New Quick Start Tutorials

We have just added 3 brand new Quick start tutorial videos. These are just a few minutes each, and cover the most important aspects of the Worshipteam.com service. Right from the start, users can see how to quickly add people, build a worship list, place it in an event on the calendar, and assign people to the event. These basic steps will have you up and running Worshipteam.com quickly and easily.

The three new videos added are :

  • Add People – this shows you how to quickly add your people and build your teams/group.
  • Get Ready For Sunday – run through the 3 basic steps to preparing for your Sunday morning and practices by, selecting songs/building a set, assigning the set to the calendar, and assign people to the event.
  • Getting Started with Worshipteam.com – get overview of all the major sections, features and functions of the entire service. A great tour of the entire site.

Here is an example of the tutorial video. This is the “Get Ready For Sunday” quick start video.

[video:youtube:J18E4afBNQU]

These tutorial videos are available on the dashboard (landing page) immediately after you login to your Worshipteam.com account.

In addition, we have added 6 new tutorials regarding main sections or Worshipteam.com, including a tutorial video for: Calendar, Songs, Sets (worship lists), Documents, Communicate and People. These are available by selecting the (?) question mark icon on the main page of each section and clicking “Watch Video”.

New Song Resources Tab

Worshipteam.com is the central place for all your planning and preparation for worship. It provides built in lyrics, chord charts and full length audio for thousands of popular songs. But you may be interested in getting additional resources for various team needs. For example, if you loved the recent worship song “Hosanna” by Paul Baloche and are interested in buying a full CD that includes that song, you can use the “Resources” tab on the song for options for find where you can get any specific product or resource related to that song. For example, the user below went to the “Hosanna” song page and moused-over the “Resources” tab and sees the following:

The “Resources” tab reveals various products that are related to that specific song. Clicking on the image of that product will launch a browser page to bring you to that resource should you be interested in purchasing it, as below:

Additionally, the resource tab includes a link to possible digital versions of the song, such as AmazonMP3 songs. If you wanted to purchase the downloadable mp3 for the “Hosanna” song, you would select the “AmazonMP3” link at the bottom of the resources tab list on the Hosanna song (see the first image in this blog entry). This will lead you to the Amazonmp3 page on which the individual song can be purchased.

The goal here is to provide a single location where you can find resources for your songs should you need more than that lyrics, chord charts and online full length audio.

Latest Hillsong Project Added

We continue to add content weekly into the site. This last week, we added Hillsong latest release from London “Hail To The King”. The songs from that album are now live, with lyrics, chord charts and full audio online in Worshipteam.com.

Blessings
Kim

New Song Usage Stats and Reports

WorshipTeam.com is constantly improving to include new user-requested functionality, along with our award-winning interface and licensed song database. Today, we launched a great new song stats interface, which allows you to generate custom reports for how your group, church or teams are using songs. This starts with nice easy, browseable statistics viewable from the main songs area. For example, when you are in the SONGS section, simply mouse-over the “…” trailer shown on each song listing. Now, in addition to the first segment lyrics appearing for the song, you see a “Last Used” date of the song, so you know how recently you used this song. This is shown below (where the user moused-over the “…” for the Paul Baloche song “Hosanna”).

You’ll note there is a tiny report icon next to the last used date as well. Clicking that icon will take you to a page that will show the instant history of that song and its usage in your group/teams.

But for song statistics to be truly helpful, you might want to know more extensive details on usage. To create a customized report of songs ranked by usage, use the “Actions” drop down menu in the main SONGS area and select the “Song Usage” icon, as below.

You will be given the ability to generate custom song usage reports for any reason. You can select your group/team filters, set a date range, and even output the results in various sort options, as below.

Once you click “Search” your report will be displayed, showing the songs, number of times used and the last date used in your report.

Each song name in this report can likewise be selected, and the user will see detailed statistics on that specific song within the report. The individual song statistics look like this:

Either the general multi-song usage report or the individual song statistics report can be printed if needed. We are very excited to add this new feature and hope you get a chance to try it out.

God Bless
Kim Gentes
Worshipteam.com

NEW “Away Time” Feature

Worshipteam.com has many ways to schedule and manage events and people, but one thing that can help with proactively working on schedules and events is to have the ability for users to mark out away time, such as vacations, trips and other absences that they already know about. With the new “Away Time” feature, when a leader is planning an event or service, they can know during that planning if the person has already scheduled themselves to be away.

Using it is simple for each user. Just go to the CALENDAR section of the website workspace (once you have logged in) and select the “Enter Away Time” icon at the bottom of the calendar screen.

You will come to a screen that allows you to enter your away times.

Select the Start and End dates for the time you will be away.

Click the “Save” button and the away segment will be added to your list of away times.

You can add multiple more away time segments if you wish.

You are done! Now, when a leader attempts to schedule you, if the event is occurring on one of your “away” times, a special notification and color will indicate that you have previously listed yourself as unavailable.

NEW: Instant Capo Chord Charts

WorshipTeam.com allows you to instantly create Capo chord charts that are both accurate and synchronized with the audio of the original song. This feature has been available for a few months, but some haven’t known it, so we wanted to highlight this feature. Here is a quick example of how to create a Capo chord chart.

The song “Sweetly Broken” is a popular song (by Jeremy Riddle) that is recorded and commonly done in the key of B. Since “B” is not a guitar-friendly key, this can quickly be capoed to the key of A and rendered as a capo chord chart.

Step 1 – Unselect the “PITCH SHIFT AUDIO” checkbox on the left of the player control while displaying the song. This will ensure that the audio stays in the key of B while the chords are changed to a different key (for Capo playing).

Step 2 – Select the capoed key that you wish to play the song in. Selecting the key of A for Sweetly Broken will display the song in the new key without pitch-shifting the audio.

They chords are now in A for playing, while the audio is in B for listening.

Step 3 – Use the “Save As View” selection from the “Actions” menu. This will save the new view you have just created.

Step 4 – Verify the new view name. You will be prompted that the system recognizes that the audio and chords don’t match and it thinks you may be trying to create a capo chord chart. Select “OK” on this prompt to verify that this current view will be saved as a capo chord chart.

Step 5 – The view is saved, labeled and it is now usable to add to sets and access any time. Additionally, it has a special note tag at the top of the chord chart that explains how to position and play the capo chord chart.

Nice work! You just created your first Capo chord chart. Now that capo chord chart is accessible as a view of that song for you whenever you need it. You only have to create it once and it is accessible from then on.