CrossConnector is Getting Real
March 31st, 2006
CrossConnector is Getting Real!
In just a few days, we’re going to open the doors to CrossConnector. This is a moment I’ve been anticipating for a long time. We’ve been working hard to finish up the last-minute details and make sure everything works the way it should.
So tell your church, your missionary friends, and anybody who does missions or ministry to check out CrossConnector!
What is CrossConnector? Basically, it’s a tool for managing and publishing ministry work. We like to call it a functional blog, because it also helps you do things like plan mission trips, organize ministry group schedules, and communicate with people like teams, supporters, and friends. When you save a project, event, or message, it automatically appears on your public CrossConnector site (unless you have created a private project). People who visit your website can see your projects, messages, and files (so you can share pictures and other things like a packing list for a mission trip).
What can you do with CrossConnector?
- Plan short-term mission trips
- Organize small group Bible studies
- Research mission work in different parts of the world
- Communicate with your supporters, teams, friends, and family
- Anything involving ministry work!
Features that made it into version 1.0:
Projects
- Publish your ministry projects (mission trips, church activities, etc.)
- Email project info to teams
- Track events for projects
- Protect private projects with a password
Messages
- Publish messages, blog-style
- Let people comment on your messages
- Email messages to your teams
Files
- Upload files (you get up to 1 GB of storage)
- Upload pictures, PDF files, Word and Excel documents, and pretty much any kind of documents
Teams & Leaders
- Set up any number of teams
- Create leaders who can post messages, projects, and files
- Send email messages to teams
Best of all, you can try everything for free! The free version gives you full access to all the features on the system for planning one project at a time. If you need to plan more projects, you can choose from the Personal account, which lets you plan three projects at a time for $3.00 per month, the Pro account, which gives you 15 projects for $9.00 per month, and the Unlimited version, which opens it up wide with unlimited projects for just $24.00 per month.
Check out CrossConnector today!
A note on the title of this post… I finally bought a copy of 37signals’ book Getting Real, which is a fantastic book for anyone developing applications for the web. Jason Fried and 37signals have been a tremendous inspiration to us throughout the development of CrossConnector, and we owe them an enormous thanks: Jason, thank you for Getting Real, and for giving the world Ruby on Rails. We couldn’t have done it without you!
2 Responses to “CrossConnector is Getting Real”
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April 1st, 2006 at 08:31 AM Looks like you're spending a lot of time nailing the details and doing a fine job promoting the product! You're not hiding your inspiration from 37 Signals (a fantastic group to select as role models.) That said, curious that you haven't mentioned anything about security and data backup/exporting -- a subject they've spent a lot of time articulating.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:37 PM Andrew: You're right on - 37signals' business model is definitely successful, and several other companies are using it successfully. Their legacy will be that they shared their knowledge instead of keeping it for themselves. To answer your question about security: We use an Equifax secure certificate to encrypt credit card transactions. To protect our customers' billing information, we do not store any credit card numbers in our database. Our credit card gateway allows us to set up recurring transactions that are billed monthly without requiring us to keep the billing information in our database. Our server is an Apple XServe G5 running Mac OS S Server 10.4 with RAID mirroring for data storage. We use PostgreSQL for the database and Ruby on Rails for the application. As far as backups - I know that it's important for people to be able to export their data. We don't have that capability right now, but we will in the near future.