What's free is the source code for building the software, the support and hosting are not free. If you had the expertise to learn the system by yourself and host it yourself, then it would be free, but there would be a cost. That cost would be your time and effort to learn and do all that is required to host and support the system yourself. So, if you need our help, we simply ask you to pay for our time and effort. But that said, our pricing is very reasonable and much less than you'd pay for any other Church Management System in the marketplace, primarily because the software itself is free.
We want you to be successful for the Kingdom. We can't guarantee that you will be but we can really help you achieve that, at least as far as the software goes.
We do this out of love for the church primarily but also to support our families. But if you have the desire and the expertise necessary to manage all this yourself, then by all means do so. And tell us your success stories. We'd love to know about those churches that are successful doing this themselves!
Sure, but keep in mind these points:
Keep in mind that BVCMS is not a small application. It is a large enterprise based application with tons of sophisticated features.
First of all not all hosting sites support a Microsoft Server platform. Many only support PHP, Ruby, and MySql.
The problem with third party hosting is, while it is feasible from a hardware and platform perspective, is that the third party costs would not include support with BVCMS itself. You would have to come up to speed with all that expertise yourself. Furthermore, we are under very active development using Agile methodology, meaning we publish new releases regularly most of the time once a week. This would put an extra burden on you to keep your system up to date. And occasionally, there is a database schema change that goes with the new release and that means your existing database would have to be altered via script to match the new source. You would also need to pay for a SSL certificate. It is not a good idea to host sensitive Church data travelling across non encrypted Internet lines (the classic scenario is sitting in Starbucks while logging in to your server.) Lot of hidden costs down that road.
On the other hand, we are experts hosting the software. You will have your own database on our SQL Server 2008 box. We'll let you download backups whenever you like, it's your data. And for the cost of hosting, you get our full support in use of the software too. Training, questions, support calls, new feature requests, etc.
You will share one of two Web server instances with other churches. You will have your own URL of https://{mychurch}.bvcms.com. The host header would direct users logging in there to your own database. You manage your own users and roles. We are there to help but your own people manage and maintain the data and people.
I think if you count the costs of third party hosting vs BVCMS hosting, you will find that we are way less expensive and certainly less hassle.
BVCMS is written in C# on the .NET Framework and uses the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC application development platform. It runs on a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The database is SQL Server 2008 R2. The database access layer uses LINQ to SQL, an object relational mapping feature of the C# language. It is deployed on a web-server and a separate database server. This configuration should never see any scalability issues with the typical demands of a church database. In fact, our current severs should be able to support at least 200 churches of moderate size and thousands of users without breaking a sweat.
BVCMS has been tested and works with FireFox, Chrome, Safari and IE7+ web browsers.
Nightly backups are transferred over a secured connection to the cloud-based Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) immediately after the backup is complete. Daily backups are kept for one month, weekly for another two months, and monthly backups since database creation.
The software is updated at least weekly with the latest code. There is virtually no disruption during most of these updates, active users will only notice the new feature appearing and their current session will continue without effect. Occasionally database schema updates are necessary and may require the system to go offline for a few minutes, typically late at night.
Open source software is computer software code that is made available to the public under a software license agreement that permits users to use, change and improve the software and redistribute it under the terms of the license agreement. While open source software is free, (there is no purchase price) it does have obligations to users. Bvcms is licensed under the GNU General Public License which requires any derived works to be made available under the same license. This guarantees that the project will be forever free to users and developers.
There are several ways Bellevue benefits from making its software available under an open source license:
Churches receive the ability to control the future development of the church management system (ChMS). No longer is a church dependent upon a proprietary vendor whose decisions are oftentimes motivated primarily by financial gain.
The system is designed by users for users.
The danger of being abandoned by a company due to any number of reasons is mitigated by having the source code to the system. Should the original developers discontinue the project anyone can continue to improve the project with the available source code.
There is a company behind the software (see next question). That company just doesn't make any money selling licenses to the software (it sells services).
Usage Defined Software - a software development and consulting company owned by David Carroll, the developer of bvcms for Bellevue.
Bellevue Baptist Church.
Your data is secured in several ways:
Lots more than we have ever seen on the system.
Bellevue is a large church with lots of people and lots of historical data. Here are the stats on Bellevue (as of 2/2/11):