? We actually improved this incrementally, making it easier with each change. Take a look at the articles about Vote Links and Register Links and how easy it is to create them right there in your email.
Last month we improved how you create (add) new Organizations. We think this new method is smoother and easier for the user. Read more about Creating New Organizations.
You can now scan those Membership forms that your new members complete and then upload them to the person's people record. These are stored in your database and are accessed on the person's Membership Profile tab. Read more about how to use this new feature.
Admin Corner
New User Role and Organization Structure
One of the newest user roles - OrgLeadersOnly - is really cool in that it allows you to give more rights/privileges to your lay leaders, because you are limiting their access to only the organizations over which they are leaders. Along with that, we also have the ability to create Parent/Child relationships between Organizations, mainly in order to give a lay leader access to some specific Organizations in which he is not a leader. Read more about this role and these new types of Organizations.
You may have noticed that we are sending emails to you notifying you about emails that failed to be delivered. The only thing that has changed is that we are now notifying you of failed emails. This is been happening behind the scenes all along but you were not aware of it unless you had been contacted by one of your recipients wondering where their emails are.
These may appear to be a nuisance but they are actually there to let you know who is not receiving your message. We hope you are interested. There is lots to know about this subject. Read more to find out what these mean and what you can do about it.
Developer Notes
Last newsletter we were telling you about our pending move to a Web Farm structure. Well, we have completed that move and things are working quite nicely. Performance has been great. We have three web servers called bvcms1, bvcms2 and bvcms3 and one database server. At any given moment you may click one page which is served up by bvcms2, then next page might be served by bvcms3, etc. This way, we spread the workload across three different web servers.
One of the neat things about a Web Farm infrastructure is that we can publish changes during the middle of the day without skipping a beat. The way we are able to do this is that we can remove one web server from the load balancer at a time and publish to it while the other two servers continue working. What you may notice is that your browser waits a bit longer to load a page while we download any updated javascript files to your browser.
Take a look at the Task Manager's CPU graph for our four servers. Clockwise from top left are the three web servers and the database is on the bottom right. This snapshot was taken on a Sunday morning during Checkin. We have thousands of checkins occuring each Sunday so you can see they are pretty busy but still have plenty of room for growth.
We now have a complete API (application programming interface) for access to BVCMS from third party applications. If you are interested in using the BVCMS API, let us know and we'll help you get started. The documentation is built in to the Test harness which we can give you access to.
We are going to be at the Spring 2012 Church IT Rountable event in Dallas, April 18-20, at the Watermark Community Church. This is a national event of Church IT professionals and web developers. We are a sponsor and will have a booth there. If you are going, be sure to look us up.
Blessings,
David Carroll and Karen Worrell
Your BVCMS Team
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BVCMS is a an open source, web-based, ministry-focused, complete and affordable, church management system. Usage Defined Software, doing business as bvcms.com, provides hosting, services, support, conversions and and customizations for a fee.{track}