Why I hate Pocket Power Church

PC · Post by PC » Sun Apr 18, 2004 4:04 pm

I sent this off to the Wish List folk.

Just wanted to see how my complaints resonated with users.

Does this program do what YOU want it to do?

To: wishlist@powerchurch.com
Subject: Pocket Power Church

The more I use this program the more I find that I don't like about it.

Today's issue. I want to call a family. There are 6 family members.

Pocket Power Church lists the family members in alphabetical order rather than by family order (Directory Sequence Number) as in Power Church.

Pocket Power Church does not give age, adult/child status, or birthdates.

Therefore there is NO way to determine who is the spouse / other adult member of the family (whom I would like to ba able to address by name).

What I want from this software is a mobile version of Power Church.
I want to be able to have birthdates.
I want to be able to search addresses or at least visitation areas.
I want personal profile codes available, esp. special needs. (When I phoned one member, I didn't have the information in Pocket Power Church that she was deaf!)
I want to be able to record & sync Ministry Services, not just visitations.
Who is most likely to have this software on their PDA? Pastors. Pastors perform ministry services as well as making visits, but I can't record them while on the road.
Also on recording visitations, how about letting me set my name as the default for "Who Visited" so that I don't have to enter it every time. It's on my PDA; who else would it be entering visits on my PDA but me?

I DO NOT want to have the sorting done between the desktop and the PDA.
This is the largest problem with Pocket Power Church, and what make it mostly useless in my mind.
The way the software operates now means that
I must know, before I leave my office, every question I am going to need answers to after I leave my office (35 minutes from my home)
If I do a sort so that I have information on something, I will not be able to have any information on the rest of my members.
E.g., If the Evangelism Chairman calls me unexpectedly and I need to get in touch with the committee members, I can't generate a list of committee members by that activity on my PDA.
If I sort out a list of Evangelism committee members before I leave the office, I have no information on anyone else on my PDA. THIS IS STUPID.
If I want information on a particular activity anywhere other than the office, I print out a report, rather than using Pocket Power Church so that I can have the full membership data on my PDA. If I do this I have no need of the sorting function in Pocket Power Church.

Please scrap the current Pocket Power Church software and start over.

Sincerely,

Rev. Craig A. Lantz

Post by **Zaphod** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:56 am

Rev Lantz,

You are correct to send your thoughts and suggestions to wishlist@powerchurch.com. That is a direct line to our development department, and the suggestions collected there are all read and taken into consideration. This message board is not the appropriate forum for a vitriolic rant, that's why your poll is being deleted. I will, however, offer this response:

The key to your problem is this:

Rev Lantz wrote:What I want from this software is a mobile version of Power Church.

Pocket PowerChurch is not a direct port of PowerChurch Plus to your PDA. It was conceived and designed as a way for users to get contact information into a Palm Pilot. As a result of early betas, the feature that allows you to enter visitations notes was added later in the development process. The original concept was to have some read-only contact info about your selected members. Pocket PowerChurch came about as a response to the number of our users who would call in asking how to export data to Outlook so they could sync that with their PDA. Pocket PowerChurch does all that these folks were asking for, and more.

Also, Pocket PowerChurch was designed to work on a 2MB Palm to make it available to users working with older, possibly donated, harware. A lot of time was spent paring down the features for this reason.

That being said, we are always interested in improving our software to better suit the needs of our users, so your comments are useful and welcome, even if they are inappropriately presented.