Friends,
I am far from being a novice to the computer, and I am very comfortable using many types of software. I program databases for a living and am one of the "go-to" guys in our church for IT issues. I must begin by saying that I absolutely LOVE Logos Bible software. I have been using it since either it's first or second release. That is why when Logos released Proclaim a while back, I was really excited.
When I first tried playing around with Proclaim, about a year ago, I found it incredibly clumsy. It is anything but intuitive, and since there was no real user's manual at the time, after spending about 8 hours getting frustrated with the software, I decided to shelve it and hope that things would change.
I am now re-addressing Proclaim, because we are interested in making some changes to our Church Presentation software. So, I spent a few more hours trying to make sense of Proclaim. Unfortunately, after a full year of waiting, and installing the new update, I find that essentially nothing has changed! Nor has there been any useful documentation made available.
Is it really too much to ask to have a "Save" button? Is it really too much to have a "Save AS" button so we don't have to RE-create an entirely new presentation for every service? Is it really too much to ask to have a list of songs that we use, rather than every time I add a song to any presentation, Proclaim just adds ANOTHER COPY of the SAME song to my list of "Reuse" items? Our church has a database of several hundred songs--has Proclaim thought about being able to import songs from other Church Presentation software suites?
Forgive me if I sound completely ungracious with this post, but that is not my intent. I had such incredibly high hopes for Proclaim because it was cloud-based and our worship team could be able to create services at home before the team ever arrived to rehearse, rather than scrambling to put it together while the musicians are playing. However, if I am having this much trouble navigating through this incredibly clumsy interface, I can't imagine how any of the others, who are less savvy with computers, would ever be able to figure this out!
Your online help is nearly worthless, as well, because there are no real instructions, and I am not one who thinks software should require a video lesson for every action. It took me an hour and a half to figure out that "Nursery Alerts" (something our church would require) were actually "Pager" alerts, and another ten minutes to figure out how to display one.
If anyone can show me how to simply use Proclaim software, I would be glad to retract or edit this post--but I'm just not getting it. I expected so much more from Logos, but I am simply amazed that anyone would use this software. If there were a way to provide ratings for this software, I would give it negative stars. My apologies to the software designers who put in so much hard work in developing it, but you have simply fallen short, and I won't even introduce our church to this software.
Warmest regards.