I've been the LAN Administrator at Brookside CRC for nineteen years. We use Microsoft Office 2003 with the Office 2007 Compatability Pack. We use QuickBooks for the church's financials, payroll, and accounts payable.
For anything else that could be considered a database function, I've put together an integrated system using Access. Since I work as a programmer in my regular job, this was a natural extension of my Brookside responsibilities and perhaps makes our situation a little unusual.
Member and visitor information, for both families and individuals, is central to the system and is available to be used throughout the system. That includes attendance for members and visitors, contributions, denominational reporting, telephone directories, photo directories, council reports, gift and service information, and separate Youth Ministries information. We can expand the functionality however we choose at any time. An example of this is an interface for the church administrator that supports the annual budget creation process.
Each staff member has an interface on their desktop that I call their "Data Mine". They can use it to extract information for themselves using Access's easy built-in filtering and sorting capabilities, eliminating the need for writing a formal report. If they want to spruce things up, they can bring their mined data over to Excel, and make their own "report" with titles, headers, footers, totals, or whatever they want. They always have the option of having me create a formal Access report for ongoing use as well.
We do have a large collection of formal reports available for regular use. The Access report writer allows quick creation of any report we might want to add to the permenant collection or any ad hoc reports that might be needed. Mailing labels are an example of a report that can be done either ad hoc or as a permenant report.
We've also created systems that are independant of membership data. A system for the pastor to keep a history of his sermons is a good example. It allows sermons to be classified by a series they belong to, the scripture passage, Heidelberg Lord's Day, and Belgic Confession, and the date. I mention this system to illustrate that with Access, you can create whatever you need for any purpose.
At Brookside CRC we use EasyWorship 2007. We probably should be looking at upgrading to the newest version. It certainly is not expensive to do so.
EasyWorship has served us well by providing a single control point for anything we want to project in front of a worship service. That includes song lyrics handled by EasyWorship's own tools, Powerpoints imported in and (let's not forget) videos or still photos. It is easy to use for our operators. One license covers use throughout the church.
Here's a related side topic to consider. There are two PCs in the church that need a higher degree of reliability than the others, that just need to keep working without interruption. Those are the one used as a file server and the one that runs EasyWorhip in worship services. If the file server goes down, staff can't work on their files. If the EasyWorship machine goes down, it becomes a disruption of a worship service.
To reduce the likelihood that either of those PCs goes down, I've done two things.
The first protects against hard drive failures. This is done by having a mirrored pair of hard drives (RAID 1) in each machine rather than the usual single hard drive. If one of the hard drives fails, the PC continues to run uninterrupted because the other hard drive continues to function.
The second protects against hardware failures of any other kind, such as a motherboard failure. To do this, I have those PCs serve as backups to each other. This is accomplished by housing each hard drive in a removeable "tray" that allows it to be removed quickly without opening up the computer case. If one of the two PCs fails for some other reason, such as a motherboard failure, the pair of hard drives in that PC could be pulled-out and popped into the other machine, which would boot right up and function as the machine that had the failure. To make this work best, the two machines should be "hardware identical" so that if the hard drives need to be moved between machines, the Windows installation on those hard drives will already have all device drivers in place for the hardware on the "new" machine.
I hope that discussion was not too far removed from the topic at hand. The connection is the machine that runs the presentation software and the need to have it run reliably in a worship service.
Posted in: What software works for tracking church membership information?
I've been the LAN Administrator at Brookside CRC for nineteen years. We use Microsoft Office 2003 with the Office 2007 Compatability Pack. We use QuickBooks for the church's financials, payroll, and accounts payable.
For anything else that could be considered a database function, I've put together an integrated system using Access. Since I work as a programmer in my regular job, this was a natural extension of my Brookside responsibilities and perhaps makes our situation a little unusual.
Member and visitor information, for both families and individuals, is central to the system and is available to be used throughout the system. That includes attendance for members and visitors, contributions, denominational reporting, telephone directories, photo directories, council reports, gift and service information, and separate Youth Ministries information. We can expand the functionality however we choose at any time. An example of this is an interface for the church administrator that supports the annual budget creation process.
Each staff member has an interface on their desktop that I call their "Data Mine". They can use it to extract information for themselves using Access's easy built-in filtering and sorting capabilities, eliminating the need for writing a formal report. If they want to spruce things up, they can bring their mined data over to Excel, and make their own "report" with titles, headers, footers, totals, or whatever they want. They always have the option of having me create a formal Access report for ongoing use as well.
We do have a large collection of formal reports available for regular use. The Access report writer allows quick creation of any report we might want to add to the permenant collection or any ad hoc reports that might be needed. Mailing labels are an example of a report that can be done either ad hoc or as a permenant report.
We've also created systems that are independant of membership data. A system for the pastor to keep a history of his sermons is a good example. It allows sermons to be classified by a series they belong to, the scripture passage, Heidelberg Lord's Day, and Belgic Confession, and the date. I mention this system to illustrate that with Access, you can create whatever you need for any purpose.
Posted in: What software does your church use for projecting songs, liturgy and/or notes?
At Brookside CRC we use EasyWorship 2007. We probably should be looking at upgrading to the newest version. It certainly is not expensive to do so.
EasyWorship has served us well by providing a single control point for anything we want to project in front of a worship service. That includes song lyrics handled by EasyWorship's own tools, Powerpoints imported in and (let's not forget) videos or still photos. It is easy to use for our operators. One license covers use throughout the church.
Here's a related side topic to consider. There are two PCs in the church that need a higher degree of reliability than the others, that just need to keep working without interruption. Those are the one used as a file server and the one that runs EasyWorhip in worship services. If the file server goes down, staff can't work on their files. If the EasyWorship machine goes down, it becomes a disruption of a worship service.
To reduce the likelihood that either of those PCs goes down, I've done two things.
The first protects against hard drive failures. This is done by having a mirrored pair of hard drives (RAID 1) in each machine rather than the usual single hard drive. If one of the hard drives fails, the PC continues to run uninterrupted because the other hard drive continues to function.
The second protects against hardware failures of any other kind, such as a motherboard failure. To do this, I have those PCs serve as backups to each other. This is accomplished by housing each hard drive in a removeable "tray" that allows it to be removed quickly without opening up the computer case. If one of the two PCs fails for some other reason, such as a motherboard failure, the pair of hard drives in that PC could be pulled-out and popped into the other machine, which would boot right up and function as the machine that had the failure. To make this work best, the two machines should be "hardware identical" so that if the hard drives need to be moved between machines, the Windows installation on those hard drives will already have all device drivers in place for the hardware on the "new" machine.
I hope that discussion was not too far removed from the topic at hand. The connection is the machine that runs the presentation software and the need to have it run reliably in a worship service.