Home Teaching Plugin for IPAD?

[arvanitas]

Is there any way that the Home Teaching Statistics and assignments can be integrated with LDS Tools for IPAD? Obviously I will update the statistics in MLS, however, if callings can be downloaded it would be nice to have the Home Teaching information as well.

[jdlessley]

I am sure there are a lot of others who would like to see this capability provided by the Church. It is one of the community projects being worked on now. However that project is currently for a web application. Once that is developed they can move into media specific plugins. The sad news is this has been ongoing for over two years now.

The first program developed to fill this need is called Return and Report and can be found at http://www.returnandreport.org/ and is not Church sponsored. It was presented as a prototype to the Church for which the current community project had its origins.

[jbh001]

HT/VT assignments were displayed in a 3rd party app called Ward Tools. However, the group that created Ward Tools recently donated its intellectual property to the Church so that it could be integrated with the Church's own app LDS Tools. While LDS Tools does not currently have the same functionality as Ward Tools, it is expected that that Ward Tools-like features will be introduced incrementally as updates to the LDS Tools app as soon as they can be coded, tested, and comply with current Church policies. That implies that there might be some features that might not make the transition from Ward Tools to LDS Tools.

Also, the data download required for Ward Tools required administrative access to parts of MLS. In LDS Tools, access to this information will be based on your current church calling, just like your access to the new directory at lds.org. If you are a bishop, LDS Tools will eventually (hopefully) provide more calling-specific functionality and information to you than if you are a member with no calling.

Hopefully that functionality will include at least current HT/VT assignments (for view by the bishopric, RS president, EQ president, and HPGL).

I (personally) would not expect to see a feature appear in LDS Tools (like HT/VT info) until that feature is also available at lds.org somewhere somehow.

[RossEvans]

I (personally) would not expect to see a feature appear in LDS Tools (like HT/VT info) until that feature is also available at lds.org somewhere somehow.

I think that's a pretty good bet. A key issue is that Ward Tools has been able to include HT/VT assignments because that data exisits in local MLS as well as the MLS exports. But AFAIK this data still does not exist in central databases at Church headquarters, which feed both the web site and LDS Tools. So that fundamental problem needs a back-end solution.