Web Service Every Church Needs to Know About
First I apolagise to all the hard core technical and Java people for making you read the title of this post. I know that church related things are pretty off topic for this blog, but I just found a really awesome SAAS web-based application that I had to talk about.
Almost all churches use CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) to handle their copyright requirements. It is a pretty good service that centralises the management of copyright for music. I was looking at some software to help make the data projector at church run better (EasiSlides looks promising), when I went across to the CCLI site. They have released the coolest addition to the standard CCLI offering, SongSelect. Song Select is a great resource that provides online access to the CCLI songs including all the features you would hope for (like chord charts, lyrics, a music player and automatic transposition of songs). I was initially just looking for something to help me get the words into a form suitable for data projection, but this looks like a product which will be much more useful.
Technologywise, SongSelect is running as a Flash App. and is just all round cool. It is stuff like this that gets me excited. It's really IT that helps makes peoples lives work better. Even if I wasn't a committed Christian (and I am), this would be cool, because it does everything that a bunch of people need it to do, and makes peoples lives better and more fun.