Integrating Missionally

At the end of 2009, I was doing a test of the beta google browser Chrome. I am notorious for opening a bunch of browser tabs, and on this night I had 41 open. That’s 41 websites that I wanted to look through and read. And then it happened.

Have you ever worked on a document for hours and forgotten to save it only to have the program crash? If you’re a PC user, you know what I’m talking about to well! Well, with 41 browser tabs open, my beta browser crashed. Now, I didn’t lose my tabs because google chrome has a nice little feature that will open the last tabs you had open when you start it up. But just as I have learned to save my documents often, I now use a browser plugin to keep accidents like that from happening again. It’s called Read It Later.

Read It Later is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome with a companion iPhone/iPod app. The browser extension sits in your browser’s toolbar with two simple icons: one to save your current page to a reading list, and another to provide your reading list for your. It’s as simple as that. If you create an account online, it will sync your reading list and you can access that list with your iPhone/iPod Touch app. While looking at your reading list, you can search through it, sort it, or remove items. Now when I go through my rss feed and open a bunch of articles I want to read, I just one click them into read it later, and I am able to declutter my browser while still having access to sites and articles I want to read later.

Read It Later is a small yet powerful extension that you should implement.

Below is a short video that discusses the Firefox extension

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“What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship,” says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.

Those reading this in a feed reader may need to view this video on the site.

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When I was working in the IT industry, one of my responsibilities was to manage the various projects we were working. We had software projects, hardware projects, web projects, and maintenance projects that I had to keep track of. In those days, the best we had was Microsoft Project. That worked pretty well but did not function well in a distributed environment.

As a pastor, I have found myself doing some of the same kinds of project management tasks. It is just that we don’t necessarily call them “projects”. They are called ministries, mission trips, retreats or some other ministry-sounding name. Yet so much of the processes and tasks of project management are appropriate for so many of our church ministries, trips and events.

If you are going to be efficient with those, why not consider implementing some project management software. And since your church, like mine, has a lot of lay involvement, why not put it out on the web so it can be used by everyone?

Collabtive is open source project management software. It is a PHP based (which means it can be run on almost any computer) project management system. Collabtive allows you to manage projects ministries by setting up different tasks and assigning them to different users. The progress of these tasks can then be tracked using the easy interface of the application. The administrator can add multiple users to the application and each user can access the interface through his/her browser. There’s no limit to the number of users that can work simultaneously on Collabtive. Although it doesn’t provide advanced features such as Gantt charts, it does provide for a very simple and efficient mechanism to keep track of your projects.

In order to use Collabtive, you need to have PHP support on your system(s). I mentioned last week how to put WAMP on your internal windows network server. However, if you want to make it available to those outside your internal network, find a good web host that runs LAMP and for $3.99/month or so, everyone has access to this powerful tool.

The software will come as a zip file. Extract the zip file, and place it in the appropriate place on the server. Then you just need to point your browser to the install.php file to launch the installer. Once installed, you are greeted with the following login screen.

Once you login with your credentials, you are greeted by what the Collabtive team call your Desktop. The Desktop shows you a list of all current projects, a tasklist, as well as a calendar showing your tasks and milestones.

Clicking on a project name takes you to the project page. This page is also called the Project Dashboard. The Project Dashboard consists of a calendar specific to a particular project. It also consists of a Timetracker that can be used to track the amount of time that you have spent working on the project. There is also an Activity Log, which contains a step-by-step listing of all the activities pertaining to the project.

This page also contains a number of icons at the top, which allow you to visit your Milestones page, review your Tasklists, access the Messaging system, as well as access the file storage for a particular project. There is also a User tab, which shows a list of all the users currently using the Collabtive system for a project.

The tasklist allows you to create tasks, which may be critical to the project. Each task can have an associated due-date and can be assigned to one or multiple users. These tasks, once completed, can simply be “finished” by clicking on the tick-mark next to them.

The Milestones can be looked upon as distinct phases in the project timeline. Each milestone may have a number of tasks associated with it. As and when tasks are finished, a status bar for the project under consideration keeps increasing on your Desktop.

The right hand side pane across all pages provides a search bar, a simple text-based calendar, and a list of users who are currently online. The search bar searches across tasks, milestones, as well as entire projects. Also, each user can fill out his/her profile page so that different team members have ways and means to contact one another.

Collabtive provides for a very elegant project management system. While it is not as power-packed as its commercial counterparts, it provides more than a decent feature set to keep track of all the tasks and milestones associated to your project, or um…ministry!

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Recently, Google released its Chrome web browser in beta for Macs. I have been a huge Firefox user, employing it early on as an option to the laborious and dull IE browser on the PC. When I moved to a Mac in 2006, I again installed Firefox because of its plugins and familiarity. I’m always a little hesitant to use the browser of company whose operating system I am using, call it the Microsoft conundrum, and thus was hesitant to use Safari. Other browsers for the Mac, Flock and Camino, were just not interesting despite their uniqueness.

I’m a big Google user, using everything from their email, apps, adsense, and analytics. I was anticipating their release of Chrome and when it was made available in beta I downloaded and used it.

The first thing I noticed is that it is indeed a beta product. Many of the features of the PC version of Chrome are not available, such as bookmark management, extensions, themes, and a dropdown history in the address bar. I know those items will be available when the product is released out of beta.

What I did notice, however, was the speed of the browser. It is extremely fast. It handles the javascript of websites really well. This is a huge benefit over Firefox, though Safari is also fast.

Another item I noticed was its stability. Even as a beta product, Google Chrome is a very stable product. In fact, I had 41 open tabs at once before I could get it to crash. And that is the only time it has crashed. I had a lot of sites in my feed reader that I wanted to look at and thus opened that many tabs. It finally crashed. However, on restart, I was able to re-open all 41 of those tabs at once and close them down one by one after bookmarking them. For some time, I’ve been having issues with Firefox hanging up and thus having to do a Force Quit and restart it. Chrome handles a large number of browser tabs easily.

Despite the fact that it is still in beta, I would highly recommend Google Chrome for Mac. While I have not made it my default browser (yet), it is my primary browser. My only hope is that Google doesn’t take as long to get it out of beta as it did Google Apps!

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At TEDxUSC, business professor David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form — in schools, workplaces, even the driver’s license bureau. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individuals.

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