I’m from a small branch in the Caribbean. We just got MLS installed a couple of days ago. I seems really simple to use. For training purposes though, is there a test database and user IDs that can be used to poke around so that new users can become familiar with the functionality of the system without using live data?

[Joel: Hello Emrol. Not today, that I know of. This would be a great topic to talk about over at http://tech.lds.org.

I’ve enjoyed reading your blog, and I hope you can continue to turn things around for the church’s technology. It was nice to see your focus on inspiration and revelation, as that is the complete solution and driver of what we do in solving business problems through code.

I was first introduced to computers on a Saturday when my father needed to go into work at the church office building. He brought me and my brother with him. That was a couple of decades ago. I’ve since gone on to get a BS in CS from BYU in two years and have run multiple IT teams and departments.

I know the church has had some truly inspired developers, and others that have been overly arrogant. My father has been grateful for those developers who care to truly understand the needs of his team and department, and then make a difference.

I am a bit disappointed that the tech talk you are hosting is on a Thursday at 6:30 as that conflicts with bishopric meeting. I truly hope the discussion goes well. Maybe some of the discussion’s highlights can be blogged for those of us unable to attend.

I imagine you already know this, but the interface, usability and stability for MLS needs a lot of work.

Best wishes and prayers

By the way there are many of us software developers how would love to give back and help out the church. I don’t know if the church has ever considered calling developers as church service missionaries, but I’d imagine you would get some interest and great talent.

Also on the open source topic some of the little utilities that we write to make our callings easier, could benefit others if there was a repository that was easy to find for the source code and/or executables.

I agree. As a counselor in our ward’s bishopric, I have yearned for some increased features in the Calendar, private calendar items for the Bishop, Bishopric, Leaders, etc. so that all of us can use the same church calendar. I wonder if somehow this could be integrated with an APP like google calendar where collaboration is possible (after log-in), but personal calendars can be used for each person (i.e. remote calendar links).

Joel,

I think that the advances that have come in church technology over the last few years have been very exciting. You and your group(s) and whoever else is responsible have done a wonderful job.

All I can say is THANK YOU!!!

My questions are:

1. Will there be some training developed and available online as is being done in other areas, for the website management.

2. The site is very basic and it seems like there are opportunities to expand the capabilities (ie. add tabs on the Lesson Schedules page to allow schedules for other classes). Are there plans to allow administrators more/better functionality?

Daryl – we’d like to do just what you suggest. The challenge is in figuring how to do it safely. More in the future on this.

Jeff – the Church is working on a new replacement for the PAF system. This is handled by a different group so I shouldn’t talk much about it. However it will be web-based and will handle both Windows and Macs. I’ll forward your feedback. Thanks!

John – yes, we’d like to do more with mapping services. Internally we’re creating mapping web services that we can easily plug into other solutions as they need them.

Brian – I answered this in another comment. We’re doing the business analysis now and hope to have answers in the coming year.

Steve – Thanks!

Benjamin – There are so many different flavors of “agile” its hard to answer the question. At the end of the day, if you can take a fully functional prototype to an executive and say “we’ll build you this and it will take however many months” and then you deliver, they’re bound to respond positively. But if you use agile as an excuse to not commit to dates, not executive in his right mind will support you. Some would say “that’s not agile.” I disagree. As to your IxD question. Yes, they create fully functional prototypes. We capture business rules and background processes differently, depending on the project. But the key is that we start with a functional prototype. Understand that this is new for us. We still have some projects underway that we started with our old methodologies and we haven’t converted those over to the new methodologies wholesale. But the ones started this way have been very successful.

Thanks for your questions!

I have been many years in IT both in project management and actual development. I have been involved in both traditional and alterative project management but have trouble convincing executive management of the benefits of Agile methodologies. I agree with you that there is not any methodology that is a one size fits all and often mix traditional and Agile components depending on the project. I am convinced that many people who like Agile do not fully understand it and improperly implement and explain it. As a result, my executive management has been soured on anything Agile which has become increasingly difficult to implement. My first question is, how do you present Agile to executive management when they are convinced it is a mistake? You mentioned you had difficultly at Microsoft implenting Agile. What were your road blocks there?

My last questions have to do with your Interaction Designers. This is an interesting concept to me. How detailed do they go? Do they mock up every page and report that will be developed? How do you capture and document business rules and background processes if you eliminate traditional requirements?

Thanks,
Ben