What’s On Tap for CMD 2014...

There are a substantial number of updated and new features finished and planned for 2014.

Items Already Finished for 2014.1

• Return of Backup/Restore to/from any destination on the fly rather than being forced to only Backup to or Restore from a single, designated folder. CMD 2014 contains both the old way and the new way implemented in CMD 2012. You can use either one.
• The e-mail option for church directory Formats A,B, and C that was transferred a couple of years to the Customized Format, is now available again in Formats A, B, and C.
• A new addition to the end of the summary statement that can be used at year’s end that displays the specific contributions $250 or more after the summary information. That will save some space since the detail report for the other stuff is not really necessary and takes up too much paper.
• The new Prayer List feature to tracks prayer requests that come in to your church.
• You can now search by First Name or Goes By in the Name Search dialog rather than just by  Last Name.
• “Snapshot,” a new feature that can be selected as a startup item, gives you a few basic stats about names in your file as a summary so that you can see some basic stats at a glance.
• The Deposit ID sort has been reworked to provide the listing you used to see in CMD 2012 and prior but now without duplicate entries (which were caused by having items in the Deposit ID with more than one date). The change in 2013 was confusing to some because the list could no longer be sorted by descending date order. Now it is back in descending date order, and we’ve found a way to eliminate the duplicates.
• A new field allows you to determine whether or not a family’s picture should be made visible on the phone-sized app.
• A number of Output Forms in Print Names can now be sent to the clipboard including: Dates Lists, Family Name Only, Individual Name Only, Mailing Labels, Mail-merge, Name, Address, & Phone, Name & Phone, Name & E-Mail. This will make it easier and quicker to drop some of these lists into your word processor or publishing program without having to save the list to a disk file first.

Targets for CMD 2014.2

• A new grid-based Output Form will present data in a grid-like pop-up dialog. My goal is to give users some options on what is displayed in the grid.
• Ability for members to see their donations on-line through the web-enabled app.
• Ability for staff members (or designated lay-leaders/members) to mark attendance using the web-enabled, tablet-sized app. This will enable real-time attendance marking from right within the congregation during services.
• Add the ability to update items on the phone app (staff only) and some of the items on the tablet-sized app.
• Provide an easy way to export lists for group texting. Though there is some cost involved in sending mass texts, prices are pretty low (3-to-5 cents per phone number) and are still much less than using postage to send out announcements. This is a very efficient, and often more effective means of sending out group announcements or meeting reminders. I am trying to find just the right provider with whom I can create a more direct method of sending texts directly from CMD itself.

Upcoming Future Plans...

• CMD for Mac…not a reality yet, but my programming language now has a compiler that will allow for one code base to compile for both Windows and Mac versions. This is huge progress in my goal of having a fully-functional version of CMD that can be used with either platform. Plus, through the remote database server, a mix of PCs and Macs will be able to be on the same network accessing the same data files. I have purchased this new compiler update and will begin work on the revamp of CMD that will be required for it to work on both platforms as soon as CMD 2014 is ready for distribution. Because this is new and will require substantial retooling, I cannot give a target date yet as to when I will have something working for Mac. What I can say for sure, however, that CMD 2014 users will get the absolute best price on adding the Mac version to your CMD license when it is ready.

There are a number of smaller enhancements and utilities I’ll be adding, but these are the major things I’m planning for CMD 2014.

Click here to view changes in CMD 2013 and earlier...