We have several big projects currently underway that have underscored the importance of accurate and complete data. For the past several months we have spent a lot of effort ensuring that our member and group data will be migrated correctly into our new Arena Church Management System. We’re also migrating to a new e-Commerce site based on Magento, and we’ve been working recently on migrating our customer, product, and order data.
The process we’ve gone through has confirmed a couple of things for our team:
- Data migration isn’t the most exciting task - unlike new site designs or cool apps, no one tweets about how smoothly a data migration goes.
- It’s not as simple as it seems - especially when you’re moving from old systems with non-relational databases.
- The devil’s in the details - mapping the major fields is usually straightforward, but then there’s always that “oh yeah, we also need to have this attribute in our new system” that you have to account for.
- It’s important - I know we would all rather spend time thinking about the front-end design, new features and functionality, etc., but that shiny new site will get pretty ugly pretty quickly if it doesn’t work because the customer or user data isn’t there.
So the main lesson we’ve learned is that we need to set aside sufficient time and energy to ensure that the underlying data for our sites and systems is complete and accurate.
March 28th, 2010 at 1:49 am
Yeah, it’s one of those things where the better job you do, the less aware people are that anything happened. That’s what I got to do for a few years with a credit card processor - convert large numbers of accounts. It could be fun on conversion weekend - free food helped here a lot. Hope it’s going smoothly for you all!
April 1st, 2010 at 6:05 am
What made you guys choose to move to Arena from RollCall? What do you see as it’s better advantages?
Are you going to use the Web CMS feature of Arena also?
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:30 am
Phil -
Great questions - there are many reasons that we chose to move to Arena, but a few of the key ones are:
Web access - since Arena was built from the beginning as a web application, we like its capabilities in terms of providing access anywhere, anytime
Public & private sites - with our current, disparate systems we have had to build a lot of custom apps and sites that do not tightly integrate with our membership database. Arena will provide us a single platform that gives us the ability to better utilize that data and provide better systems to our staff, volunteers, and attendees.
Extensibility - with the Arena API and the development community we like the idea that we can extend and/or customize the system to suit our needs.
There are many others, and we may enumerate those in a future blog post. As for the Web CMS, we have made no concrete decisions about if or when we will start using that. It is something we plan on researching in the coming months, but as of right now we are satisfied with our existing CMS for our main websites.
Thanks for the questions - keep ‘em coming!
April 12th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Hi Russell,
Great - thanks for your response. As a church we are looking at a new management system and Arena was one of them that has reached the short list. Our issue is that we are multi-platform based (PC & Mac) so it needs to run on all fine and be the same user interface.
How does Arena go for exporting data for printing mailing labels etc..? Being web based, is there any features that you’ll miss compared to a software based client?
Thanks,
Phil
April 13th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Phil -
We had some of the same concerns as we looked at replacing our church management system. We are Mac shop, but do have a few PCs scattered around. Since Arena is web-based it’s essentially platform-independent, and from our testing it’s also browser-independent.
Arena uses Microsoft’s Reporting Services for all reporting needs, and we’ve been working on replicating (or improving) all of our current reports, which include rosters and labels for our different classes, etc. So far we feel like it’s pretty flexible and robust and will be able to do what we need it to do.
As for differences going from client/server to a web app, there are a few things that web apps still can’t do as well as a locally installed client. One of the main ones would be speed when moving from one screen to another, and I’m sure there are others. But we feel like the benefits of a web app far outweigh the benefits of a local client - mainly the ability to access anywhere, but not having to install / upgrade software is also nice!
We’d be happy to talk with you in more detail if you want - just email us at arena@northpoint.org and we can set something up!
Good Luck!