BvCMS - Bellevue Church Management System

We have simplified the “Forgot Password” process. Now you get a link to set your password directly. Gone are the funny, sometimes embarrassing, system generated, two word password combinations.

It works this way for creating a new user account too. You get a welcome email to set your password first thing.

Also, an Admin can send mass emails to congregants, inviting them to create an account. When they click the link in their email, it creates a basic MyData (access to their family only) account.

Karen has written a wiki doc about this here.

Since Tuesday, due to a problem with Bellevue’s servers, BVCMS has been hosting Bellevue Baptist Church’s database in addition to our 100 other churches on our Rackspace site. That’s not just a 1% increase however; Bellevue’s database is HUGE compared to most of our clients so we really had to scoot over tight to let them have a seat on our bus. I’m sure many of you noticed the slowness of the server yesterday. Anyway, all should be well now. Last night late, we doubled the capacity on both our web server and database server and it looks like we’ll be able to host this big family and more for a while. Pretty soon, we’ll be looking at doing a Web Farm of BVCMS servers where we can spread the load across multiple servers. We’re committed to great service in both hosting and support.

No this is not a change of address form that everybody hates to have to deal with when they move. But it is a change and it has to do with how Addresses in BVCMS work:

• We now have a Country dropdown. If you ignore this, it will be treated the same as United States a least as far as address validation is concerned.
• There is now no State dropdown (you just enter the abbreviation) and the label has been changed to State/Province/Region to accommodate international addresses.
• Finally there is no more Verify Address button.

What@! you say? No more Verify Button!!

OK OK, hang on there, it is now automatic! The way it works is to always validate when you press Save Changes or Submit. It does this in three places:

1. On the Person page Address tab
2. On the Search / Add dialog, Add New Family page
3. And during an Online Registration. This is new. We used to not validate the address during online registrations but now we are.

So here’s what happens, when you save, it will check the address against the USPS database and if it finds a match, it “normalizes” the address using the standard USPS abbreviations, zip+4, etc. Then it will update your fields and show you an “error” message of the change (really just informing you). At that point you can save again and it will complete.

If you use a country other than United States, it will not validate and save regardless of what you have in there. That is why we have a special Country of “USA, Not Validated” that you can use to override this behavior.

Read more about address verification on the wiki

To read more about Main Fellowship Organizations (you  know, that little checkbox on the Organization Header), click here. This is an article explaining how this is used in BVCMS.

Along the same lines, you may also want to read this article about Leader Types.

These are both settings in the Organization header that you may not have noticed before, but are very useful.

Surprisingly, we get this question: Can I change my password? Or we get this question: How do I change my password? Or we get this question: What is a non-alphanumeric character??? Sometimes we get this question: Why didn’t I get an email with my username/password when I clicked the link?

The answer to the first question is “Yes, you can certainly change your password.”

The answer to the other questions are as follows:

• On the Homepage, hover your mouse in the top right corner where you see the greeting “Welcome, Karen” (notice that there is an arrow there)
• There will be two options presented: Logout and Change Password. Select Change Password
• Now enter your current password
• Then enter your new password –
  • must contain at least 7 characters
  • can be numbers or letters or a combination of both
  • MUST contain a mark of punctuation (a non-alphanumeric character – i.e. not a letter, not a number)
  • Examples: John3:16 or QWER123! or car.parrot (notice that each of these contains a mark of punctuation)

Along these same lines, remember, if you ever forget your Username or Password, just click the appropriate links on the BVCMS login page. However, if we do not have a correct email address on your record, you will not receive the notifications. So, if, after clicking one of those links, you do not receive an email (be sure to check your Spam folder, too) you will need to call the church office. Please call the ministry in which you serve as a leader so they can verify your identity and make the necessary changes to your record. Read more.

Our new iPad App has arrived! Now you can use an iPad for checkin. It requires 2 things: 1) download the free App from the Apple Store – search for BVCheckin; and 2) install the newest version of the checkin software.

We tested this at Bellevue yesterday with great results. Read more about iPad Checkin.

We have just posted a couple of new wiki articles regarding Tasks to give you all you need to know about how to use Tasks – whether you are assigning Tasks or having them assigned to you.

The first article – Assigning Tasks – shows you exactly how to assign a Task (about someone) to another staff member or lay leader, what will happen when you assign it, and how you will know it’s been accepted and completed.

The second article – Accepting Tasks – shows you what to do once you have been assigned a Task, how to accept it and how to complete it.

Of course, we already had an article about Tasks in general which explains the concept of Tasks and how you can use them to quickly and easily identify your visitors and assign Tasks about each one so that they are contacted as soon as possible after their visit to your church. Check it out!

PS Remember, you can always search the wiki by keyword to find help articles.