Well, it has been a busy 2008 for us so far at Ministry Centered technologies. We were planning on getting many new features to you sometime in the first half of January, but as many of you know, the company that housed our servers had some major problems and went down. Consequently, we expedited our move to a new server facility and we have been extremely happy with our new server facility and have been able to increase both the speed and reliability of Planning Center as a result.

Now that everything is better than ever, we were able to squeeze in a couple of things that originally wouldn't have made it into this release. There are some great new features that many of you have been requesting, and we are excited about how they will hopefully increase your productivity all the while making Planning Center easier and more fun to use. Without any further ado, here is a list of the most major and notable improvements and fixes.

People

  • Add pictures to user accounts. Picture thumbnails also appear when adding people to your plan.

  • New Permission: Schedule Editor.

  • Schedule Editors can create, edit & email people. They can schedule people from Plans & the Matrix and can create, edit & delete block-out dates for other people. They can only delete people they have created.

  • Respond Later: When responding to a scheduling request email with multiple requests, in addition to accept and decline for each request, there is now a new button, Respond Later. This allows your people to respond to some requests even if they don't know about all of them.

  • Scheduling Conflict Improvements:

    • Planning Center now finds scheduling conflicts for people in rehearsal times and plan times.
    • When dragging and dropping people in the Matrix, a conflict box will popup if there are plan or rehearsal time conflicts.
    • When adding a group of people to a plan, or browsing people when scheduling, conflicting times are easily viewable.

Plans

  • Consolidated add buttons. To clean up plan view, the add song and add header buttons now only appear when you hover over add an item.

  • Unified Add Item box. There is now a single, unified box for adding items, headers & songs. This allows you to convert an item to a song and retain all the other attributes.

  • New Rehearse button. The mp3 player and download PDFs buttons are now visible only when you hover over the new Rehearse button.

  • Attachments you add at the bottom of your ministry on the main plans page will now appear in the Attachments box for all the plans in that ministry.

  • When changing a song key or arrangement in plan view, you no longer need to refresh to see the changes.

  • Shortcut keys have been simplified. You no longer need to push ctrl & alt. Just push the letter:

    • I - add item
    • S - add song
    • H - add header
    • T - add time
    • P - schedule person
    • N - add note
    • E - email these people

Matrix

  • When dragging songs in the Matrix, category notes will now copy over if you drag the song to a plan in the same ministry or another ministry that already has that category.

  • When adding a song to the Matrix, Planning Center will now choose the correct song arrangement and key that you have clicked on.

  • Dragging people in the Matrix now copies their assigned times and the "responses to" person if you drag them to the same category.

  • Adding a song from the Matrix now sets the song length.

Songs

  • Referring plans are now listed for individual song arrangements as well as the song itself.

  • Chord Charts now allow font sizes of 11 & 13.

  • Only administrators can delete songs they did not create. Editors can only delete a song if they created it.

Miscellaneous

  • Selecting a start date in the block-out date calendar sets the end date to the same day.

  • Dates for June 2008 have been corrected.

  • When receiving an email from Planning Center, the name in the from field is now the first & last name of the person sending the email rather than their email address.

There were also over 61 other minor items that were addressed since our last update! We continue to be very excited about Planning Center and its future. We recently had a great vision meeting where we established a clearer picture of how Planning Center will move into the future and continue to get better and better as we grow. Thank you for believing in our ministry and letting us be a part of yours!

In Him,

Jeff Berg Owner/Developer Ministry Centered Technologies