All About Oikos

When we launched Oikos Version 1, we received plenty of feedback on the calendar. The old calendar would only allow individual dates and events that would repeat perpetually. On the dates that repeated, if the event was edited, every instance of that event was changed.

The Oikos Version 2 calendar is much more robust. You can add events that repeat continuously, or have repeating events within a specified date range. Individual dates in repeating events are editable (or deletable).

The calendar handles all the public events for your Oikos. It can also aggregate events from the groups in your Oikos. When an event is added to a group calendar by its administrator, there is the option to publish that event to the public calendar.

The new version of Oikos will allow you to subscribe to iCal and RSS feeds.

One of the major requests for improvement for the next version of Oikos, was for there to be more ways to personalize the Oikos experience. People felt very restricted by the limited options, and we agreed that something should be done to help people make Oikos their own.

Our first idea for making Oikos more customizable was to make an easy-to-build home page. We got rid of the old rigid widget system and made widgets that are extremely flexible. There are widgets for putting photos, videos, audio, and text on the home page. What’s cool is that these new widgets can be moved anywhere on the page, they can be resized, and they can overlap each other.

The image above is an example of a simple Home page made with the new widgets. The background is a default image that comes with Oikos V2. The flower/gear picture, the Oikos logo and the boxes around the text are all instances of the Photo widget. All the writing you see is contained in Text widgets. You can use any color for your text and choose from several font types. Text widgets support simple HTML, so it’s possible to make clickable links to other web pages.

As we said in the previous post, we hid the chat feature in the footer so it wouldn’t take up screen space when it wasn’t being used.

When you click the far left-hand part of the footer, it opens a list of all your friends. When you click one of the names from the list, a chat window pops up. You can move the chat window around the screen and you can resize it if you want.

When you compare Oikos V1 and V2 friends lists, you see that the layout for V2 is simpler and uses less screen space. You can still view the status of your friends, and you can check for messages that people have sent while you were off-line. If someone who is not already your friend sends you a message, you can make them your friend with a single click.

In the new version of Oikos, you can have multiple chat windows open on your screen.

And finally, if you’re in the middle of doing something else in Oikos, and you don’t have any chat windows open, V2 will pop up a little notifier in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen to let you know when someone has sent you a message. Just click on the notifier and the chat window will open.

We received a lot of great feedback when we released Oikos V1. While people had plenty to say about what they liked about Oikos, they also had a few improvements that they wanted to see. We were happy to oblige.

The original version was optimized for a 1024 x 768 screen resolution, but would not expand for higher resolutions. What’s more, there were elements that always stayed on the screen (like group navigation and the chat window) which made them easy to find, but they took up valuable screen space when they were not being used.

The new Oikos makes full use of your computer screen, it expands to completely fill your browser window. The bigger your screen, the more you can see.

We also hid the chat window and the group navigation so that when you weren’t using them, they wouldn’t take up space.

Oikos V2 has a header that holds your organization’s logo, and can display your organization’s name if you’d like. The header also contains the buttons that were formerly on the left-hand side of Oikos V1.

The footer for V2 holds everything that pertains to the Oikos member. The far left-hand part of the footer is where we hid the chat feature.

To the right of chat is a menu called MyStuff; it’s where members can access and edit their profile, see their list of friends, check out the groups they belong to, and get a display of everything that happened in Oikos since they last logged in.

The left-hand side of the footer contains the buttons that were formerly on the top-right part of Oikos V1.

Each element of the footer will be explained more in following posts.

V2 allows you to upload any image you’d like to have as the background for your Oikos (or you can use the ones we supply). You can regularly change the background to keep things fresh.

Stay tuned for more of Introduction to Oikos Version 2. We’re really happy with the changes we’ve made, we hope you will be too.

In the early days, when we were planning to make Oikos, we decided we wanted to build a web application that could grow with the communities who were using it. We didn’t want to have different versions of Oikos, where we would release a version, wait a year or two, then release a new version. We wanted Oikos development to be an ongoing process, with lots of small updates. It’s an idea we still believe in, but because the first major upgrade to Oikos is so huge, we felt the need to call it Version 2 (V2).

Oikos is built on the Adobe Flash platform. Right after we finished building Oikos Version 1 (V1), Adobe released a much better version of Flash– a version that was incompatible with their prior release. We had a decision to make. We wondered, “Do we continue to build with the old version of Flash, or do we go back to the drawing board and start from scratch?” We decided our only option was to start all over again, building with the new version of Flash.

The good news is that the new version of Flash is better in every way, which means the new version of Oikos will be better in every way. In the coming days, we are going to outline the differences between Oikos V1 and V2. We hope you like what you see.

We are in the middle of a major update to Oikos. It’s so much of an update, you might consider it a new version. But the crew here at Simon like to think of our services as ongoing projects, and we feel that the next major update, while broad in scope, is right in line with what we’ve always planned to do: release Oikos to the best of our abilities, listen to feedback, and make it even better.

We’ve gotten brilliant feedback from Oikos users and we want to turn those ideas into reality. Some of the upcoming improvements:

• Liquid Layout. Oikos will grow and shrink to make full use your computer screen.
• More Customization. The next update will offer more ways to personalize the Oikos experience.
• Comments on Media. Right now in Oikos, you can comment on blogs, profile pages, and in the forums. We’re going to offer commenting on pictures and video, allowing more ways to interact.
• Improved Calendar Functionality. You’ve spoken, and we’re working. The new calendar will be more robust and also support iCal.

There’s much more in the works than what is listed. If you have a good idea to make Oikos better, and you haven’t let us know about it yet, please jump in the forum and make yourself heard.

We’re here to help!

With our latest release, we fixed a bug in the calendar where, in the week view, November 4th showed up twice.

We also decided to try something new with the way we handle feedback for Oikos. In the spirit of Web 2.0, we want to make feedback collaborative.

In the olden days of Oikos feedback, you’d click the feedback button, type what you wanted to say, and then you’d click submit. We’d get an email with what you said, we’d process it, and we would email a reply. It worked dandy, for one-on-one communication, but we noticed that people were sending us similar ideas, and similar problems.

We realized that if we kept all the feedback in a public place, there could be a collective understanding of Oikos, both strengths and weaknesses. People could share tips with each other, and brainstorm on ways to make Oikos better. Instead of waiting for a response from us, Oikos users could search the forum for answers, instantly.

We think this will improve the overall Oikos experience.

The feedback button in Oikos will now have a link to the forum, or you can use the following link.

http://forum.oikoshq.com

Sweet! We’re pumped and honored that Oikos is receiving buzz around the internet. We’ll keep you up to date with all the latest news here on the blog. Check out the following buzz links:

Oikos is Ning for Church Goers
Mashable! - http://www.mashable.com

Similar to a Ning network, you can create a branded network for your church so the members can stay connected in an offline community. There are groups, profiles, blogs, calendars, media-sharing and widgets, which are based on the different sections of your network. Oikos is developed by a company called Simon Solutions, which specializes in faith-based online tools, including a Charity tracker and a Prayer pipeline service as well. Each network created is private, so you won’t be able to find and communicate with members of other churches. Read more …

Oikos.com - God-Friendly Social Networking
Killer Startups - http://www.killerstartups.com

Who said that church needs to stick to their old fashioned path? With Oikos churches everywhere can get out of the stone age and build their very own online communities, keeping in touch beyond the obligatory Sunday morning mass. Oikos lays claim to some pretty snazzy features too. MySpace could only wish to look this sharp. Among its features are music and photo sharing, discussion groups, calendaring, event listings, and collaboration. Oikos integrates with your existing website; they also take care of all the technical details so you can focus on podcasting your sermons, organizing prayer meetings, sending group emails, and running campaigns. Of course, Oikos is nothing less than secure and safe. Pricing starts at $14 a month for 1-49 users, and goes up to $295 a month for 900+ users. Read more …

Enhance Ministry, Deepen Relationships through Simple, Safe Online Social Networking Tools

FLORENCE, AL, August 8, 2007 - With a desire to ignite a passion within the Christian community to connect and communicate in new ways, Simon Solutions Inc. has introduced Oikos, a revolutionary online community-building platform with which congregations, ministries, schools, and cell groups can connect, share, and communicate online all in a secure environment. Oikos, also the Greek term for household, was developed by the folks at Simon Solutions that have a zeal for ministry and are motivated by their desire to provide innovative solutions to build up community within the worldwide Christian Church.

People desire deeper personal connections with one another, and are constantly looking for ways to accomplish this within their busy lifestyles. With more and more people gravitating towards social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook in order to keep in touch and foster community, we realized that the Church could benefit from similar tools that are more secure and available to expand existing community groups online, says Mike Simon, visionary and president of Simon Solutions.

Oikos provides small groups management, online calendars to help people keep up-to-date on events and activities within your organization, multimedia tools such as image and video sharing, online chat, forums to discuss issues relevant to ministry, personal profile pages for each member, and online 24/7 prayer. The application is completely secure and requires the Oikos administrator to approve each member that joins the group.

We’ve harnessed the power of Web 2.0 to create a Flash-based environment that has never been seen before in the Christian community, remarks Isaac Simon, developer on the Oikos R&D team. “God has given us the call to serve the Church with technology tools that truly bring people together and enhance face-to-face ministry, not replace it.”

Vince Farrell, Student Ministries Pastor at Faith Church in Florence, Alabama adds, “Oikos has provided our student ministry with a safe community meeting place where they can connect with others. It’s provided me with real-time tools that keep our ministry communication real and relevant.”

To view the Oikos online demo and register for a free 30-day trial to find out how it can impact your ministry, visit http://www.oikoshq.com or click here to send an e-mail.

Summer sale! Now through August 31, 2007, lock in the special promotional rate of 50% off standard Oikos subscription prices.

About Simon Solutions
Simon Solutions desires to empower people through technology in order to serve the body of Christ. With an aspiration to help ministries translate their visions into action, the company has developed three core solutions that they hope will stretch the boundaries of how churches, ministries, cell groups, and para-church organizations share community: Oikos, a revolutionary safe online community platform; CharityTracker, a collaborative network to track benevolence; and PrayerPipeline.net, a transformative 24/7 online prayer network.

Wow. Our very first blog devoted to one of our services. We want Oikos to rock! Oikos has been out there in cyberspace for a few months now, and we’ve made quite a few friends. Y’all have been giving us some great feedback! We’ve set up a forum to keep track of it all, to keep everyone on the same page.

We’ll use this blog to keep you informed of our progress! We’ve been completely re-working Oikos to give you guys what you’ve asked for. (And to make some changes we’ve wanted to see ourselves.)

Can’t wait to show you! Stay tuned.