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<begin rant> As most of you know, Watermark is an Arena and Shelby customer.  For the most part, we have been happy although today I got a response to a support call that I wasn’t to pleased about.  After doing a successful Shelby upgrade last Friday, I received a warning that our database hasn’t backed up for the past three days… Interesting.  All of our Arena backups have been fine, so this must be related to the upgrade.

After taking a look under the hood, I noticed that the schedule was still it place, it just wasn’t running.  When trying to recreate the schedule, sure enough, we get a Shelby application error and then the application quits.

I called Shelby support and finally talked to someone, but they had no idea what the issue was, so they went to grab someone in IT.

Then this happened… To give you at time reference, it is 4:45 pm, central time.  Memphis is in central time.

“Hey I was able to grab one of the guys from IT as he was headed out the door.  He has a pretty good idea what the problem is and thinks he can get you fixed up pretty quick.  IF YOU COULD JUST CALL US BACK FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, WE’LL GET YOU TAKEN CARE OF…”

Really?  I have a database that hasn’t backed up in 3 days and your IT guy can’t stop to help because he is on the way out the door at 4:45 in the afternoon?

Customer service fail.  I’m in love with the Arena product, but I’d be more in love with it if Shelby would learn to act like a hungry software company rather than a software company that mostly deals with churches.  </end rant>

Recent post from the Google CHMS group…

We’re a prerelease Arena customer and had a fairly successful
implementation so far.  Fortunately at least for now, Shelby has the
manpower to keep up with what will probably be a custom conversion for
each customer.  This is not a "right out of the box" installation.
What I can tell you is that as of the prerelease version, both the
Shelby V5 database and the Arena DB need to live on the same physical
box, which is a good thing for the triggers, but a bad thing if that
box ever loses the data.. in which case both your databases are gone
(so have good backups!)  What we have done is placed the web front end
on a separate box, and pointed everything to the DB server.

The triggers had some initial problems which resulted in data being
duplicated, fields not moving correctly, etc, but the Arena folks are
working through those.

As far as our users, who disliked even using Shelby at all, they love
the interface.  Easy to learn and use and I feel like the overall
usability gained is going to be well worth the cost.  Looking forward
to the next version of the Kiosk software, as the prerelease was a one
to one deal (one checkin station per room, which is cost prohibitive).
The V1 software has been completely rewritten to allow full families to
be checked in at once, as well as individuals and is no longer 1to1.  I
hear that it is now also setup with a wizard, which should be much
better than the pain of the prerelease settings.

Most importantly, I LOVE having our data here.  I’ve been able to use
third party tools already to mine the data, and we are working on some
survey imports in the near future (to keep our data on one central
repository… something you can’t do with the other solutions.)

More later as the story develops.

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