Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 26 March 20, 2008
Jason Powell
Good afternoon everybody, today is Thursday, March 20, 2008, this is Episode 26. Time is 2:05 pm, therefore I am very late, and I am very sorry. My name is Jason Powell, I am the IT Director at Granger Community Church, and if you want to get more information about this podcast, check out www.churchitpodcast.com and all the Episodes, 1-25, are available to you transcribed for you to search and check out and read through. We also have www.citrt.org another reference site for you to check out links to other bloggers. There is a blog feed that pulls in RSS stuff from a lot of our different church IT blogs. You can also check out www.itdiscuss.org, there’s a lot of great information there, a lot of it relevant to church IT. If you have not taken the church IT survey, I encourage you to do that. I think we’ve got some 60 churches that have filled out survey information, gives you an idea of what churches are using software wise, what their staff looks like.
So today is wide open, nothing is programmed into it other than what we talk about today.
First, if you are in the chat room, put in your name, church, location, position, blog address, contact info. Hopefully somebody is capturing this chat thread, that helps our transcriptionist. It helps me too, cause some of your user names and real names might not match up, so it’s all helpful.
I also recommend the IRC Channel, where there are typically a number of us hanging out throughout the day and evening talking about this, that, and the other. Go to my blog, www.jasonpowell.net and search for mibbit and that will take you to a “how to” join the IRC Channel. There may also be a link to that on the citrt page as well.
Hey is that Justin? On the way to Russia!
Justin Moore
It’s me, hanging out at JFK in New York right now.
Jason
Tell us again how long you’re going to be over there.
Justin
11 days. We are involved in a church planting over there in a region in Northern Moscow and we are going to assist them in the work they are doing.
Jason
That is very cool. So everything keeps Justin Moore in your prayers and his wife as they are making their trek over to Russia, that’s exciting. We look forward to hearing the stories when you get back.
Let’s see, we’ve got Ministry Tech coming up April 3rd and 4th, Oklahoma City. Last I saw, registration was pretty close to being full. If you have not registered, please do so, get yourself to www.ministrytech.org and sign up. It’s for church IT and audio/visual guys. This is the first time this is happening, be interesting to see how it goes. There are a number of workshops scheduled, should be good stuff, Then the following day, the Church IT Roundtable on April 5th. It’s on my blog and on the www.citrt.org site. There are registration links on both, thanks to whoever updated that.
Once the April 5th event is done, we will announce the dates for the Fall Church IT Roundtable to be presented by Sea Coast Church in Charleston and Trace Pupke. Fall in Charleston should be fun. We are also [TimeStamp08:27:23] trying to work out some kind of something cool with spouses. My wife said I’m not going to Charleston without her.
Ok, housekeeping, am I missing anything? There is also another event coming up that Nick had mentioned last time, another church event happening maybe late April, there’s an IT track involved with it.
In the world of church IT stuff, last time we talked about the Apple and Active Sync release, that was pretty exciting. Last podcast, also I had Justin Moore and Dave Mast live on the phone here in my office. That was fun, we spent a couple days doing lots of work, had a great time hanging out with them. Extreme IDF make-over. Not done yet but we’re getting there.
So what questions or cool tools do we have today?
Questions for other people on the call or in the chat?
Tony Dye
Ok Jason, silly question for you. Church IT losers, final weigh-in, is it on Monday or April 1st?
Jason
I think we/I extended it, made it April 1st, which is not Monday.
Tony
I just wanted to be sure that’s what you meant when [TimeStamp08:29:57 ] you said that. Sounds like you did.
Jason
Yes, I’d really love to actually do it at the Roundtable but that would require everybody brining their scales with them so we are all using the same calibrations.
But April 1st it is, and no April fools. If you cheat, God will punish you. You may lose a little weight, but God will smite you with some crazy disease where you’ll gain ungodly amounts of flab or something if you cheat.
Church IT biggest loser contest, we’ll be doing another one, I’m sure. It’ll probably start up after we get done with this one. Matthew Irving has lost almost 50 pounds, which is an amazing story, if you’ve not read his blog, it’s pretty sweet. Myself, I’ve passed the 30 pound mark, I’m pretty pumped about that. I’ve back-slidden the last few days, I’ve not exercised and I’ve eaten more [TimeStamp08:31:30 ] than I should have. I set my goal for 180 pounds by April 1st and I’m at 183.5 as of Monday, so I’m hoping I can get rid of those extra 3.5 pounds by April 1st. I think I can, I just need to get my focus back. There’s a number of us close to hitting the 10% lost mark, or have exceeded it, so it’s exciting. I think collectively we’ve lost almost 400 pounds, so that’s cool. I feel great, I’m wearing size 34 jeans today [MS too much information Jason J]
So yes, Tony, April 1st.
Tony
Ok, I feel good now. My 20-year-old son has agreed to help me on that last weekend, he says, “Ok I’ll go do super dehydration with you so you can come in and win.” I thought, that’s kinda neat of him to do that, not sure I’m gonna do it, but…
Jason
I hope nobody dies because of this competition! That would be very bad.
I dropped 5 pounds in one week and that was a little scary once I actually looked at the scales because of everything I read, that’s not healthy to do.
Tony
Has anybody else read Four Hour Work Week? Let me say this carefully, I am not recommending this book, but it is fascinating. Interesting stuff in it, this guy lost, well he competed in a national kick-boxing championship, and they do the weigh-ins the day before the championship or the fights, he had a 30 pound weight difference across those two days by extreme dehydration. You talk about not healthy. So anyway, I’m just thinking through March 31st, April 1st, how much of that do I want to try to do. We’ll see how that works out.
Jason
Holy cow! 30 pounds. What is it, 2/3 of your body is made up of water? That’s amazing. Somebody in the chat window put in “IT Biggest Loser contest causes many job openings!” You must be alive to win. I wish everybody could be present, I’d like to have some video footage, talking to people about the changes made in their life. Good stuff. If you didn’t get in on the Biggest Loser contest this time, there is hope for you next time. I’d also love to figure out how would you deal with church IT maintainer contest. Once you get down to your ideal weight, how would you do a contest to still keep it there? I don’t know. We’re not talking IT stuff at all, so those of you that are waiting for the IT content, it’s coming, but since I’ve lost a lot of weight, my flab is much more noticeable, so I’m thinking if I’m at 180 and I’ve still got this much flabby stuff hanging here on my gut, my ideal weight could be like 160 or something crazy like that, so I’ve still got another potentially 20 or 30 pounds before I’m at my ideal weight, that’s a little scary.
So we’ve talked about flab, dehydration. Any other questions?
We’ll have to form another podcast just to talk about food and weight loss.
What’s happening in people’s IT lives?
A lot of Asterisk talk going on. Seacoast is doing Asterisk, Tony Dye, you guys are talking about it.
Tony
We are talking real serious about it, and I didn’t know that a month ago, I wanted to consider it, Justin came to visit and I didn’t know how interested I was in Asterisk. The fact that we’re doing some new construction and I’ve got a connection problem over there and all I’m going to have is one fiber line sure makes Asterisk an easy solution. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here in Atlanta, on April 25th, we are going to have a get together, a 3-part get together, we’re gonna have a couple hours of demo & seminars, everything you wanted to know about Asterisk. Then we are going to go down the road a couple miles to one of the teleco’s and visit their central office and see what they do on the back end of stuff. We think they are taking us to dinner too -- free dinner -- then on Saturday the 26th, the Atlanta Asterisk users group is having an install fest at Georgia Tech. So if you are near Atlanta, it would be a good time to come and spend a day and a half with us. Even if you’re in far out places like Indiana, it would be worth coming. There’s your invitation. Check my blog, I will have an update on there within a couple of days, send me an email, whatever, yes.
Jason
That would be sweet. Good stuff. I’m letting all you guys bleed with Asterisk, then I’ll come in afterwards once you guys have got it all nailed down.
Sp
C’mon Jason, where is your adventurous spirit?
Jason
Right now, it’s in preparing the house to sell and buy a house and all that financial fun. My adventurous spirit at work is not adventurous. I’m trying to make things here at work as boring as possible. Don’t rock the boat. Especially before Easter. I will say that I’m enjoying my Samsung I760 phone, I’ve had it a month or two, it changed my life compared to the crappy Trio I had, this one works.
Sp
Keep rubbing it in to us folks who still have to carry a Trio. Thanks a lot.
Jason
I’m digging the I-phone.
Sp
Just waiting on Sprint to get the I760.
Jason
Verizon is the only game in town in our area with any sort of high speed cellular broadband. Of course once the I phone gets Active Sync, and if Verizon could carry it, I could potentially be swung to the dark side, it is a sweet phone. I’m very curious to see what happens with that. And we will also pray that Active Sync will be part of Mac at some point. But that’s a duel-edged sword, let’s not go there.
I did pick up a zoom player yesterday, I’ve been using Yahoo music for a couple years now and my giga… player won’t play videos anymore on it. And the fact that Yahoo sold the music service to Rhapsody, I decided to investigate, got the zoom, the wireless sync in pretty sweet.
Surge
I think a quick question addressed to all of the guys. Do you guys have any initiative in terms of this coming year in terms of IT or something that you want to do to simplify your department, I’m not just talking about adding storage in your environment, but the thing like exploring the Google application, to migrate your Exchange server to Google solution or anything in that line. Can anybody jump in and say what you are looking into for this year?
Jason
Great question. From our aspect here at Granger, I was just talking with my boss yesterday and our network administrator about, probably every week or two I look at and consider what it would look like if we dumped Exchange and went to Gmail. What’s the benefit, what’s the loss?
Shawn Ross
I am actually in the process of putting together our plan to switch, we don’t run Exchange but we are about it bite the bullet and go Gmail all the way. We keep looking at Exchange and the costs are just out of control for us to move there, but we need the collaboration, and the central administration and so on, but Google is our next stop, probably within a week. So ask me about questions in another week or two.
Surge
What’s gonna happen, let’s say you have an Internet outage and the people within your department need to communicate, with the fact that you are using a hosted environment, how are they going to communicate during an Internet outage with email not being accessible. This is my greatest resistance as far as jumping into the hosted solution.
Shawn
For us, we are essentially using a hosted solution, we don’t have Exchange internally, we are using email offsite. About 8 years ago, they were running Exchange, the reason they were using Exchange, they needed to send emails internally, they had one 56K connection and they only used it when they needed it, so at this point, we are all ready, since we are on a hosted connection where if our Internet line goes down here, they got nothing. So for us, the risk in that respect is less, but we’ve also found that in the last 4 years we have had only one Internet outage with our provider, and that one outage was for a small amount of time, about 15 minutes, so for us the cost issue, what does it cost us if the Internet goes down is not high enough for us to balance that. Does that make sense?
Jason
We have a back-up ISP, I know some other churches do as well. So if our main connection gets severed, we have a broadband wireless provider that we use, we actually tested that fail-over and fell back today getting ready for Easter, so if we lost one of our ISPs, hopefully the other one is still up and running. But that is a valid concern. If you’re relying on your Internet pipe, it better be solid.
Shawn
When I ran the numbers and gave it to our Executive Director, he said it wasn’t worth it. For that much a month, I’m not willing to pay it, so, that’s a decision he had to make. That’s not my decision. Someone else has to bite the bullet and get their wallet out.
Surge
In terms of liability, how concerned are you guys that your data is actually hosted on somebody else, especially email. I know a lot of enterprises have hosted websites, which is fine, but as far as the data of the email is a little bit different than the data of a website. How concerned are you guys?
Shawn
When I put that question to our Executive Director, well, you need to realize, currently we are on a shared server of sorts, but one of the things we looked at, not necessarily completely logical, is that for Google, being a large company, the egg on their face from essentially deciding that the data on their server is not safe, they are not going to risk it. That’s not good logic, but for us, the IT to IS data, the value placed on that is currently not high enough that we would be willing to pay for that. If it was that high, I would look at a hosted Exchange solution maybe, because for us there are a lot of other things that come into play if we have to host it on our own. Again, the cost ratio and the chances of that happening, I feel better about having Google host that because they don’t want to have a PR nightmare on their hands either.
Jason
And on their site, they say that they are Sarvings [MS?] compliant and all that good stuff.
Shawn
If they have a breech in that respect, the government will be all over them.
Jason
And there are some big players using gmail. Obviously Google uses it for all their employees, but some other large companies are using it as well as a number of universities, so the track record is there. There’s still a lot that you lose when you switch from Exchange, and the idea of having everything free, there’s some benefit to that.
Surge
Do they do the back up for you guys as well?
Jason
You can buy Postini back-up message archiving service for your mailboxes. I don’t know by default, with the free stuff, what they do.
Shawn
You are still within Google’s data servers, so they have some kind of weird distributed file system where their data is distributed geographically, but we essentially said that we are willing to pay for the upgraded Postini capabilities and will pay a very small amount more than we are paying now for our email each month and we get the added capability of Google plus the better reliability. Our current provider lost data for us twice, email data, so that is not acceptable.
Surge
In terms of dependency, let’s say you had some monitoring server internally that sort of needs the Exchange server on the lane to shoot out emails, how do you handle all those dependencies? Or any application that you may have written that needs to communicate with Exchange, being on an external environment and using an external IP and that, how do you handle that? For instance, if you have a managing service here that alerts you if the Internet goes down, now the fact that it relies on the Exchange server, which is hosted outside, in position of not getting the notification because it can’t even talk to the Exchange server to begin with?
Shawn
But if I’m not here, if I’m off campus and my email server is inside and my monitor is inside, I’m still not going to find out unless I have a text message set up.
Surge
I think Postini has that external service.
Shawn
There are a lot of external monitoring services and if I need that level, if I’m going to depend on that level of monitoring, I’m going to use one of them, I’m going to trust them more than my network. I don’t know if I understood your question.
Surge
Yes, you answered it correctly.
Jason
I know that Northpoint Church, Andy Stanley’s church, may have switched over to Gmail for everybody by now, they were moving in that direction last time I spoke to them over there. They are a point a reference. Anybody know how many staff they have? It’s gotta be in the 200s.
Sp
I think he mentioned 400.
Jason
Yeah, they’ve got 400 some client machines, so we can assume a correlation there.
I don’t know, I’m a big fan of having your stuff hosted off site. I love that we use F1 and it’s hosted off to somebody else and they have to worry about security and back-ups and being the SQL gurus and all that stuff. I love that they have to have co-location centers for our data. As I look at our environment, what else could we be farming off the other people that are better experts than we are? We’re talking about, Server 2008 is rolling up on us, so what are we going to need to do to prepare for it, how much of an expert do I need my team to be on Server 2008? Do they need to go out and get certified? We’re also looking at Exchange 2007 and how much training do we need to do? Which is why we’re looking at hosting solutions and outsourcing our IT stuff as well. So I don’t need to have my guys as heavily trained or knowledge experts in particular areas because I’m going to outsource it to a company like Viant or somebody like that and it is their responsibility to make sure they are up to date on the latest and greatest. And when there is an issue, we troubleshoot it here to a certain internal, then we pick up the phone and say, “Hello Viant, we got an issue.”
Tony?
Tony
Yeah.
Jason
To put you on the spot. Add some input here on the whole outsource scene. You guys are heavily outsourced, what is your philosophy behind that?
Tony
It’s a good subject. Here’s the deal. For Perimeter to hire really qualified people is a hard thing to do, part of that is our own crazy rules, but this is probably not that usual for other churches. We only hire our own members. But we also want incredibly qualified technological people and we don’t want to pay them very much, so that’s a hard, ya know, “here let me sell you on this really great job that I’m going to underpay you on from this small audience that I’m working on.” So, for us it has worked out so much better to, in effect we are paying more in raw dollars to outsource, but I am paying for slots as opposed to particular people. So the Viant guys, on any given day, I’ve probably got three people here, it may not be the same people from day to day. If we are doing particular kinds of work, it may be Danny, or if other stuff, it may be Brandon, both talented guys, very different talents. So by outsourcing, it lets Viant be responsible for having an Exchange server guru on the day I need an Exchange server guru. I don’t want to say that I need somebody who really understands Exchange to that lever, that would be nuts, but I can let Viant have that problem, and I love it, and I pay them a higher amount for the day I need that Exchange person, then I don’t pay that Exchange person the rest of the year. That’s my philosophy.
Jason
I love that too.
Tony
It has another real subtle thing that was not in our original planning but it just kinda worked out. When somebody says, “Well, I know you guys don’t normally do this but, I need this,” now we have a way to charge it because we know what it costs to do whatever that other thing is. You want something we don’t normally [TimeStamp00:36:58 ] do, great! How do you want us to charge for that? It also, getting into the almost ridiculous, it helps us measure where we spend our money. Because we’ve got an assumption here, we have this situation where people want to move offices, and that doesn’t cost anything. Well maybe it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs me a fortune. Well, all of a sudden, I can identify that because I’ve absolutely forbidden any of my staff people to do moves, I only let Viant do the moves, and we record that to a separate account number and at the end of the year, I’m gonna say, “Ya know all those free moves we did? Here’s what they cost.” It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, but I’ve got accountability and we can look back and say we spent x-million dollars moving people around. So it has that neat little bonus that would otherwise be hard to record.
Sp
Is anybody else using that kind of a service?
Shelton
Has anybody had experiences where, there’s a weekend equation here that I guess I get concerned about.
Tony
Which is the concern?
Shelton
Obviously, in most contemporary churches, there is a big emphasis on the weekend production, what happens, do you have a good turn-around on weekend response times if you have a problem on weekends as opposed to during the week?
Tony
Probably much better using an outsource company than using regular staff.
Shelton
Maybe it’s all in the way the relationship is set up, but in the past, that’s always been a struggle for us.
Tony
These people are available to us pretty much 24/7. I try not to use them that way, but if we’ve got a problem, like we are going to be doing some san work this evening, tomorrow is a holiday for us, so all our staff will be gone, but the Viant guys have decided this would be a good time to do the san maintenance we’ve been needing to do and virtualize a server and all kinds of other stuff that we don’t want to do these normal times.
Mark Rock
Same thing, right now I’m still a solo IT person, and I started off by hiring an outside firm like you Tony, when I want a server set up, they install it, they get SQL Exchange and everything set up, they bring it in, set it up, it is ready to go and I don’t have to spend the day doing it. I just released one company and hired another one that has more staff and now has 24/7 support. It costs me more but I’m figuring I get a set number of hours on a fixed rate on how many hours it takes them to come out here, but I’ve got a tech that knows my system, I’ve got a tech on call, they put some monitoring agents on my servers so they can check things and let me know. I’m still here pretty much 7 days a week and I take care of the issues, but the nice thing to do is when something major happens, I don’t have to be at the engineering level, I’ve got someone that can come in a say, did you check this? I go, “Aw man, I should have known that.” But it’s just sometimes when you are in a smaller group to have somebody like that. Now we are over 100 computers, we’re getting over 100 staff members, I’m going to hire a second person to come on, but hey need to be more helpdesk, computer, maybe a network administrator but not necessarily engineer level because if I have that, I call them and they come in. And on weekend, I might have to wait, they might take two hours or an hour depending on what the issue is, but it might take just a phone call and they can walk me through because they know my system. So I think for me it is gonna cost about $735 dollars a month to have that type of service, and for me to hire someone at that level is, I can hire 2 or 3 of these guys. So it has worked out well for us. I do plan to increase my on level staff to handle the computers and simple things, but when something is down and I need someone, it is nice to have this level. Plus I’ve got a certified VM ware person, I’ve got a certified HP person, a certified SQL Exchange, anything I want, they’ll send a guy out because it is a large enough company. So I went through that same Monday-Friday thing and then you have problems on weekends, so when I re-evaluated it this February, I went from $400 a month to $700 a month to add weekend coverage and I probably need them once or twice a year, most of the stuff I can deal with. But if I’m on vacation, they are the first person they call and the guy knows my system and takes care of it and I’m covered.
Tony
I think there is something to be said about hourly rates, for the right thing, I will pay $2000 an hour for [TimeStamp00:42:43 ] something that takes one hour once a year, but I really really have to have it. Not to mean that I would really pay that much, but if I otherwise have to hire a $40,000-$100,000 dollar employee to use one hour a year, which is the better deal?
Mark
In our contract, we have so many hours a month built-in that I can use for anything I want to use, and if a disaster happens, it is cheaper to pay somebody $100 an hour for 16 hours than to pay benefits and have them in there. Plus they are going through training, they are working with 20 other companies that have seen other things happening, they can look at my system and recognize a problem. It’s nice to have people that internally know all your own systems, but when you’ve got someone that’s working with a bunch of other companies, there’s a lot of knowledge base.
Tony
Yes, there is a bonus to having somebody who was just working in another organization yesterday with a similar but different problem, that’s neat to have people who aren’t totally focused on you but have been out in the world and looking at what other people are doing and can come in and say, “hey did you ever think about x?” And I love that, it opens the doors up instead of closing them down.
So Jason, that was probably a lot more answer than you were expecting.
Jason
Good. I think that’s important for churches to consider, it may not be an easy sell to some church boards, the whole concept of outsourcing, but outsourcing staffing, outsourcing solutions, it just carries a lot of base and makes a lot of sense on so many levels. The flip side to that, there are probably people that will listen to this and it will make them nervous, that’s me.
Tony
Yes and, but it makes you more powerful, it makes you smarter. I can get so much more stuff done and I know less and less everyday and I’m not too bothered by that. I mean, someday, I don’t think Richard’s on this call so I’ll say it, someday Richard is going to come in and say, “Tony we don’t need you anymore.” I’m gonna say, “Ok, great.”
Think of the comparison of outsourcing to building construction. Are you going to hire people to build your next building or are you going to outsource it? Why is it different? And I know it’s different, but it’s one of those you hire experts to do things that need experts instead of trying to have generalists do everything.
Jason
Right, now how would you suggest people go about finding or get started, find a company that is not going to mess you over or do something stupid? What kind of recommendations, those of you who are doing outsourcing, can you give to churches that maybe need to take that next step and start looking at it.
Mark [MS I think it’s Mark?]
For me, I treated myself as a business. I went out, I talked to some people that were using different companies, I bid it out, looked at their services, compared quotes, talked to other customers, had a couple techs come out and met with them and showed them what we have, and I don’t think it is any different than hiring a doctor or a plumber or electrician coming into your church, you check the contract, you look at the people, they’re handling banks, doctor’s offices, doing a couple other churches, I hired one company but I recommend, the two finalists I had, to churches that [TimeStamp00:47:25 ] call me and ask me, I recommend both. One company I had was more geared on remote agents on every single computer in the church and they would support you by dialing in and taking care of it. The philosophy of our administrator wants more hands-on support to help the users, but on the servers they can log on and do it. But I think you just treat it like a business, you go out, meet the people, a couple of them say try us for 90 days and see if you like us then we can sign a contract, so I think it’s just getting out and asking for bids and checking references, I don’t think it is any different than any other business transaction.
Jason
Good.
Shelton
I will say too that we went through that whole budget discussion and the reality is, the minute it interferes with a weekend process, all of a sudden budget is less important. Big surprise. But that’s when we realized we should start looking at outsourcing.
Jason
What type of stuff are you talking about on the weekends?
