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I’ve spent the last several months taking Vista through the paces, first with Beta 2, then RC1 and 2, and now with the final build of Vista Ultimate. 

I can say with confidence that it is a big step forward for Microsoft and I really do like the Aero interface.  However, beyond the spoofed up look, I’m not seeing much benefit RIGHT NOW for our church.  Most of our machine are less than 2 years old (we typically have a 4 year upgrade plan) but of those really good machines, most won’t be able to take advantage of the Aero interface. 

In addition, I’m just not sure what is to be gained from being an early adoptor here.  As of last week, Dell still didn’t have drivers for my test machines and the laptop machine (a Dell XPS 1210) seems to have the most incompatibility problems. 

I’d love to hear what other churches plan to do about rolling out Vista.  As for us, we’ll wait until Dell won’t ship us XP any longer.

Well, after lots of work on the part of the Arena team, we got a new set of database triggers installed today.  It appears to have fixed the issue with the duplicate entries being created in arena.  In addition the "update family wizard" in Arena appears to be filling out all of the necessary data and saving correctly.  As of yesterday, some secondary addresses were coming over to the Arena DB from Shelby, but not being displayed in the wizard if you made a change.  Thus when you saved the family information, the secondary addresses were being wiped out… AND worse, they would then trigger the record to be deleted from the Shelby DB as well.  Bye-bye data.  Not good.  Looks like it is fixed now though.  We’ll do more testing tomorrow.  We also have lots of duplicate data to fix.  But tomorrow is another day.

Arena Shelby Church Technology ArenaCHMS Church Management System

We begin tomorrow on our Shelby Arena week of training.  Install (mostly) happened last week, and there were a few issues that I’ll discuss later.

Arena Shelby Church Technology ArenaCHMS Church Management System