Hi all.
Our church network use Office 365 as our foundational IT platform for most things that we do. With Flow and PowerApps offering extensive integration with hundreds of other platforms and apps, I would really like to adopt a ChMS that at least has a connector to hook into those.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen a ChMS that has that - they all seem to take the position of “In our ChMS you can use OUR tool for this and OUR mobile app and OUR workflow system and the only extensibility you have is what we have built in (unless you drop down to coding it yourself in an open platform)”
As an IT Pro I view the walled garden approach to systems very outdated. Microsoft have grasped the “interconnected” approach with both hands…does anyone know of a good ChMS that has also caught on to this paradigm shift in IT systems or are they truly all doing their own thing?
@Jag I would guess that no one has simply worked on this yet. I know that there are at least a couple ChMS that have a REST API; that ability should enable integration w/ MS Flow or anything else that can speak REST API (as supported). Are you looking for the ability to integrate, pre-built functions, or a drag and drop kind of thing?
A quick Google search on “microsoft flow api” turned up some useful results.
In addition to what Shawn said, I’m pretty sure I tested (years ago) a plugin from Mine Cart Studio that connected Rock to an Exchange server to pull in contacts and possibly record emails as communications in the RMS (ChMS) – but I don’t see it listed on their plugins page. I’ll mention this to them that there is new interest in such a plugin.
Thanks for the replies folks.
We already have a substantial amount developed in O365 - membership database, small groups, teams, bookable rooms, some reporting, file storage and a variety of other things.
Our church and church network are considering use of ChurchSuite. They do have a basic API but having built a range of business processes in Flow and some focussed apps in PowerApps, I am loathe to move to a situation where I need to go back to just using API calls instead of a properly developed connector.
I’ve looked at a range of ChMS options and I think you’re right that no one has a proper connector YET…just wish they would hurry up and get on with it
Chiming in here as a happy RockRMS user (disclaimer, I also serve on the board)… with Rock you’re not at the mercy of the product’s development team, you have the power to extend Rock. Bonus points for sharing with the rest of the Rock community… perhaps other churches have the same itch you have.
