Services lets you bring just about all your service-planning details into one place — team members, their statuses, times, notes, items, songs, files, details and more. But many team members don’t need to see all of that information, so it can end up adding unnecessary confusion.
We’ve released two features that will simplify things for your team members by showing specific features only to teams that need them. First, Rehearsal Teams are a new team type that give access to the media player, songbooks, and item files. And second, Team Schedule access lets you hide the Order tab completely.
What’s a Rehearsal Team?
Teams come in many varieties, but there is a way to break it down into two main types.
- Teams who show up and then get instructions.
- Teams who rehearse or prepare for the service ahead of time.
Teams who need more preparation are often doing things like practicing music, preparing the lyric slides, or setting up lighting queues, and they’re usually doing it by accessing music or other files attached to the service order. These are the teams we’re now calling Rehearsal Teams.
It’s important to note that this changes the norm. Most teams are not Rehearsal Teams, and therefore their team members won’t see item files or the media player (unless they have Viewer permissions or higher). If your team needs rehearsal tools, you will now take an additional step of making that team a Rehearsal Team. Don’t worry though, in the obvious cases, we’ve already done this for you.
Setting Rehearsal Teams
When you create a new team, you’ll have the option to make it a Rehearsal Team right there.
If you choose any of the Common Teams in the Music or Tech categories, they’ll already be Rehearsal Teams. But you can also change a team’s type at any time from its settings page.
We’ve already run a script comparing all existing teams with common music and tech team names, and set those as Rehearsal Teams. We also realized we couldn't catch all of them on our own, but we've made your part really easy! The next time Administrators view a plan in a Service Type, if any of those teams aren’t set, a popup modal will appear where you can choose each team’s type.
If you aren’t sure about any teams, leave them set to Ask Later. You can then set them from each team’s settings page, or until all teams are set, you’ll see an orange warning icon in the Team header of the plan that you can click to get back to that popup.
Team Schedule Access
Rehearsal Teams let you hide rehearsal tools from the order, but the order itself is still visible. This is good for teams like Ushers who might want to see the order to know when they’re passing the offering, but don’t actually need to rehearse anything ahead of time.
For other teams who don’t need access to the order at all, you can hide it completely by using a new team setting. Change Plan Access for Scheduled Viewers to Team Schedule to allow them to access their teams and related info in the plan, but hide the Order tab.
Transition Time
Right now we’re in setup mode. Any teams can be set as Rehearsal Teams or given Team Schedule access, but this doesn't do anything just yet, since it only pertains to Scheduled Viewers, and they can’t even access the new page yet. After a few weeks, hopefully most Rehearsal Teams will be set, and we’ll finally let Scheduled Viewers opt in to the new plan page. When they switch over, their first experience will be as simple as you set it up to be.
At that point, we’ll only be hiding rehearsal tools or the order from the new page, not the mobile app, and never from the old page. Once we finish the transition to the new page and the old page goes away later this year, we’ll also apply these settings to the mobile app.