I got a chance to talk with someone yesterday who attended the NACBA Conference last week when Shelby announced Arena. He didn’t get a chance to get any more details from Shelby than we already know from Jon and others, but he did have an opportunity to talk with Jeff Hook for a while. As you would expect of a competitor, Jeff didn’t really have anything good to say about it. In fact I think he was pretty negative.
However, I really respect Jeff. I’m a big Fellowship One fan, and I really believe that if Shelby is to remain competitive and stop losing customers, they’re going to have to step it up a lot. I don’t doubt that CCV has an excellent product. I’m just concerned about what will happen when Shelby takes it over.
I’m sure Shelby will just tell you how great this is going to be, just like Jeff will tell you how big of a disaster it is. I like to hear opposing arguments. I know there’s truths and biases to both sides, and I’m pretty good at distinguishing between them. I’d be very curious to hear what each side has to say.
Shelby has a reputation of being on the dull edge of the spoon.
Hopefully this will catch them up a bit. They have been around for a long time, but that means they have a lot of anchors dragging on them to.
I believe we will try out Shelby Arena as soon as we get a chance. We looked at FellowshipOne briefly, but we were not interested.
Well, I can give you an opposing argument…
I don’t work for Shelby, but seeing as I’m the senior developer at CCV I do have quite the bias. I also was in the Arena booth at NACBA at Shelby’s invitation.
I do agree with you that Shelby has to “step it up a lot.” It was this sentiment that led us to develop our own ChMS system to begin with.
However, I think Shelby has made a lot of progress on the Arena product. I’ve worked very closely with them over the last 6 months and they’re making a lot of positive changes. Just a small example was how impressive the Arena booth was. We had marketing firms stop by just to comment on how great the look was.
I hope you can get a chance to talk with someone who actually stoped at the Arena booth and got a demonstration of the application. All our responses were very positive.
Jeff Hook did stop by the booth briefly, but I don’t think he’s had a chance to see the actual Arena product so I’m guessing his reservations are more about Shelby as a company than they are about the product. If so, I think Shelby is addressing those with Arena.
Just my two cents.
Brett, would you allow me to re-post some/all of this thread on the ChMS Discussion mailing list? http://groups.google.com/group/ChMS Or better, would YOU be willing to post/comment there? I’m trying to find that right balance between a bunch of individual blogs (all good) and a common-interest mailing list (also good). Great ideas welcomed!
Let me vouch for David. I’ve seen Arena and heard good things about the changes that Shelby Inc. has made to take on this product. I also have seen F1 (some time ago) and also love that product too.
Aside from core functionality, there could be two significant differences between the these products: price and extensibility.
Understanding that part of the cost for F1 goes toward paying Fellowship Tech run the system in TX, you’ll still need your server and admin with Arena. Ultimately we’ll have to see where the price for Arena lands.
As for extensibility, I’m hopeful for (and expecting) an Arena licensing option that lets you have the option to build your own extensions/modules. If this happens, Arena will become a *platform* for third party vendors, open source groups and churches that have developers (even if part time – like me).
Imagine the 30, 60 and 100 fold increase in module ‘fruit’ when other groups begin developing modules for Arena…think arena-forge.
-Nick
Well guys, I guess we’ll see. I’m rolling out Arena here as a pre-release customer, so I’ll know better by next week what the issues are. From what I can tell you right now, the install process went fairly smooth with our existing Shelby DB working seamlessly with the new Arena DB. Triggers are firing, data is in sync, and all is well. Some of the features of Arena are really going to make our small groups folks happy… more importantly, we still have our data here, so we can write whatever custom stuff we want to hit our data. More to come next week.
Well guys, Arena isn’t ready for prime time yet. Two weeks after the install, I’ve got problems with my data, and triggers that aren’t working. It appears that Shelby is NOT ready to make this product generally available by January 1st. They are working on the problem, but until I see results, I can’t give Arena a positive review. The product itself (the interface and functionality) is great, but don’t expect it to work out of the box, or expect the interface between Shelby and Arena to work as sold. They are having to do a ton of custom SQL to move our data from one system to another. More updates when we get stuff figured out.
Thanks for the updates Scott. Let us know how things progress.
Well, it’s been a year since I posted, so here is the update. After a year with Arena, I can say that we are pleased with the progress the product has made. One thing I can say for the Arena team is that the customer service has been great and they have gone above and beyond to help us out. It’s not a perfect system, but MAN is it customizable! We’re about to roll out our member portal that will run fully on Arena, and we’re please with the power that it gives us (and flexibility). I think it will only continue to improve. I’ll try to remember to post again once we launch our portal site.
We just attended the June 2008 OSI Conference in Orlando and have considered Fellowship One as well. It appears to me from ‘first glance’ that Arena IS ready for prime time. I’d love to know if you have any further comments since your last post in this subject was six months ago.