Synchra - a step toward one less competing data source

Update 3/30/2006: You can now find information on Synchra from the brand new website: www.SynchraSoft.com.

One of my big desires is to have ALL common church data exist just one place where all the staff can share it.  This sounds so easy, but it's just too easy for staff to create a spreadsheet, or word document, or Outlook contacts, or (horrors) even post it notes, to maintain important data that should be shared, but now isn't.  Besides the lack of access to what should be shared data, there's also the problem of updates not getting properly distributed.  How often do you hear of problems where a church member changes an email address (or snail mail address), but continues to receive mail at the old location.  The church database is right, but some staff member is still using that "one off" copy from the old information.

It really bugs me when staff has this "one off" data.  But there is something worse.  That's when the IT staff is responsible for doing this!  We've been doing that for years.  Our Exchange Global Address List is manually maintained, and often has overlapping data with our church database, and sometimes it's wrong data.  How embarrassing.

Well, thanks to John West, an interested member of our church who is also a partner in a high-tech consulting firm, we've got a new solution called Synchra.  In it's most basic form, Synchra keeps our Exchange GAL up-to-date with changes that come from our Church Database.  It's very intentionally a one-way process, from Church Database to GAL, but it's also a very smart synchronization that protects against duplicate addresses, maintains existing groups and aliases, and has a lot of flexibility.

John wrote Synchra to be very flexible and amazingly robust.  It's also quite fast, processing our entire database and updating the GAL in just a minute or two.  Synchra is intended to work with nearly any database as long as it's possible to query it.  The flexibility is quite amazing.  Among the things Synchra does:

• Updates (doesn't replace) records in the GAL.  You can put these records into groups and they'll be maintained during updates.
• Protects against creating any duplicate email addresses.  If an address is already in the GAL, Synchra won't create a conflict record.
• Understands that sometimes spouses share an email address, and creates a record that has both names (Smith, John & Mary), continuing to make sure there are no duplicated email addresses.
• Since Synchra is entirely query based (and the query is in the config file), you can decide if you want to only put members into the GAL, or Members + Regular Attenders, or any other selection you choose.

When John first implemented Synchra, I was very pleased.  But, of course, I asked for a few changes.  John turned these around almost instantly and I was surprised out how quickly he could do that work.  Then I learned of John's forward thinking.  He didn't recode anything -- all the changes were defined in the config file!  That's pretty nice work.

John will be offering Synchra as a product in the near future, at a price, but a very attractive price.  If you think you might be interested, check out the Synchra web site.

Comments

[Brian Glass]

I'm planning to do something like this sometime next year. It's a slightly different problem though. We're using Fellowship One and don't have direct access to the database. We'll have to use Fellowship One's XML api called Data Exchange. I'd like to have it sync with an LDAP service.

Of course I have also submitted this as a feature request and it has been added to the product roadmap, so we'll see how it goes...

[AJ]

I'm most definitely interested.

[Austin Spooner]

Im interested

[Lew]

Count me in!