Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 6, March 16, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, March16, 2007, this is Episode 6. We are a bimonthly live interactive podcast with Church IT staff and volunteers, just to get together and discuss news, tips, tools, technology, best practices as they related to church organizations and what we can do to further God’s Kingdom. We meet live every first and third Thursday of the month at 2:00 pm EST on www.talkshoe.com. Check out www.churchitpodcast.com My name is Jason Powell, I’m the IT Director at Granger Community Church and I’ll be your host today.
First off, if you’re in the chat window, stick your name, blog address, church name, position, so forth into the chat window. If you are just in the phone only, just shout out your name, church, and position please.
I’ll unmute everyone. Not as many in attendance today, but that’s ok.
Where is David Russell? Would anybody like to be the official note-taker today?
What I’ve got on the plate today…first is of course Kool Tools, then anti-spam solutions, hopefully Tony can give us IT Roundtable updates, then we will look into IT purchases, how you prioritize purchases, who gets what? Budget stuff is on the plate today.
Kool Tools first. I don’t have a cool tool for today. I guess Parallels for the OSX, it’s helping me to use my experimental Mac and be productive with it to be able to run Windows. I don’t necessarily recommend people run out and get a Mac to run Windows on, but if you are forced, Parallels is a great piece of software that virtualizes Windows, so thumbs up for Parallel. That’s mine for the day. The floor is open.
John
PS Tools often bails us out of trouble, so specifically PS Execute, PS Shutdown, and all the rest. PS Tools is a command line took kit that allows you to remotely control systems that you might not otherwise be able to get to, or if you are trying to script a number of options, you can use it to reboot or update or start a server. If you go to Google and type PS Tools, you’ll find it. Google is my cool tool.
Jason
You needed to say SysInternals John. Now I’m with you.
John are you guys using the BG info stuff too?
John
Yes, BG info allows you set the background however you want, so for all of our users we set their background to their computer name and it include their authenticating domain controller for them and other various information, so that whenever they have issues, we can just tell them to look at their desktop to see which server logged them in. We find that very helpful. We push that out via script using Desktop Authority. [Time Stamp00:07:20] The IP address is also there.
Jason
We are looking at that. We are actually gonna put in their C drive information as well so they can see their hard drive space too. The beauty of iTunes.
Sp
Over Disk is very cool, it’s the quickest, most useful view in a nutshell of what is going on on your hard drive that I’ve seen.
Tony
Jason I should warn you that we have John’s brother in the room, Richard Dolan, and he is an all Mac guy. We are trying to train him.
Jason
I’ve got all sorts of Mac questions. But back to Overdisk.
John
Winabler [?]. It’s a great tool and I probably shouldn’t be telling you about it, it will take any greyed-out text box and make it not greyed-out anymore. Pretty funky. We’ll put the link on Tony’s blog for you.
One thing it doesn’t do, even if it ungreys an option, it still cannot bypass the active directory authentication, so some things it works, for some things, it doesn’t. But you can do a lot of neat things with it. It takes the basic standard Windows API on any applications and it digs in underneath it to enable those boxes. So if the program was using Microsoft API it can basically ungrey any of those check boxes. If not Microsoft API, it is not very useful.
Jason
How did you stumble upon such tool?
John
I search everywhere for different tools and different things and one of the things I use it for is to be able to, something there is a Next checkbox that you can’t click unless you’ve filled everything out, well, this will let you click the Next box. There are other things it will let you bypass, the I Agree button, it will let you get around, but not usually installs. I usually just use it when applications aren’t functioning [Time Stamp00:12:51] properly. I’m kinda stingy about using it, there are usually other ways.
Jason
Cool, Overdisk and Winabler.
If you are in the chat window and want to put in a cool tool, go ahead. BG info.
I hadn’t seen that until we went to Perimeter and then I wanted that.
Sp
I’m a big fan of Filezilla for FTP.
Jason
I saw that on somebody’s machine for a small business client that I moonlight and I thought it was sort of spyware, but they said it’s how they do file transfers.
Sp
And NT File Mon is a cool set of utilities, or just File Mon, which allows you to monitor which files are active at any given time, so if a program is goofing up, it allows you to do more indepth debugging.
Jason
We tried to use that and Reg Mon when we were having issues with iTunes not working when a person was a non-local administrator, but we never could pinpoint exactly what was not working.
Sweet tools.
David Spooner
I’ve got three tools that I use all the time. One is Putty, ssh freeware, and PDF Creator, a freeware print-driver, so if you are on Windows and need to create PDFs and don’t want to spend the money for Acrobat, you can install this and print to it. And PS Pad text editor for all sorts of text editing tasks. It’s free. I like the interface in it, it has a built-in ftp client so you can actually edit files and save them back to the ftp server without downloading them. www.pspad.com
Jason
Has anybody with the Office 2007 stuff checked out the pdf creation side of it?
David
Not yet, but I’m glad it’s there.
Steve
[I couldn’t hear him].
Jason
What I’d like to do now since we don’t have a ton of people on the phone is do some introduction stuff. I’ve sorted your names alphabetically. Just go through and give us your real name, your church, [Time Stamp00:18:54] your position and maybe number of machines in your care, that helps us determine the size you are dealing with, any other information.
Bryson
Director of IT Ministry at College Heights Christian Church is Missouri. We have a network of about 50 computers here, all Windows workstations working off of Lenox.
Jason
Chris McGuffin is in the chat window, Chris from Sugar Creek Baptist Church, they are hosting the upcoming IT Roundtable. Chris is IT Director, 7 servers, 83 workstations. He is typing it in, mainly Windows.
Dave
Dave Mast, IT Director at Newpoint Community Church located about 100 miles south of Cleveland in Ohio. I manage 50 PCs, 10 servers, and 10 Macs.
David
David Spoonare, Polish, Network and Systems Manager here at Lakeview Church in Indianapolis on the west side, 40 employees, 80 computers, 8 servers, and next month we have a new building addition for children and youth. We are doing public wifi and having fun with that. It’s exciting.
Jason
Jason Ferguson. I’m formerly the web architect for Covenant Church in Dallas Texas. Currently heading up a ministry called The IT Roundtable very similar to what Jason and Tony have been doing. We are looking at coordinating IT departments from churches and ministries and the US and the world. Mainly, we’ve been meeting locally here in Dallas, it’s been interesting to see what the Lord has been doing through Christian IT blog space, mainly we just want to see everybody work together as one body.
JC
JC Jennings, Technology Pastor at Rock Spring Church in Charleston, WV about an hour and a half from Washington DC. We’re small, about 150 in attendance, 3 servers, a workstation, couple of laptops, I also support the key leaders in their efforts. I’m currently working a contract where I [Time Stamp00:24:52] am on location at a data facility, so I’m not full-time with the church yet. Contractor for a consulting company, helping support efforts in the data center, get to play with cool new tools.
Jason Lee
We’ve got a network of 110 workstations, 15 servers, running VM ware.
Jason
Josh is not on the phone, let’s see if I can read this. Josh Loveck, Director of Technology, Westside Christian Church, Springfield.
Jason Lee
They run Windows 2003 domain, I think they have 12 or 13 servers, they have a school, daycare, and church environment, I’d say they probably have 120 machines.
Josh was one of my great volunteers when I was in Springfield. Kudos to him.
Matt
Matt Kerner, I’m in Springfield, MO at Schwitzler United Methodist, we’ve got about 60 Windows machines, about 12 Macs, and 4 servers.
Matt
Matt Wilson from Munster, Indiana, Family Christian Center with Pastor Steve Muncie, we have about 4000 members, the network is just me and some volunteers, we have 5 servers, running Windows 2003, we have a fiber backbone connecting our gym and back building. We have HP switches, Sisco routers, Exchange 2003 and about 150 computers on the network, and we’ve been getting more Macs. I just got my first Mac this week. I can do everything with it. I have Windows and Bootcamp.
Jason
At some point, I’ll blog about my Mac experience.
Your turn Nancy.
Nancy
I do Operations and Administration here in Wisconsin. My background is as a CPA so I just try to keep up with the tech stuff. My big interest is church management systems, we’re moving to a new building this fall that will triple our square footage, so we’re looking at a new phone system, VPN, Steve can [Time Stamp00:30:27] tell you more specifics about our network. We are just looking at ways to stay current and what other people are doing.
Steve
Currently we are running 4 Windows 2003 servers, about 40 workstations, that will probably grow by 50% this fall. We’re trying to figure stuff out.
Jason
We all are.
Richard
I am brand new at Perimeter via Viant Solutions, I’ve been at the Apple store for two years where I’ve done training and video stuff mostly, so I’m coming over the dark side and having my baby brother teach me how to use these things called PCs.
Jason
Welcome Richard.
Tony
You already got Richard. I’m Tony Dye, IT Manager at Perimeter Church, about 14 physical servers and a gazillion logical servers on VM ware ESX, 250 stations on the network that are a mix of PCs and Winterms and some fruity machines, and HP networking, we are Script Logic people. We are VM ware the ESX. We are looking hard at moving to Office 2007 in the summer and probably going to take One Note at the same time and do a massive upgrade. It will be wonderful if we don’t kill each other.
John
How do you follow that introduction. I’m John Dolan, I work with Viant, which does the consulting for Perimeter Church. That’s about all.
Danny
I’m on the list there. I work with John for Viant. We do hardware and infrastructure and also support the same things John supports. Typically, I support them, John fixes them.
Brandon
Brandon Huff, I work for Perimeter Christian School, which is a Ministry of Perimeter Church and I support about 50 users, but that is also included in Tony’s 250. I do a little contracting for Tony too.
Jason
That’s all the Perimeter crew.
Trace
Trace, [Time Stamp00:35:59] IT Director at SeaCoast Church, our main location is just outside Charleston, SC, we have 9 locations all around SC, Georgia, and NC now. We’re up to about 200 PCs, 10 Macs, 8 servers, pretty much all Windows. Like some of you, I’m a fan of Script Logic. Most of our larger offsite locations, I do have VPNs set up, so they are part of our network and a little bit more easily managed than having to drive.
Jason
How are you dialing into the phone bridge? You’re coming through really loud.
Trace
I’m just on a regular, dialing land. A 3 Com NBX system.
Jason
I hope I got everybody.
Tony, can you give us an update on the upcoming IT Roundtable.
Tony
Sure, we are one month. This time next month is the first day of it. Some people want to come the day before and I encourage you, I’m speaking for Chris here, we are going to have some activities on Sunday, you can come worship, after that we will have a meet and greet, a little bit of food. We’ve got a long list of vendors who will be there on Monday to talk to us about technology, that includes folks like Script Logic and VM ware and Excentric, and Service U, and Datacore, and we are jamming people in. We’ve got a tight fit on how we are going to do it that day, running people back and forth. They are all happy to be here and they know they have to be ready to tell you what they’ve got. Then during the evening, we’ve got Mark Stephenson with us to talk about Web Empowered Church which is pretty neat. On Tuesday, we’ve got the real Roundtable and we’ve got 20-something people at the table and other people will be in the room listening in, which we think will work, if it fails, we’ll know next time not to do that. We’ve got [Time Stamp00:40:20] Phil Martin coming in to talk to us and we have Mike Gould from Willow Creek, they will each do presentations Tuesday. Then on Wednesday we’re gonna do the church management discussion and we’ve got 6 vendors there, 3 of whom will be showing off stuff that probably nobody has ever seen before. On top of all that, the vendors have come up with money and prizes and doorprizes and food, so that once you show up and check into the hotel, you are done paying for anything. We will feed you, give you stuff, teach you stuff, hang out and have fun. Where else can you get a deal like that? Now the bad news, if you are not already in on the deal, you are not gonna be in on this deal. We are full and have waiting lists. Good news, hear it carefully, we are not going to be streaming this event, but we will be recording the event and we will make all or some of it available after the fact. Not necessarily free, but close. That’s the update.
Jason
Exciting!
And Chris Guy is suggesting that the Fall Roundtable, he threw out the dates of October 3rd and 4th, to be held at his stomping ground there in Kansas City. Head over to Chris blog, Apian Way, and check out what he is considering. He is trying a unique approach, curious about that.
www.appianway.blogspot.com Or you can go to my blog, and it’s there.
Good stuff.
We’re 45 minutes in, good time to chat about budget stuff. Here’s what I’d like to know, how in your church environment are you prioritizing IT budget? How do you determine who gets a laptop verses who gets a desktop? Who makes that decision? How do you designate who gets a Mac?
Trace
With us, you’d have to prove that you have use for a laptop, that you’d be doing a lot of offsite work or studying, otherwise you’d be with a desktop. Mac-wise, your job would have to call for video, but we don’t just buy Macs because [Time Stamp00:46:21] somebody would like it better. They have to prove the need to convince us to make the purchase. The costs come out of their budgets. I usually back up the ministries by looking at the inventory list to see how many I see that we might be upgrading, so if a ministry hasn’t budgeted for it, we tell them it is coming out of their budget, but it really was sort of a secondary budget. It’s all the same money but they know we can’t just buy a $3,000 computer.
Jason
So, are they bringing this directly to you?
Trace
If they are not a ministry director or pastor, they have to talk to whomever they report to that controls their budget, then they will ask me, then I handle the purchasing. No major computer hardware can be purchased without going through me.
Jason
Let’s say somebody wants a shiny new Mac, they go to their department leader, who is telling them they can or can’t?
Trace
I communicate with their leader. If the leader can’t comprehend all the computer stuff, I will get with the person directly, but I’ll tell the person they report to why they are not gonna get exactly what they were asking for if it is just what they like, not a need.
I’ve got a few youth leaders right now who want the Mac just because it’s what their age group is being pulled toward, but other than that, they have no knowledge of Macs and don’t have any other need for it.
Jason
Thanks Trace. Any other input?
Tony
I’ll make statements that are not true, but they are an attempt. We work on the basis that when you come on staff, if you are a ministry associate and you’ve got a need to burn CDs and stuff like that, you get a desktop, if you are an anybody else, probably you get a Winterm and you get a Citrix connection. That is your day-one system. That [Time Stamp00:50:56] works for us when that happens. Then if you need a notebook or something special, you have to earn the right to get it. That’s the story we work on, it doesn’t always hold true. When it does happen, it happens great. Our exception problems come up especially like in our Global Outreach department, these people travel all the time, so it is normal that they would get a notebook and we agree with that. Where we run into trouble, forgive me for what I’m about to say, if they hire somebody who is a great ministry person and a lousy PC person and give them a notebook, that creates a support nightmare, and it is funny how those support nightmares always come up when somebody is in India. They can’t tell you about a problem they are having before they leave for India, or Russia, or China, or wherever, they tell you when they are over there and they want help. Those are tough. That is a training issue, it is something we are working on.
Jason Lee
Are you out-sourcing some of your support to India yet Tony?
Tony
Good idea!
Mac same thing, if you have a need for a Mac. We are fortunate since we’ve got Citrix, our Mac users can still get to all the same stuff like everybody else by using a Citrix client, so we’ve got that good cross-breed situation. It’s interesting sitting here, we’ve got, of the 5 of us on the call, we’ve got 3 PCs and 2 Macs in this conversation.
Jason
Good. Others?
Nancy
We do basically what everybody has been describing, you have to have a justifiable reason to need the machine you are asking for. Where we have a challenge, and we are not the only ones rapidly growing, we could be sitting 6 months before a fiscal year even starts and try to figure out how much money we might need in the budget to allow for known and unknown requests, [Time Stamp00:53:48] new technology, I’d be interested to know how people are planning, submitting budget requests. We have a central budget and I’m the one it has to go through to be decided, but I don’t have a crystal ball. How are other people doing it?
Jason
One of the things we do at Granger is try to anticipate how many new hires we will have next year, of course that’s fuzzy logic, then there is a value associated with that new position to get them a machine, so let’s say the value of that is $2,000, maybe next year we anticipate 10 new people, and that is not in my budget, but when a new position is created, I get to pull from that to purchase a new machine for them. Or I use that money to purchase a new machine for somebody that may need newer hardware and that new hire may get a trickle down machine. Otherwise we try to anticipate what is coming up next. I meet with my boss and go through what’s on the docket for next year. We are getting ready to do a new building campaign so I’m going to be asked shortly to come up with a budget for the hardware for the new building, that’ll be separate from the IT budget.
Tony
We do the wild guess, each year, we try to look at the body count, hopefully it is one machine per body, thought that is not always true. We look ahead at turnover or growth, look at our inventory, what needs to be replaced, and therefore come up with a good guess of what will be to be purchased this year. Another related thing we’ve worked around, we used to try to allocate machines and trickle them down to the right people, and we discovered we were spending all of our lives rebuilding machines. So we changed our model and said when you come on staff, you will probably get a pretty good machine and probably keep that machine for 3 years, then it would get replaced, so we do our best [Time Stamp00:57:26] to not trickle down, we let everybody know they are on a 3-year cycle. Staff turnover sometimes messes than theory up, but in general it works out, we try to avoid anybody having a really old machine. We also try to keep hot spares on the shelf so that if something goes wrong, we can swap their machine. That’s been a good budget tool for us.
Jason
Also having some sort of a refresh cycle, maybe you are rotating laptops every 3 years and desktops every 4 years and servers every 5 and switches, etc. Those are important things to consider inside that as well. Keep them staggered. I’d like to be on a 4 year rotation for all our desktops, so every year, I’m replacing ¼ of the machines. That’s where I’d like to be, I’m not there yet. Trying to project.
Other budget dialogue.
Jason Lee
We are on a 4-year rotation, we are opening a can of worms right now deciding who gets a laptop and when. We don’t have a fun answer. But the 4-year rotation helps the budget. For me it is easier to say we are spending $20,000 a year and it’s a known item in the budget rather than being flexible every year.
Sp
How many Jasons do we have?
Jason
Too many!
Jason Lee
Do you count my multi-personalities?
Jason
Does any of that help you Nancy?
Nancy
Yes thanks! I’ve always been a big believer in the people who do the work get the most powerful machines and usually those people are lower on the food chain. The executive really doesn’t need to do much but check his email, but now they are the ones who are mobile and need the laptops.
Jason
And I’ll put a plug in for leasing machines. It doesn’t work in everybody’s environment but we try to put everything on a 3-year lease and that’s when we were rolling 1/3 of the machines every year. I’m [Time Stamp01:02:08] still torn on whether the laptops should be on a 2-year or 3-year rotation. Laptops get beat on. And that was a great point Nancy, administrative assistants work their machines like a dog and some of the people up the food chain, maybe not so much. How hard does the Senior Pastor work on his machine? Probably just word processing and email, verses PhotoShop of Final Cut or some other hairy software, so trying to manage that…. If your Senior Pastor comes to you and says he needs a new machine, in the back of my head, I’m thinking, you really don’t, somebody in the graphics area does, we could pass machines around, and so far I’ve been able to get away with that for the most part. All of our Senior Management team have both a desktop and a laptop, that creates some interesting support issues as well.
[Couldn’t hear the speaker for a minute]
Jason came back on talking about synchronization issues. Someone having 2 copies of something open
VPN synchronization. We are still trying to figure out a better way to do that. I’d like to have something better than offline files. We’ve had enough kind of scares with it, I just don’t like it. I have 7 using a laptop and desktop, too many. It’s just that’s the way they want it, and they are Senior Management. There have been a few other department leaders that requested the same thing, I do not handle that in the budget, basically, what I’ve been told is that IT is responsible to make sure every staff person has a functioning machine, if they ask for 2, their ministry budget is going to have to take care of that. We try to suggest it is not the wisest decision to make because of the complications, but nobody has listened to my spill on that.
We are at the one hour and 10 minute mark, I’m going to close things down. [Time Stamp01:09:33] We can bring this back up next time, think of other budget questions? Switches and wiring, fiber, new buildings, all sorts of variants.
Many people left a comment on the blog that it would be better to do these on Thursdays, so we are going to try switching to Thursdays. April 5th next time. I’ll put a reminder on the blog.
Thank you all for showing up, we’ll see you next time.
