Disaster Recovery - Are You Prepared?

When you work 24 years helping churches with their software needs, you hear plenty of horror stories.

- We had a fire in the church office that melted the computers.

- A pipe burst over the weekend and flooded the office.

- Someone broke in and stole the computers and the backup tapes (all of them sitting right next to the computer).

- We had a virus and had to reformat our hard disk.

- There was a bad thunderstorm last night, and the server got fried.

- Katrina showed up, and everything is gone.

- Looks like you have a corrupted data table. When was your last backup? ... silence ...

- We went to restore our backups, and the tapes are all empty.

You get the picture. Bad things happen, and you had better be ready for your turn. The good news is that most of the churches from the above stories were prepared for their misfortune. Hardware and software can be replaced, but it's all up to your backups to get to a happy ending. Do you make regular backups? Is there an off-site copy of all of your data? Do you know that your backups are usable?

If you are not 100% sure of the answers to the above questions, you had better make some phone calls. Get the person who set up your tape backup system to run a test restore. Check with the ACS LiveStor team if you need a dependable off-site backup. Call ACS Customer Support if you have any ACS-related backup questions.

You never want to experience a disaster and then face the impossible task of re-entering all of your data.

Do you know all your Options?

I was in Nashville this week and attended a client training school. I used the opportunity to talk with the group about customer support. I was glad to hear that the group was happy with the support they were receiving, but I was also surprised that most of the group were unaware of the different ways available to get help.

"How many have contacted customer support via the telephone?" All hands went up. "How about using email?" Maybe one third responded. "Ever logged into the client support portal using your pin number?" Fewer hands and several blank stares. "How about using the knowledge base to answer a question?" You can really tell the engaged users by this point. "How about using live chat?" Down to two people in a group of 25.

The real benefit of my spending time with this group turned out to be an opportunity to educate them on their options when they need help. We know that the preferred option for most people will always be to call the support department, but I encouraged everyone to try the different methods available.

Working at night or on the weekend and need help? Try the knowledge base - it's available 24/7. Have a question that does not need an immediate answer? Use email to submit your question. Tired of talking on the telephone all day long? Try the live chat option.

Check the client support website for more information on your different options for getting help.

Wedding 7.7.07

Last Saturday was a very popular day for weddings. I know this from personal experience because my daughter's wedding was one of the many held that day. It was a very special event, and I had a great weekend spending time with family and friends. Now that I am back at work and things are settling back to normal (except for a few unpaid bills), I was reflecting on how ACS played a small part in my daughter's wedding.

First, the wedding service and surrounding events took place at my church (ACS user since 1985). ACS software was first utilized back in August of last year when we were looking for dates to schedule the event. The Ministry Scheduler module was used to check available dates; once 7/7/07 was deemed the best option, the sanctuary and other rooms needed were reserved. I am sure the last thing a church wants to do is to book two weddings at the same time, so this is an important task taken care of by ACS. As more detailed plans were made for the wedding, the Ministry Scheduler module was used again to record the room setup requirements and to reserve the equipment needed. As the wedding day approached, the Ministry Scheduler module was used once again to feed data to the church air conditioning system so that the sanctuary would be properly cooled for a July wedding in South Carolina.

ACS also took care of the financial aspects of having the wedding at the church. Accounts Receivable was used to create invoices for the wedding fees and took care of the payment transactions. Then the Payroll module was used to record the extra weekend hours worked by the church staff so they were all paid properly. Finally, the membership records would be updated with a wedding anniversary date for my daughter.

Now the actual wedding planning was not done with ACS. Instead, my wife and daughter used TheKnot.com as their database for the invitation list. Looking back on that choice I now wished I had set them up with an OnDemand version of ACS (accessible via the Internet) so I could have more easily answered their many "how do I" questions. I will keep that in mind for the next time. Did I mention I have two more daughters?

17 Years of Service

This week, we are having a retirement party for someone who has been with ACS Technologies for 17 years. Eddie joined us in 1990 when we had one product and only 1200 churches as clients. Eddie was always a dependable worker and hardly ever missed a day of work. He once cut off part of a finger with a table saw, but still showed up for work the next day.

Eddie started in the Customer Support department and spent many years assisting churches one phone call at a time. Back then, the support representatives had to take calls on all the software products, so Eddie had to be a jack-of-all-trades. A support person will easily take two to three thousand phone calls a year. That means over the years Eddie has helped nearly all of our clients.

A few years into his career, Eddie was promoted to a group leader in the Support department. There, he used his experience to train and supervise the newer support staff. Over time, Eddie worked with at least 100 people delivering support. He even started our first "e-mail" support team.

In the most recent years with ACS, Eddie became a specialist in assisting clients from moving from one product to another. If you made the move from ACS to DOS or to ACS for Windows, you probably talked with Eddie. Each month, Eddie reported the number of churches that made a product transition and, for several years, this occurred at a rate of over 1000 a year.

Now let me see... dependable employee, helped tens-of-thousands of people over the phone, supervised over 100 people helping our clients, and assisted thousands of churches moving to Windows. Did I mention that Eddie was also a part-time pastor?

Job well done Eddie!!!