I acquired a new follower on twitter today and they appeared just after I’d tweeted wanting to know if anybody wanted an independent review of hardware or software. Now the two may not be linked but shortly after Tim Cool (great name by the way) of Cool Solutions Group asked me to supply my ‘unbiased thoughts‘ on ministrEspace.

I was happy to oblige as anything that gives me something to write about is good for the blog and good for me as it keeps my creative juices flowing.

So just what is ministrEspace? Well in their own words it is “the low cost, web-based software solution for all your ministry space scheduling needs“.

So what did I think then?

Overall the visual appeal is bright and clear with all the initially obvious info required being readily available. The layout is uncluttered and very straightforward – something they have managed to maintain throughout the entire site.

To test it properly I needed to sign up to a trial account – this, in keeping with the site, was straightforward and uncomplicated. The trial account gives a full 30 days to test which should be more than enough for any ministry / organisation to test and I’ll come back to the pricing later.

What really pleased me about the signup is that they enforce a modicum of effort from the new user in creating a harder than usual password. Regular readers will know I’m a fan of tough passwords and was more than satisfied by being allowed to use all regular characters and numbers as well as !@#$%^&*. The password process insists that you use at least one capital and one number – good but still not quite good enough in my view. Still, it took my 12 character upper, lower case, numbers and non-std character password without missing a beat.

The downside of the signup form is the captcha. I understand it’s need and use a very basic one myself on my contact form – but it isn’t clear what case I need to enter the captcha as. the first one I was presented with also gave me an O (for orange) or 0 (zero) but it wasn’t clear enough and I got it wrong. The second I deliberately enetred lowercase as most captcha’s I fill in don’t appear to care. This one does and perhaps a little note advising that it needs to be entered exactly as seen would help.

That said, it was straightforward and my confirmation eMail arrived almost instantly.

Login / Usage:

First view on logging in is a very clean and straightforward interface giving five basic options.

From my point of view, especially on first login, I think you should be directed to the setup page. It’s fairly obvious that this needs to be done but I guess it’s a simple programming process to force one to the setup page on first login … and for that matter subsequent ones until the setup is undertaken.

Setup is straightforward and you are offered eight areas to setup. You can configure as many or as few of these as you necessary.

The 8 areas are:

• General – configure the name of your ministry / upload a logo.
• Approval Areas – An approval area is a group of spaces or resources that have similar approval requirements.
• Users – Add or remove users, reset passwords, grant permissions, etc.
• Categories – Events can be grouped into categories which make them easier to find when searching.
• Forms – You can create forms that must be filled out when certain spaces or resources are requested.
• Spaces – Spaces are the various rooms, buildings, and outside fields that comprise your ministry’s physical campus.
• Resources – Resources are additional items that can be requested for an event, such a projectors, musical equipment, etc.
• Services – eg: Childcare, Sound Technician, etc.

The remaining four views are as easy to follow / understand as the setup screen with that obviously being the most time consuming and also most important one.

A minor bugbear in setting up is that it becomes repetitive and I tried to find a shortcut and ended up throwing up a SQL error. However, I need to remember that this service is still in beta and that issues are liable to crop up.

Once the setup process is finished the next obvious step is to do some scheduling. This is done under the “find a space” tab. A simple form belies the power of the service being supplied here and so long as you’ve been careful with your setup and naming conventions then there should be little problem to users.

Each of the entry boxes is a ‘click and select’ for date and time with the later being restricted to every ¼hr for start and finish – I don’t see this as being an issue for most people.

What I did find as strange in this area is that if you opt for a recurring event then every section has to be filled in whether needed or not (and it isn’t clear that it should be filled in) and if you don’t a rather unhelpful SQL error is thrown up. You have to remember that this is still in beta though and it is likely that most if not all of these bugs will be caught prior to full launch. After filling in the initial screen you get directed to the room selection where you have two options. Clicking calendar takes you to an overall view of the rooms but no obvious way to get back, whilst clicking ‘create event’ takes you into the nitty gritty of the scheduling.

Here you get to confirm the meeting, name it, add notes, make it public (it isn’t clear what this achieves) and even set a reminder. Next takes you to a date/time confirmation screen only be wary, as you will need to reset the recurrence of your event … this should be automatically carried through from the initial search screen – well I think it should.

One of the nice features of ministrEspace is the ability to have different users at three levels. There is administrator, sub-administrator and user. Admin has full access, the sub-admin has access only to those areas designated and users can only create events.

The only real differences from a users point of view is that you don’t see the setup page and you can’t auto-approve an event. Speaking from a personal point of view I think there should be an ability to ‘find a space’ without having to have an account created. At our Church we have many an event where someone wants to utilise Church space as a one off and I don’t see why they need a dedicated user account?

This aspect is also not 100% clear when signing up. Am I signing up to create an ‘Espace’ for me / my church / organisation or am I signing up to be a part of an existing one so that I can reserve rooms, services, facilities, etc? Or do I need to request an account via the administrator, which begs the question of how do I know my Church, etc is using this web app?

The other two tabs are ‘view calendar’ which is again straightforward and finally you have ‘reports’. This last has the ability to export to spreadsheet or PDF but to my looking appears quite restrictive. It would appear that you can only have a report on any one space or resource or service but not a combination of them. This, I would suspect, would be the most useful aspect of reporting in seeing usage of a resource in a certain room. It would appear, at first glance, that this is not possible.

So what about cost?

Cost is going to be a factor for anyone, especially in current climes. To me, the cost levels appear very reasonable but I have nothing to compare these against. I note that the levels are based on square footage but quite how the company monitor that (or maybe they don’t care) I simply don’t know.

Still for me the main question on pricing, whatever level you sign up at, has to be is the service worth paying a recurring monthly fee for? For those that don’t have this functionality already and I suspect most of the larger churches already have then I can see it being beneficial.

Quite why one would spend the effort in configuring your rooms, resources, etc only to use it for one month I don’t really get. If you’ve gone to that effort then you’ll want to keep it going and I guess ministrEspace are possibly banking on that. I can see one off or annual events using it – such as Faith Camp in the UK which I have attended annually for the last 4yrs… next year we are trying River Camp.

Problems that need addressing.

• Ability to reserve space when not logged in – as mentioned above, I think an un-logged in access is required.
• On that note, a public display of availability would be useful. This could be embedded into a Church website or viewed by organisations that want to schedule the resources.
• Adding forms / resources / etc is time consuming so can’t see folks setting it all up only to stop using when the event has finished. There again they just might!
• As far as I can see one can’t delete scheduled events

Conclusion.

Overall I am impressed by the offering and can visualise uses for it, though some reservations do remain. I can see ministries utilising it and being able to use it even though they don’t have a technical bent.

I have to remember that the site is in beta and the errors I’ve encountered (reported as well) will likely be addressed. In fact, as I type I note that support has responded to my ticket to advise that deleting events “will be in version 1.1 which is due later this month”. I presume they mean January 2010 though.

As it stands I’d give it a hearty 4 out of 5 star recommendation and will certainly be pushing it at my church to use.

What say you?

Please note: All opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid or offered other services / goods for free to write this. Any inaccuracies are entirely mine and subject to my understanding of the service and its offerings.