Well, it is that time again. We are about to deploy an update to our flagship product Planning Center Online and we are so excited to get this update to you. We have been really busy and already have some great plans for the next version of Planning Center which should be out after the 1st of the year.
Also, if you haven't heard we are growing and we have just created a new position that we need to fill, you can find out more about that on this blog post.
Text Messaging
We have been asked several times for a way to do text-messaging and there just didn't seem to be a good way to reliably text-message users for awhile. E-mail to sms providers are free but are not reliable and most pay-gateways are too expensive, especially with the amount of text-messages we will be sending out. But a couple of months ago we found the service called TextMarks.com and I mentioned this service to our customers in the forum and the response was very positive.
New "Schedule" View
Another requested feature was a Schedule view for people to see everything that you are scheduled for. This new screen will show all plans you have been scheduled for, any upcoming times you are scheduled for & will include the "My Calendar" in the sidebar. All Scheduled Viewers will be directed to this page by default, and other users can click "my schedule" under their calendar on the main plans page.
Volunteer Video Tutorial
We have added a new Volunteer Video tutorial to help your volunteers understand the aspects of Planning Center Online that they have access to. This video tutorial is very quick and simple. It can also be downloaded and burned to a DVD if you wish to show it to your volunteers on a projector. You can view this video on Vimeo, this video will also be available on the Planning Center Website at launch.
*Linking to AmazonMP3
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Trying to stay copyright compliant while also making sure your teams are well rehearsed is a huge obstacle nowadays. To help provide you with a solution to this obstacle we have made it very simple to link to MP3s on Amazon's MP3 store, so your users can download them legally. Click the new "link to AmazonMP3" button in a Song Arrangement Attachment box, and Planning Center will look up your song in Amazon's store for you to add the link to your song arrangement with one click.
New Custom Properties Editor
With Planning Center getting used by more and more ministries in a church we have some churches with more than 50 property options which was making it impossible to manage. So we worked really hard to create a new interface that will show you what properties someone has and easily add new properties to a person. We are really happy with this new interface and we hope you are too.
*Miscellaneous *
Added Birth & Aniversary Dates
Added Notes To People & Plan People records
Added check/uncheck all to Plan E-mail dialog
Added arrows to calendar under "My Calendar" to allow you to view any month
Accounts that have been disabled will not show up by default in the people list
Added an "Alternate Owner" that you can assign to another person who then will be able to update your payment information and receive the payment receipts
Ability for us to send out notifications to users via a notification bar at the top of the page
Ability to copy a plan to a template and copy a template to another ministry
Added stock matrix reports to everyone's matrix
Added Church's Logo To Standard Plan Print Out
Lots of clean-up of user interface