Project History
Bellevue Baptist Church experienced a dilemma in 2007. Bellevue found that the commercial and proprietary church management system they had been utilizing to manage the church was no longer meeting its needs. In November of 2007, Bellevue initiated the bvcms project, an endeavor to write a new ChMS from the ground up. In May of 2008, BVCMS was introduced to the Bellevue staff for read-only access. The legacy system continued to be utilized for all data entry, but BVCMS became the option of choice for searching and reporting. In August of the same year, Bellevue extended access to BVCMS to the Bible fellowship teachers and lay leaders so that they could better manage and track their groups. Then just two months later, in October, the old system was unplugged. The entire legacy system had been retired in less than one year. By April 2009, five hundred active users were working with BVCMS.
BVCMS was such a success (including rave reviews from Bellevue's in-house user base) that it made sense to share this innovation with other churches. It did not make sense to add yet another commercial and proprietary solution to the marketplace. So instead Bellevue made the the source code available to the public under an Open Source license and the particular license chosen disallows any commercial venture to incorporate any part of the code into their own commercial products. This guaranteed that the source code for BVCMS would forever be free and open to the world. On April 19, 2009, the first public release of the code was made available on CodePlex, an open source project repository. Today, BVCMS is utilized by churches across the country and around the world.
David Carroll, the developer of BVCMS, has started a company (bvcms.com), completely separate from Bellevue, to host, support and continue to develop BVCMS for other churches as a service-based commercial business. Bellevue has graciously offered to allow the use of their Internet connection and server room to house bvcms.com servers.
Future
Our current goal is to reach 200 hosted churches on bvcms.com by the end of 2011. This will give us a base of revenue to support continued development of the project as other churches sponsor and participate in the continued development of the system. There are many opportunities for adding new features to the system. We keep a list of things we want to do and where we want to go with BVCMS.
Learn More Through Our Blogs
We figure there are two types of people in the audience. The first group is made up of regular people like pastors, assistant pastors, administrators, leaders, and staff. We've tried answer many of your questions on this site. If you have a burning question you can't find an answer to, just use the contact page to get in touch. You can watch our videos (most no longer than five to ten minutes) showing the system in use. There is a live Demo system you can register for. Finally, check out our Webinars which are the primary means of training on our system.
The second group is much more technical like information technology admins at churches, software developers, database admins, etc. Some of you are just curious about the technology we are using. Others are investigating the feasibility of the system for your church. Some may want to get involved in the project and contribute patches and source code to the system. Potential contributors who develop software will want to investigate the Docs where guidelines for contributing to the open source project will be published.
Because we want to keep you looking and interested, there is a blog which you can subscribe to keeping you apprised of what's going on with the project. There is also a separate blog just for developers. You can subscribe to all blog posts or to a specific category of posts if you wish.
Get the Media Kit
Includes:
- High resolution JPEG bvcms logo
- 3 press releases
- Press contact information