I’d love to hear what you’re doing in this area. Our ward has invested some time and effort in developing our own systems based on data imported from MLS…

In a related matter, currently Deseret Book is providing the bandwidth for the mission.net server, but that relationship may be ending any day now due to a change in IT policy at DB. Is the church in any position to offer a colocation for this service in your DMZ even if there is no direct connection between the servers?

Currently I serve as the VT coordinator in our ward. In an attempt to enter visiting teaching contacts for our ward, it quickly became clear that much contact information is inaccurate… Visiting teachers were feeling guilty for not
visiting sisters who actually had moved but not notified anybody in any ward. The visiting teachers just knew that they could never seem to find the sister home. So I began working on reducing the guilt and anxiety of the visiting teachers by searching for these sisters and if I could not find them, recognizing that we cannot find them at this time- by moving them to a “search and pray for them” visiting teaching route and bringing up their names to the RS Pres who takes them to ward council. Then if no one in the ward can find them, we send them back to Salt Lake hoping that they will contact the church and have records requested. I also discovered that people move around alot within the ward. So, I’m trying to keep an accurate account of contact information for sisters who are still actually in the ward. In addition to contact information, there are people who need to be or to not be visiting teachers or who need to be or not be visited by a particular sister. As the RS Pres and I discuss these sisters, I need to quickly make changes and communicate these changes in VT routes to visiting teachers. The project snowballs into a huge record keeping feat. I live 40 minutes round trip from the church. I need to go to the church computer once a week to maintain the visiting teaching records for the women in the ward and to communicate with the clerk regarding new contact information. Sunday morning is prime time on the church computer which is located in the clerks office right next door to the bishop’s office (who may be doing confidential interviews). After church the computer is reserved for processing tithing. So this means that I make a second trip to the church computer each week (52 trips a year). Is there any way you could offer a way for visiting teaching coordinators to log on to MLS from home (passworded of course). It would save me time and gasoline. Also, it would save me lots of time in not having to recreate databases at home just so that I can be up to date in my communications with the RS Pres and the visiting teachers who depend on my information to fulfill their obligations to the Lord to nurture each sister.

How do people who live yet farther away from the church keep up with this task… I assume that although we do our best, we just can’t be as accurate as we would like at this time due to distance constraints.

Although I have offered a view of my own current church assignment, I am aware of many other sisters and brethren who maintain and work off of home-based databases for similar reasons. We are all recreating data that could be so readily accessable. Not to mention that because of this phenomenon, MLS data is not being maintained at the local level as well as it could/should be.

I’m hoping to log on to MLS from home.

As for VOIP, unless there’s significant efforts towards making the connections secure, I’d stay FAR, FAR away from it. There are too many tools out there now to sniff/intercept such transmissions. Unless you don’t care about what’s said on the channel.

I’m really looking forward to the day when Temple Ready is not solely on the FHC machines, but maybe that’s something that can be managed via the local ward computers hooked up to high speed DSL.

And whatever happened to the effort to combine ward records with pedigree charts to encourage family history work? (I saw one of those printouts when I was shlepping around the COB many years ago visiting my mother-in-law in the membership records dept. I was excited about the prospect of such records! But it seems to have drifted quietly away. Perhaps it’s a bigger elephant to eat than expected in combining ward membership records to IGI records. But I can’t think of a better way than to get started with having members make the connection themselves by linking directly to IGI records. It sure beats trying to do it on your own as church programmers and then trying to undo the “best estimates” of automated matches, or risk offending someone. Maybe a mini-extension from MLS export a member’s records to a file, have them log in via familysearch as a member, and start making the connections that way (or using PAF Insight’s features integrated into a new PAF program to assist in that effort).