Tech Forum

We are in need of a more efficent way to track who has talked/prayed and when they did so. Right now we are tracking it on spreadsheets but we have a new family move in every week so it is very difficult to keep updated. I tried writing my own application that will allow for imports from MLS. However, when I try to run it from the church desktop it is erroring out. Does anyone know if the church doesn't allow for executables to be run on their computers? The system is a stand alone system (XML files) and doesn't require any MLS. I can get it to run fine from my laptop, but I want to be able to have all clerks inputting the information from a central location.

scott0912 wrote:We are in need of a more efficent way to track who has talked/prayed and when they did so. Right now we are tracking it on spreadsheets but we have a new family move in every week so it is very difficult to keep updated. I tried writing my own application that will allow for imports from MLS. However, when I try to run it from the church desktop it is erroring out. Does anyone know if the church doesn't allow for executables to be run on their computers? The system is a stand alone system (XML files) and doesn't require any MLS. I can get it to run fine from my laptop, but I want to be able to have all clerks inputting the information from a central location.

There is no restriction that I know of. Church computers with Destop 5.5 have some operating system 'tayloring' in place through registry settings but there are no problems that I have run into regarding executables. I have run several on both ward computers and the stake computer with no problem. Since I don't know the specifics of your program and how you access libraries or make system calls it would be difficult to assess the nature of the problem.

scott0912 wrote:However, when I try to run it from the church desktop it is erroring out.

What is the error? What language are you writing in?

I had to manually install .NET on our stake computer so a radio memory management program to program the stake's Amateur radio would run.

scott0912 wrote:We are in need of a more efficent way to track who has talked/prayed and when they did so. Right now we are tracking it on spreadsheets but we have a new family move in every week so it is very difficult to keep updated.

I just typed the names in manually each week after they had spoken/prayed, and then gave the bishopric updated hardcopies periodically for planning (i.e every month or two). There was no need to import anything from MLS, and no worry about frequent move-ins/outs. So the method you are currently using does not sound simple, like perhaps you are trying to use drop-down lists, or a LOOKUP() feature or something.

Even if you get it working to your satisfaction, something to consider is when you no longer have that calling/assignment/responsibility how hard will it be for the next person to maintain or troubleshoot (especially if a future update to MLS unexpectedly breaks part of your process).

The spreadsheets I used can be found here.

Of course I could manually do it for the next five years but that wouldn't be any fun. My big picture is to have a easy to use system that will create a sacrament agenda and also update who and when people have spoke and said prayers. My plan is to have a custom report with the fields that I need from MLS. Then I will export it into my system and create the data store for me. Then my application I will be able to go down the list of possible sacrament agenda items (releases, sustainings, baby blessing, ordinations, new members, etc...) and it will create a PDF for the sacrament agenda and update the speaker information so we don't call on them again. When I am typing the names it will auto complete the text box so we can speed the process up from manually typing things in. Everything will be independant of the MLS system, we just need that to get names in there so them process will be faster than manually typing it. I will continue to try to figure out why I can't get my executable to work. It might be the .NET Framework. Thanks for all of the suggestions.

For tracking this data we use custom fields in MLS. Then we use Custom Reports to build talk and prayer lists.

I have a similar spreadsheet to track our speakers and music and uploaded them to the forum last year. A few other people uploaded their forms in that thread as well so there are good tools to use without reinventing the wheel.