These changes are scheduled to be deployed Dec 17 - 19.

Introduction

At least 4 times per year a member of the Think Ministry team will update all MinistryPlatform implementations to ensure consistency across all systems.  During this update, we make changes to your setup area, database, nightly routines & report server. While each MinistryPlatform implementation has unique customizations, our goal is to ensure each implementation has the same core database objects and reports. On occasion, we may also take this opportunity to update stored procedures in use by one of our other applications.

New Features

• A sort order can be applied to Product Option Prices. This will allow the user creating an event registration product to ensure the options presented to the end user are in the desired order. For example, T-shirt options might be listed as Small, Medium, Large, XL regardless of alphabetical order or order entered.

Reports Added

• Birthday List: This report shows the individuals who have a birthday for a given date range with pictures.
• Find Donor Households*: This report is similar in purpose to the “Find Donors” report.  However, it will return a list of households whose total giving matches the criteria provided.  It can create a selection of all heads or all household members who qualify.
• Selected Donation Mail Merge: This report can create a mail merge file for selected donation records on the Donations page or donations records within selected Batches on the Batches page. Each row in the resulting report will contain data about the donation and up to 4 distribution records.
• Selected Group Rollscan Roster: This report produces a roster with a 3of9 barcode for the selected groups.  It is similar in function to the report titled Selected Program Groups Rollscan Roster.

*Only users with either the “Administrator” or “Stewardship Manager” security roles can use these reports.

Reports Updated

• Copy Selected Donations: Stored procedure change only to prevent an unlikely issue in churches with a non-standard database name.
• Donation Listing – Simple: Added new parameters and new columns. Made the Programs parameter into a multi-select parameter.
• Mission Trip Donations: Formatting changes to improve page breaks.
• Selected Call List:  Re-deployed to address an occasional issue reported by some churches whereby the report would take a long time to render.
• Selected Campaign Donor Summary (& Export):  Added beneficiary, optimized for faster performance.
• Selected Contact Facts: This report now prints Past Groups separate from Current Groups. It now prints Feedback. The user can elect to hide the chart.
• Selected Donation Letters: This report can now be run from the Batches page.
• Donor Stmt: 2 Column (& Selected):  Increased the width of the description field.
• Donor Stmt: 4 Column (& Selected): Preventing the description field from expanding to multiple lines which would impact page # calculations. An “Item Number” column was added.
• Donor Stmt: 5 Column: A fix was made for the “continued next page” text so it would appear only when needed.
• Selected Event Summary: Added a parameter to filter by Ministry.  Added a multi-select parameter to filter by Group Role Type.  Participation Status is now a multi-select parameter.
• Selected Group Call List: Enhancements include:
  • User can look for people who haven't been since a date
  • User can look for people absent on a date
  • User can look for people last seen on a specific date
  • User can filter attendance to an event type
  • User can save/create a selection back into Participants page to communicate with resulting group members.
• Selected Group Directory Photos: Several parameters were added to impact what prints and who prints:
  • User can look for group members who will be in the group “as of” a specific date.
  • User can print the notes and elect different dates to add (start date, end date, etc.)
  • User can determine whether to show a role or not
  • User can print only individuals “not seen since”
  • User can determine if the printed results will honor the “unlisted” preferences of the set by the individual on the Portal for things like address, phone, email, etc.
• Selected Group Participation Summary: Formatting changes to prevent overlapping by report elements in the final output.
• Selected Labels: Improved how Foreign Country name is printed
• Selected Labels – 1 per family: Zip+4 will show when present.  Foreign Country printing improved.  Improved printing of last names for spouses with different last names.
• Selected Mail Merge – 1 per family: Added columns for Donor “Envelope Numbers”.  Added option to hide the address block field.  Zip+4 will show when present.  Foreign Country printing improved.  Improved printing of last names for spouses with different last names.
• Selected Program Group Participants – Optimized the underlying query in the stored procedure.
• Selected Publication Household Export: Zip+4 will show when present.  Foreign Country printing improved.  Also improved the printing of last names for spouses with different last names.
• Selected Publication Subscriber Export: Zip+4 will show when present.  Foreign Country printing improved. 

Nightly Routines Added/Changed

• Data Quality:
  • When two households share the same address record a copy will be made and assigned to one of them. This can be turned off by changing the value of the new “CopySharedAddresses” Configuration Setting from Yes to No.
  • Duplicate Donor Account records will be combined now even if they have slightly different “Institution Name” fields. In order to be considered a duplicate, the account record must have the same donor and exactly identical account & routing numbers.

Configuration Settings Added/Changed

• New configuration setting: “CopySharedAddresses” will, when the value is set to “yes” make a copy of any address record shared by two households and assign that new address to one of the households so that each household has a unique address record.

General Database Changes/Additions

• New Field: A new text field was added to the Contacts page called “Current School”. Many of our churches already had this field. It is now standard and was added only when not already present.
• New Field: A new integer field was added to the “Product Option Prices” page called “Sort Order”
• Updated Stored Procedure: The Combine Contacts Core Tool will now return only the first 500 duplicate records.  If more than 500 duplicates exist these will be loaded in subsequent uses of the tool after the initial 500 are cleared. If you wish to combine a specific duplicate you may launch the Combine Contacts tool from that contact’s open record.
• Updated Stored Procedure: Updated the stored procedure associated with report deployment.

Stored Procedure Dropped & Re-created

• api_CoreTool_ContactMerge_FindDuplicates
• report_Groups_Selected_Roster_Parent_Info
• report_Campaign_Selected_Donor_Summary
• report_Contact_Households_Selected
• report_Contacts_Daily_Birthday_List
• report_Contacts_Selected
• report_Contacts_Selected_Facts
• report_Donation_Listing
• report_Donation_Selected_Letter
• report_Donor_Search_Households
• report_Donations_Selected_Copy
• report_Event_Selected_Event_Participants
• report_filter_group_role_types
• report_filter_letters
• report_filter_participant_types
• report_Group_Contacts_Selected
• report_Groups_Selected_Roster_Parent_Info
• report_Program_Groups_Selected_Roster
• report_Program_Selected_Group_Participants
• report_Publication_Household_Subscribers
• report_Publication_Selected_Subscribers
• report_Value_Letter
• service_data_quality
• util_CreateMPReport