Does anyone have any experience with integrating data from a church management software package such as ACS PeopleSuite? Our church uses PeopleSuite to manage member information and since with WEC we will have users managing their own contact information, it would be nice to be able to somehow get that data back into PeopleSuite. At the minimum, it seems inefficient to manage the same data in two separate databases that very likely will end up with conflicting information if not integrated in some manner.

Jay,
I agree this would definitely be a nice feature to have, but I'm not aware of anyone who has pulled it off so far. On the TYPO3 side of things, you do have full access to a stable database schema for representing members so it should be possible to have some kind of syncing function.

The big question to me is whether ACS provides any ways to sync data with external systems. Do you know anything about that?

Thanks,
Jeff

I can't speak with complete acs knowledge, but I know they have an export function. Import should be available, but may be an add-on. I know that some of the other larger chms software vendors provide this. Shelby runs on SQL Server and F1 has a product called Data Exchange. I would be really surprised if ACS did not have import/export at some level.

-Pete

Oh wow, this is a discussion I'm interested in too! Our church uses ACS as well and I would love to integrate the ACS member database with a WEC-driven website!

Pete, you mention an import/export feature, but that sounds like it would be a manual process. This would need to be something that could easily share the updated data between ACS and WEC, right?

Holly,
You're correct that this would need to be something to easily share the updated data. Full disclosure here - I currently work for Fellowship Technologies, another Church Management Software company. I know that ACS has import/export capabilities and they have a great support staff who would be more than willing to present their users with the options to import/export data in some automated fashion if you explain what you're trying to do. My gut feeling is that they have either an edition or add-on that would help in accessing the data, but at some additional cost. I could be completely wrong about that, though and can not speak with authority on that side.
I can tell you that ACS 8.0 uses Paradox with the more sensitive data protected by passwords. ACS 9.0 uses DBISAM (basically the upgrade to Paradox) with a similar type of protection. They do this to keep just anyone from reading your more sensitive data in a manner that bypasses their security (a good idea).

I'd also hazard a guess that even if you were to regularly extract data from either ACS or WEC, you'd still have some reconciling to do prior to just updating either system. If Joe Smith updated his Web Profile's phone number, but someone @ the office updated his address - they'd both be updated, but which would win? What if they both updated the phone number? All sorts of fun stuff to reconcile no matter how you work with your data.


On a related note - is there a concept of a "Current ChMS System Unique ID" field in WEC? If not, that would probably be the first place to start as without that reference, you'll have a hard time reconciling the data.

Hope that helps a little with what you're looking into. I'm a database guy by nature, so this sort of stuff fascinates me anyway. I'll help out as much as I can as long as it doesn't adversely affect what I'm doing now or what ACS may choose to keep secret (I think you understand). What is public knowledge or relatively easy to discern - I'll share and try to give a hand.

I would look into the idea of exporting the data into Access and perhaps writing some Access code to combine the data sets - that could be worth it. Yes it's a manual process, but a weekly sync of the data would be better than nothing.

-Pete

Pete,

Thanks for you expert help on this stuff. It is interesting to hear that ACS was done in Paradox. I used to write a lot of Paradox code several years ago and loved it.

Here is an attempt to answer your question about a unique ID in TYPO3: Every frontend user in TYPO3 has a unique ID that is not reused. So, I believe that ID could be tied to a unique ID in another system. But as you point out, this is not easy stuff. We have considered doing this in WEC but have not started it because it becomes so difficult to integrate with the many different ChMS systems and then to maintain that integration over time.

In Him,
Mark

Thanks, Mark, but what I was thinking of was a separate field that could be used to link a UserID in TYPO3's tables to a UserID (or whatever equivalent) in some other system. That way we'd always know that Joe Smith - WEC ID = 25 is the same as Joseph K Smith - ChMS ID = 6F743.01. (And yes, some ChMS systems really do use such odd conventions for their unique ID's - I'd probably make the field some form of variable character length 50 or so.)

And just to be sure you noticed - ACS 9 (aka 2006 or 2007, forget exactly which year) was re-written to use DBISAM for both speed and security improvements. I know they added a pretty cool export function as well as a lot of other enhancements, but I'll leave that to the ACS users.


Probably a better question would be along the lines of what data would be synced? Address, phone, name? User Names? Passwords? Last Login time? Would we upload basic stats back up such as last attendance date/class? Giving? Signing up to attend classes in some bi-drectional manner? What would we try to push across in either direction?

-Pete

(tempted to put in a plug for F1's Data Exchange feature here, but trying to resist )

Pete,

Sure. We can add fields to the Frontend user database as needed. We do that with the WEC Frontend User extension already. See:

http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/wec_user/1.2.0/

In Him,
Mark