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Jan 07, 2009

Children's Ministry Tutorial

Hey PCO users! Happy New Year from Ministry Centered Technologies! I’d like to introduce another tutorial video that we made recently. It’s on how to set up your PCO account for scheduling Children’s Ministry. This really can be applied to anything you have that doesn’t necessarily fall under a Sunday morning worship service plan. It could apply to a First Impressions/Greeting team, a special events team, or, as shown in the video, a Children’s Ministry team. So enjoy the video and for now that

Katie Willard

Customer Support

1 min read

Nov 03, 2008

Product Update: Transposing MP3's, new file box, ministry names, and stage layouts

We have some new updates being released today (Monday, November 3rd)! We decided to do an earlier update during mid-quarter just for fun. You can watch this video for an explanation and a tutorial on how to use these updates. Let me tell you a little bit about them first. Changing the name of Ministries: We will be changing the name of Ministries to Services. So from now on, when you see ‘create a new service’, it is the same as ministry. We felt this fit much better. Transposing mp3's: Anothe

Katie Willard

Customer Support

3 min read

Sep 30, 2008

Introducing Transposr.com and our new Community Support Director

So we have some exciting news for everyone today. First, we are very pleased to introduce you to our new Community Support Director, Katie Willard. After getting over 40 applications we were very happy to narrow it down to a person who was a perfect fit for this position. Katie is originally from Oregon and moved down to Southern California with her husband in October 2007. Her husband is a youth pastor so Katie is busy doing ministry outside of her work here as well. She comes to us with a tea

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Sep 08, 2008

Unexpected Downtime Last Friday

On Friday, September 5th we had about an hour and a half of unexpected downtime. At 2:33pm Pacific Standard Time, I was notified via a text-message from our server monitoring service that Planning Center was down, I called RackSpace.com and it took about an hour to figure out exactly what happened and then another half hour to bring back up the system and verify all the services were up and running. We are meeting with Rackspace today to discuss how they can monitor our servers more thoroughl

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Aug 29, 2008

Product Update: Text Messaging, AmazonMP3 and a lot of prettiness

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 ask

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Aug 27, 2008

Come work with us as our new Community Support Director

Update: This position has been filled. Thank you to everyone who applied. Ministry Centered Technologies is looking for a person with great communication skills. This person would have to possess strong writing skills for customer, tech and community support. We want someone who would be in charge of responding to all support e-mails, phone calls & forum posts. Also, this person would be in charge of developing our support tools such as online documentation, tutorial videos and podcasts.

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read

May 19, 2008

Product Update: iPhone Interface, Enhanced People Pages & Much More

Well, it's been exactly 3 months since our last Planning Center Update and we're excited that this one has finally arrived! Though this update has some exciting new features, some of the biggest changes are behind the scenes in our database structure. To make this geeky information simple, it is setting us up much better for the future and speeding things up in the present too. Before we dive into "The List", I wanted to take a second and welcome Serena Petrie, who joined our staff about 2 mo

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

May 06, 2008

New Video Testimony & Survey Results

*This is an outdated blog post and the information here may not be current. To read more about our recent product and company updates, please visit https://www.planningcenter.com/blog. So we are working on finalizing the next release of PCO but before we did we wanted to get out some of the things we have been working on over the last month. 2008 Survey Around the middle of April we opened up a survey to the owners of accounts that were created before March 1. In this survey we asked se

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

2 min read

Apr 15, 2008

A Student Ministry centered review of Planning Center

Tom Roepke from the "Who are these guys" website recently wrote a review on how his church uses Planning Center for their Student Ministries. Originally when I sat down to develop Planning Center we really worked hard to make sure that this site could meet the needs of not just Worship Ministries, but all the ministries of the church. Thanks for the glowing review Tom, this really confirms that we are meeting our goals. Planning Center (www.planningcenteronline.com) has made numerou

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read

Mar 13, 2008

2008 Easter Worship Song Statistics

Easter is just over a week away and we decided that it would be fun to list the top 30 songs that all of our Planning Center Online users are using for Easter. I hope you find these stats as interesting as we did. Easter 2008 **Planning Center Online ***Song Usage Statistics Compared To Easter 2007 * .songcompare { text-align: center } .songtitle { font-weight: bold; CCLI # Song Title Change 1 27965 Christ the Lord is Risen Today +1 2 4591782 Mighty To Save

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

2 min read

Mar 04, 2008

WorshipLeader.com Planning Center Online Articles

I don't know if anyone noticed but our own Aaron Stewart has been writing a featured article for WorshipLeader.com every month. Aaron has done a great job writing these articles and I hope that you enjoy them. Below I have posted links to the first three and I am going to post the rest of the articles as they are released: January 2008 - A Master Plan For Faster Planning As a music pastor, I’m always looking for the most efficient way to accomplish my tasks in order to be more of a min

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Feb 18, 2008

Product Update: February 2008

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

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

4 min read

Feb 01, 2008

Schedule Maintenance: 2/1/2008, 9 - 11pm PST

*Update: *The maintenance went great, we should be prepared for a lot more growth. Hello Everyone, Tonight, February 1, between 9:00 and 11:00pm PST will be doing some scheduled maintenance on our database servers. During this maintenance we will need to bring down Planning Center Online. I don't expect the outage to be more than one hour, thank you for your understanding. Thanks! Jeff Berg Owner/Developer Ministry Centered Technologies

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read

Jan 04, 2008

Back & Better Than Ever

Before I say anything else, I've got good news. Planning Center is back online! Not only that, we are giving everyone 4 days free for the trouble it has caused and just to say thank you for being so patient with us. Your next credit card charge will be postponed 4 days. In case you had not noticed, Planning Center has had some network problems over the last couple of days. First it was because the server got overloaded when everyone returned from their vacations at the same time. Then after t

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Jan 04, 2008

We Are Up and Running!!

Wooohooo!!! We are back up...I have just switched over the DNS entries for our site to www.planningcenteronline.com to the new servers, it should only take an hour or two to propigate. If it is not working for you try staging.planningcenteronline.com. Please e-mail us at support@ministrycentered.com for any issues that might have popped up. Thank you so much for your prayers & support. Jeff Berg Owner/Developer Ministry Centered Technologies

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read

Jan 03, 2008

Almost there!!!

We have restored the database to our new server. We are now working on getting the app fully functional. Anyone know how to get rmagick running on Red Hat Enterprise Edition? Jeff

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read

Jan 03, 2008

Planning Center Down

Hello Everyone, In case you don't know what's going on, let me tell you. Yesterday (Jan 2), we had an overwhelming amount of traffic since almost all of you resumed work after the holidays at the same time. This caused major strain on the servers which caused them to be either very slow or non-responsive. We had anticipated this and had already ordered new upgraded servers at another server facility, but we were dependent on that facility to give us the proper information to start using th

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Jan 03, 2008

Planning Center Is Down due to AT&T Network issues

UPDATE (1:45pm PST): We have gotten our new servers pretty much up and running and we are going to our current datacenter to remove our servers and bring them back to the office so that we can upload the database to our new server farm. Hello Everyone, I am sorry to report that Planning Center Online is down right now. At around 7:00am (PST) this morning I received a text message letting me know our site was down. I immediately checked and saw that the issue was with our internet host DISC

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

2 min read

Jan 03, 2008

Update: We have the database server

Hello, We are back at our office and we are hooking up the database server and uploading the database right now. Jeff

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

1 min read