As I'm sitting here on my first day back to work in 2012 (I'm choosing to call it twenty-twelve, not two-thousand-twelve, by the way), I'm reflecting back on what a great year 2011 was for PCO and thought I should write a quick post overviewing a lot of the great and memorable stuff that happened.

New Peeps

The Staff of PCOThe first thing that came to mind for me was that after helping co-create PCO with our amazing owner & lead developer Jeff Berg 6 years ago, last January 2, I finally became a full-time employee. The rest of 2011 brought some incredible new team members. We hired 3 developers: Mark Ranallo, Daniel Murphy & Peter Fokos, a new designer: Will Dos Santos, and another part-time Customer Support Rep: Peter Wilson. It's hard to believe our little company now has 13 employees and is currently looking for number 14! Oh, and our customer base also grew 40% more in 2011 than in 2010 — not too shabby!

New Digs

After coffee shops, restaurants & living rooms, our first office space had been in La Quinta, CA (in the Palm Springs area) for the last couple of years. At the beginning of last year, we were looking to start expanding our team and we knew it would be easier to recruit new developers to a community not so synonymous with retirement, we began the search for a new office. We ultimately decided on Carlsbad, CA in North San Diego County, bought a building, and hired Phil Smith III from TheArtOffice.com  to design our new space. On August 8, our beautiful new offices opened and we relocated many of our team members.

New Features

Wow, there is so much we added it will be hard to condense it, but here goes!

  • Chord Charts renamed Lyrics & Chords, includes support for lyric PDFs and ChordPro format for better alignment of Chords

  • Song Sequences to specify order of verses, choruses & more

  • Matrix 2.0 with Live updates, Library Sidebars & Full Plan Reordering (do you even remember that it didn't used to do that!)

  • Brand new integrated Help system

  • Improved Group Scheduling

  • Reorder & Edit People, Plan Note & Item Note Categories directly from a plan

  • Item Details with Rich Text Formatting

  • SongSelect, iTunes, YouTube & Ustream Integrations

  • Assign People Directly to Positions

  • Auto-Scheduling

  • Scheduling Preferences for Users

  • New Mobile Media player with background audio support

  • External Display support for Planning Center Music Stand

  • Started testing the brand new Planning Center beta, launching Jan 16, 2012 (that's very soon!)

  • Oh yeah, our new mascot, PiCO was born!

To Infinity and Beyond!

2011 was a great and productive year for Planning Center, and we're even more excited for what is in store for 2012 (twenty-twelve, remember!) The new site will be permanent on January 16, so make sure you start checking it out now while you can still switch back if you need. In fact, we're going to start automatically switching people over starting today so it doesn't catch you off guard. Don't worry, it's not permanent until the 16th.

In addition to lots of great Planning Center enhancements, be on the lookout for some surprises. They might be brand new add-ons, they might be brand new products, they might be brand new integrations, who knows!? Well, I know, but I'll never tell, at least until it's time to write the blog post!

From all of us here at Planning Center, we hope you had a wonderful Christmas and wish you a very happy (say it with me) 2012. To make sure you have all the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.