Our Shelby system is down right now because of ongoing woes with SQL Server. When you are responsible for IT in a very large church that uses Shelby for every aspect of church operations, “Shelby down” is not a happy thing. This is an unplanned outage made necessary by the fact that every time we ran a bank reconcilliation this afternoon, it blew up SQL Server 2000 (errors in the log and the need to manually restart SQL Server every time).

In response, we’re moving our database to a new server running SQL Server 2005. This is something we’ve been working on for months. The final step before moving to 2005 was to install Shelby 5.6.2000, which we did earlier this week. (Since we’re down, we’re installing the 5.6.2009 brand new patch right now.)

We’re now 105 minutes into an unplanned 30 minute outage. Remind me again why I have made a 22 year career in IT???

I spent 75 minutes on the phone with Tony yesterday, which is great for me because I’m always smarter after I’ve talked with Tony than I was before. Perimeter is just ahead of us in the ChMS selection process. He has a deadline of this month to make a final decision. For us, our only looming deadline is to put in our budget request for 2007 this week. I met with our executive management on Monday. Based on that meeting, it seems very likely that our budget request for ChMS will be approved. If so, 2007 will be the year we make a change, but we still have a couple of months to decide what to do.

Here’s our short list:

MSCRM 3.0 plus add-ons from Microsoft CRM partners
Fellowship One
Shelby Arena
Build-our-own open source system in partnership with WEC

Interestingly, two of my finalists overlap with Tony’s three finalists.

Tony’s third finalist is Blackbaud. I’m intrigued by that and enjoyed the chance earlier this year to discuss it in detail with Shelley Hildebrand of Tony’s staff at Perimeter. Unfortunately, the cost of Blackbaud is up there near what it would cost to build our own, so that’s not a feasible option for us.

Also like Tony, I know there’s a chance our short list will get longer before it gets shorter. Did I mention this decision is risky and complicated?

Jason mentioned that Network World featured him extensively in an article on church IT. Jason also gave the reporter my name and I was quoted too (on pages 2 and 4). This is the first time I’ve been quoted in a national trade publication. Thankfully, I have Brian to keep me humble!

I had the privilege of spending the day Friday with Alfred Johnson, Steve Pruitt, and their teams at Shelby Systems. Frank Canady also joined us for lunch. We had deep discussions about the Church Management System (ChMS) market, and specifically the soon-to-be-released Arena ChMS.

I first met Alfred at the IT Roundtable. He arranged the day and introduced me to the senior management team of Shelby. Alfred, you are a gentleman and a great host. The warmth of your hospitality made my time there special.

Shelby has been around a long time and has been a leader in the ChMS market for many years. During my time there, I gained a lot of insight into Shelby’s history, how they see the marketplace, and their product plans going forward. Some of those things I was asked to keep to myself, but many of them are open and I will be commenting on them in the coming days.

We had a frank discussion about our concerns as a Shelby customer, and everyone was gracious enough to really listen and take my concerns seriously. At the same time, I was surprised to learn that my impressions of Shelby’s customer base and target market were incorrect in several respects. Like the Fellowship Tech team before them, they also indulged me an extensive discussion of strategic considerations without insisting on jumping right to a product demo. There will be plenty of time for that.

The Shelby senior management team is seasoned and humble. They have a good understanding of what the marketplace is asking of them. Regardless of whether we become an Arena customer, I’m glad to say I have new friends in Memphis who care about the local church as much as I do.

I will continue to post about my trip and my impressions as we make budget plans for 2007 over the next few weeks.

No, it’s not an obscure law firm. I’m referring to Jeff Hook and his team at Fellowship Technologies.

Today I flew to Dallas for a tour and discussions to help me decide whether Fellowship One will be our next church management system. Jeff, Jeff, Curtis, Curtis, and Scott were awesome hosts and I enjoyed my time with them very much. The team is impressive (even those whose names aren’t Jeff or Curtis!) and their passion for the local church came through loud and clear. I particularly appreciated the openness of our conversation. Church management system selection can be complex (it certainly is in our case) and the issues often can’t be articulated in bullet points or sound bites. So they indulged me by taking the time to fully air the issues and explore them from multiple angles. It definitely sharpened my thinking. I love serious, deep conversations with smart people.

Thanks again Jeff, Jeff, Curtis, Curtis, and Scott!

You’ve been warned. Thanks Jason!

Chuck posted back in August regarding the launch of our first satellite campus, Resurrection West (affectionately known as “Rez West”). The staff of Rez West includes a campus pastor, campus associate pastor, operations director, children’s director, music people, etc. – 7 or 8 people altogether. They have been officing in a temporary space on the central campus since June.

Meanwhile, our Facilities folks found some space for lease near the junior high school where Rez West worships. For the last couple of months they have been working on tenant finish to turn it into usable office space plus a large general purpose meeting room and a garage for the A/V equipment trailer. Last week, while the tenant finish was nearing completion, it was our turn to come in and start assembling the technology: phone system, voice mail, Internet connection, firewall, network switch, file and print server, printers, and computers.

Everything but the printers and computers are being installed into one cabinet. Here’s Ian terminating the voice station wires into the patch panel (the guy on the right is our new desktop support guy, Jeremy, who doesn’t even start until November 13 but came out to help):

Me with Ian and Jeremy:

Me testing the jacks by plugging in my laptop. (Meter? We don’t need no stinking meter!)

A big “thank you” to everyone who came to Church of the Resurrection for Leadership Institute and/or any of the other conferences we had going on last week. My friend Jim posted his final thoughts here.

A number of attendees at this year’s Leadership Institute blogged about their experiences. Here are all the posts I’ve found so far:

Jim Walton
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/04/leadership-institute-bound/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/05/leadership-institute-session-1/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/07/it-panel-discussion/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/08/leadership-institute-website-strategies/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/08/leadership-institute-web-empowering-your-church/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/08/wwtd/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/10/leadership-institute-emerging-colloquy/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2006/10/08/leadership-institute-continuing-the-discussion/

Jay Vorhees
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/08/29/im-going-to-kansas-city-kansas-city-here-i-come/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/03/kansas-city-day-1/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/06/umerging-day-1/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/06/the-case-for-the-mainline-church-adam-hamilton/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/06/umerging-panel-discussion-with-bishop-jones-schnase/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/06/john-wesley-and-the-emerging-church-hal-knight/
http://onlywonder.com/wordpress/index.php/2006/10/06/airport-thoughts/

Jonathon Norman
http://stphransus.blogspot.com/2006/10/pilgrimage-of-ill-repute.html
http://stphransus.blogspot.com/2006/10/two-methodists-and-saint-walk-into-bar.html
http://stphransus.blogspot.com/2006/10/umerging-are-we-there-yet.html
http://stphransus.blogspot.com/2006/10/thoughts.html
http://stphransus.blogspot.com/2006/10/bishop-qa-q1-and-bishop-schnase.html

Steven Fife
http://revfife.blogspot.com/2006/09/looking-ahead.html
http://revfife.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-conversation-at-wonder.html
http://revfife.blogspot.com/2006/10/narthexes-have-changed-little-bit.html
http://revfife.blogspot.com/2006/10/sitting-in-basement.html
http://revfife.blogspot.com/2006/10/flickr-photo-blog-of-emerging-colloquy.html

Gavin Richardson
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/blogging_ummmer.html
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/umerging_pilgri.html
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/cor_youth_room_.html
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/umerging_pilgri_1.html
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/umerging_the_vo.html
http://www.gavoweb.com/hit_the_back_button_to_mo/2006/10/a_2nd_chance_bl.html

Jason Woolever
http://post-methodist.blogspot.com/2006/10/update-from-cor.html
http://post-methodist.blogspot.com/2006/10/secret-to-dan-kimballs-hair.html
http://post-methodist.blogspot.com/2006/10/highlights-of-today-at-cor.html
http://post-methodist.blogspot.com/2006/10/experiencing-brian-mclaren-at.html

Susan Cox Johnson
http://aunitedmethodistemerging.blogspot.com/2006/10/im-back.html

Joel Betow
http://theconnexion.net/wp/?p=2466

Gordon Pruitt
http://biblemoth.blogspot.com/2006/10/highlights-from-my-trip-to-kansas-city.html

Paul Kethley
http://tpaulkethley.blogspot.com/2006/10/hello-friendsi-am-sendihng-this.html

Josh Tinley
http://scrambies.blogspot.com/2006/10/church-of-resurrection.html
http://scrambies.blogspot.com/2006/10/brian-mclaren-at-cor.html

Abi
http://faithrenaissance.blogspot.com/2006/10/doing-vs-being.html

http://www.corruptgeneration.com/?p=175

If you have spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve the Church Management System (ChMS) function in your church, you probably have reservations about buying one of the existing ChMS products (“buy it”) but at the same time realize you can’t afford to build your own system (“build it”). I want a third alternative: “integrate it.”

With the right technical and non-technical factors in place, it should be possible for your team to integrate technology from multiple commercial and open source providers, along with in-house developed modules, to achieve the range and degree of automation that makes sense for your unique ministry.

In my last post, I listed three technical factors that would need to be in place in order for an open ChMS marketplace to come into existence:

1. A common schema for data exchange. (The best technology for this right now is XML. See ebXML for an example.)

2. An architecture for generating and handling data change events (such as a Web Services API).

3. An architecture for single sign-on.

This list comes out of our experience integrating multiple web applications that weren’t designed to work together. Perhaps there are one or two additional technical requirements I haven’t thought of yet. This brings me to the second part of my question …

What non-technical (business) factors would need to be in place to foster development of an open ChMS marketplace?

I’d like to suggest we work toward the following:

1. Backing of a few influential churches and/or para-church organizations plus one or more open source or commercial ChMS vendors.

2. A funded standards organization.

3. A Kingdom-minded spirit of unity and cooperation across denominational and geographical boundaries as well as among both non-profit and for-profit organizations.

I’ve said before that we have differing styles, mission fields, and theological points of view, but we have one Lord and we proclaim one gospel. We’re all on the same team. Could we begin to move together in a direction that honors God and helps the Church pursue the Great Commission?

I look forward to your comments.