It's been less than a month since our monumental Matrix 2.0 release, and we're back with more! First of all, let me say thank you for all the positive feedback and comments on the Matrix. We love making your lives easier and having happy customers, so thanks for all the support!
We've got a great improvement to group scheduling, a brand new help system, and an explanation of some changes we recently made to permissions in regard to deleting people, songs and media.
Improved Group Scheduling
Planning Center has had the ability to schedule groups for a while, but there was no great way to schedule a whole team to the same position...until now! After choosing a group or browsing from the schedule a person box and clicking "Add All to Plan", you can schedule them all to one position, or click the button at the top to schedule them all to separate positions like before.
On the left, you'll see all the people you have selected and can hover over them to see what their conflicts or block-outs are, and remove people individually. You can even click the buttons at the bottom to remove everyone with conflicts or everyone with block-outs. When you change a Category, it recalculates the conflicts based on times assigned to that category. Here's a link in our online help that shows you how this works:
New Help System
Speaking of our online help, we've greatly improved our help dialog to help you find the most common answers without having to email us. When you click the help link at the top right of Planning Center, you can now type in a summary of your question which will search our documentation and give you any potential answers before emailing us from there. If you do send us an email from there, Planning Center sends us a ton of information about your account which will help us answer any questions much more quickly. We always welcome you emailing us directly, but if you are able to use our new help box, it will help us help you faster. You can help the helper! :) I sense a Beatles song coming on.
Delete Permissions
This last update is a little boring, but many of you might have noticed some changes we made to permissions a couple of weeks ago. In the past, any administrator could delete any songs, media or people. We've had quite a few unexpected situations where administrators have deleted items accidentally or even sometimes on purpose that caused churches to lose a lot of valuable information, and we needed to figure out a way to prevent that. So we changed all accounts so the site owners can delete anything, but administrators can only delete what they have created.
Instead of deleting, administrators can easily hide songs and media and change people's account permissions to disabled. This basically does the same thing as deleting them; they don't show up in any searches, people don't count against your account limits, but they are there for archive purposes and can be retrieved in the future. (Files uploaded to media and songs still count against your file space limits).
We still feel this is the safest way for most accounts to operate, but with this update, we've added a site setting that will revert your account to the old way. Your site owner can change a setting that will Allow Admins to Delete Anything. Remember our great help I was telling you about? Here's a help article that will show you how to do that:
"That's All Folks"
For now I'll sign off with Porky Pig's infamous farewell as we get to work finishing up some other great scheduling enhancements we plan to release in the weeks to come!