Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 7, April 26, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, April 26, 2007, this is Episode 7. 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, position please.
The next podcast will be May 17th. Jeffrey Thompson will be doing something to fill in the gap.
Many of us were at the Church IT Roundtable, we’ll talk about that today.
But first, let’s talk Kool Tools. I’ll start by saying www.spinvox.com is the coolest thing in my world right now. It is amazing. It is a service on your phone. You set up your forwarding, busy, no answer to shoot to Spinvox and it converts your voice mail and it converts it to text. It is amazingly accurate. I have to check voice mail, and voice mail isn’t searchable, but now I have the ability to search because it shoots it into my email, I can get it right off my phone. If you are interested, hit my blog, www.jpowell.blogs.com and Matt Singley’s blog, he is giving away free Spinvox accounts. It even translates Spanish and French. So that is making my life happier.
Anybody else got a cool tool?
Jared
Have you ever used a tool called Spacemonger?
Jason
Tell me.
Jared
It analyzes the hard drive and shows you a graphical representation of the file sizes of everything on your hard drive. It is nice for being able to analyze a users hard drive and see that they’ve got this 30 gig file that is slowing them down. It’s nice to be able to see that graphically on the machine. They’ve got a free version and a paid version. I put the link in the chat window.
Jason
I like the name. Just Google Spacemonger and I’m sure you’ll find it.
Still no logging ability through talkshoe. I wish we could get a log. I’ve still got in the back of my mind a way to gather church IT staff statistics. I think that would be a huge benefit, to be able to look and see how big other were when they hired more, and blah. I get enough emails from people asking me for that kind of information.
Sp
I just had that talk with my boss the other [Time Stamp00:07:50] day and the first words out of his mouth were, “Well what are other churches our size doing as far as the size of their IT department?” so I could really use that information.
Jason
I don’t think it is necessarily the size of the church but more the size of what you are supporting.
Chris
We are going through the same thing. Our web developer recently left, on the flip side, we are looking at out-sourcing our website and other things to try to maintain smaller staff.
Jason
I think we are all in the same boat. Each church is obviously different. What other churches are doing with out-sourcing too. Anytime I get some time with David from Second Baptist, I’m picking his ear on how they are doing out-sourcing. Like Tony Dye, you here Tony? They do a lot of IT out-sourcing and I think that is very interesting. I don’t know how to capture this data, other than just say here are some questions, fill it in and I’ll try to aggregate it and put it out there. Maybe a survey monkey? It’s still in the back of my mind.
Good, other cool tools?
William
This isn’t exactly a new thing but kind of a note after I got done talking with our financial person and closing out the year and going through their different programs, one thing I did not realize until I started looking around the market was the different categories of church management systems, one thing that they seem to be missing in many of those programs is the financial side of it, they don’t want to touch that because it is such a wonderful challenge to do. As a church that uses the ACS package and we’ve got most of the modules there, for the churches that do not have the financial part, the financial part is available separately from ACS. Our finance person seems to be really pleased with the improvement beyond Quickbooks. They had been using that and this is the first full year [Time Stamp00:11:53] that they have gone through the whole year with only ACS and no other financial programs, and they said that you definitely needed to go through the training to understand the program but it was way beyond the capabilities of a non-church program. They were very pleased with that.
Jason
That is interesting to hear. I’ve heard a lot of churches switching to Quickbooks.
William
Basically if you have your favorite program to deal with the people and you don’t like the ACS interface for that part, then it would be a good thing to use that program and just get the financial modules from ACS.
Jason
I was surprised at the roundtable by the number of stand-alone modules that ACS has. I had not idea because we are a Fellowship One shop, but there are a ton of ACS products out there, back-up solutions.
Alright, Chris you go ahead and throw out that question you had on CMS stuff if you don’t mind.
Chris
I was just curious what everyone was using in terms of web-based CMS. We’ve been examining, we have a home-grown system right now, we are looking to change into something that doesn’t require so much custom programming all the time to do everything and I’ve seen that Web-empowered Church and we’ve looked at a couple of other commercial ones, so just curious what people are using and what they thought of everything.
We were primarily a dot net shop for a long time, so I looked at xcon but it is going to cost big bucks to get into.
Jason
Andrew, tell us about your Jum [?]
Andrew
We’ve been using Jumel [?] in about 10 sites and we are starting to outgrow it now in terms that it is hard to move around with the amount of content we have in there, so we are looking to move to Grouple [?]. We launched one site on it recently as a test to see how things are going and [Time Stamp00:15:33] we’re in the process of moving the rest. Grouple has better user-control so you can have users managing separate parts of the site.
Jason
Are you responsible for doing all that stuff Andrew or do you have a team?
Andrew
Pretty much all me, I have a graphics guy, but I don’t have a web team.
Jason
Anybody doing Web-Empowered Church?
Andrew
I don’t see David Russell on but I know he just launched his site with Expression, that’s his specialty is web and he likes it quite a bit.
Jason
Check out David Russell’s web site. I’m sure he’d chat with you about that stuff.
We are using a custom thing for our website.
Chris
How many people out there are running stuff on your own server verses using somebody like Site Organic or somebody whose got a pre-built content management system, there are very few metrics on what’s being done in the church IT space.
Jason
All our web stuff is hosted offsite.
Sp
We are hosting onsite but I’m trying to find a good solution offsite and even find somebody who can do some of the management on the security side.
Jason
People are replying into the blog.
Chris
We are set up unique because we launched a multi-site church that runs true live and we are doing it all over IT. We are running it in-house but we run our server off out of a rack at a co-lo, but the co-lo is tied to both of our churches, our main church and our multi-site.
Jason
Can I ask approximately you are paying for, do you have a full rack?
Chris
The rack isn’t that bad, all the other stuff is. We have a 75 meg Internet line and then 100 between the co-lo and the main campus and then 30 megs from the main campus to the multi-site. The rack is like $300 a month, they threw it in because of all the other stuff.
Jason
I put a blog post about if anybody [Time Stamp00:20:11] was interested in trying to pitch in and do a co-lo. Some interesting conversation on that, let’s keep that in the back of our minds on how that might look for the future, I’m still interesting in that. Do you have a blog Chris?
Chris
Yes, but it’s not very good yet.
Jason
Doesn’t have to be fancy, just post once a week. Doesn’t’ have to be in-depth. Chris maybe you could post on what that might look like, if other churches did something with the space you have.
Chris
I recently began speaking with 316 Networks, have you ever worked with them? Our Internet streaming has been growing. We stream all of our services live and we are getting to the point where in six months we are going to saturate our current Internet pipe which is a 75 meg Internet pipe. I began talking with 316 Networks about instead of increasing bandwidth, looking to work with them to be able to distribute our service world-wide, they’ve got like 7000 servers world-wide, so I didn’t know if anybody else was doing in terms of a streaming solution for their services.
Sp
We’re running Windows Media Streaming, and what we’ve been doing, it is cheap, is we’ve been getting dedicated servers like $150-$200 a month Windows servers in different data centers around the country and just doing round-robin between them, and each server has a 100 meg pipe on it so it allows us to scale pretty easily and when we need more, we add a couple servers. In terms of pricing, it is a lot cheaper than going with a large solution. I don’t know how many users you are looking at.
Chris
We are over 500 a weekend now.
Sp
What size stream?
Chris
Our primary stream that we get the most work off of is running right now at 280 and it is a Windows Media Stream as well. We have kinda the same thing, we’ve used the Planet before, we still do our Real Player streaming out of a server wherever they are, Texas or somewhere.
Sp
Light Cast Media is supposed to be doing a live streaming solution soon. The other thing is, there is a new company I was going to blog about shortly that just came out with a beta but you have to download a client for it called NeoKast, and it actually uses some kind of multi-casting trick out there, Neokast, the quality is really good, they are in Beta right now. So we were toying with the idea of maybe making that a second option, people want a higher quality, maybe move to that while keeping the Windows Media Stream available. And it is free if you’re not charging/profiting and there is no limit.
Jason
NeoKast. We are waiting for Light Cast to do some streaming stuff too. I’m curious how that is going to work since they are flash. Can I send my Windows Media Stream to them and then they convert it or how is that going to work?
Sp
They are now strictly flash anymore. We use Light Cast for all of our web-streaming but we don’t do any live stuff, but they are using Windows Media for the live. That’s how they are doing Live Church, I think.
Jason
Who said they were beta testing.
Sp
We are beta testing NeoKast, not Light Cast.
Jason
Gotcha.
Sp
Light Cast’s current beta test for live streaming is what they call simulated live, where you still upload the video but everybody can play it back live together, not true live.
Jason
Oh, I don’t like that. We want as close to real-time live as you can get. We are using Christian Video Channel.com for our live. I shouldn’t be telling you, the link is secret.
Sp
There is another company out there that I [Time Stamp00:27:52] just got an email about called Church Quest that also does live Windows Media streaming, not on a large scale but cheap like $9 a month or something like that.
Jason
What was the again?
Sp
www.churchquest.com
Jason
Saturating a 75 meg connection? That is crazy.
Sp
It’s nice during the day when we are not doing any streaming, downloads are a lot of fun.
Jason
I can only imagine.
Hey David, I’m gonna try to un-mute you again. David? Not getting noise.
Any other questions?
I’ll throw out one. How are other churches handling, a user comes to you and says they need Adobe CS3. It’s the coolest thing and they’ve gotta have it. And it is probably on your approved list, but whose budget does that come out of? Does your IT budget have room built into it for unexpected software needs? Or do you say that needs to be budgeted out of their department and IT just needs to handle the basics?
Sp
I just ask them for an account number.
Jason
That’s what we do to, I don’t know if that’s right or wrong. Just curious how other people are handling it.
Austin
We sent something out to each department at the beginning of the year about what our IT budget will be so that we can dispense with those unexpected circumstances, then we charge the department after that.
Sp
We charge the department. We cover the basic needs, then any special software like that, they are responsible for budgeting that.
Sp
At the moment, we attempt to have them look at budget time to get ideas about what they will need in the future, but we do have a slot for surprise requests in our IT budget.
Sp
We are a hybrid, we have a monthly line item for unexpected software but then we have some different costs, like the church school and all it’s IT is handled out of a separate budget, [Time Stamp00:31:53] and our bookstore is all handled separately, otherwise, we budget the rest of it.
Tony
Same story here. We charge it to the ministries initially. Once it comes into the shop, then we add it to our budget for the next year for future upgrades. But once it has been approved, we want IT to control it. For surprises, we say we will gladly get that for you but how are we going to start the cost on it?
Jason
Interesting. It seems like your IT budget will continue to get fatter and fatter that way.
Tony
Sure, what’s your point?
Jason
When I’m told at the beginning of the year, “This your IT can only have a 5% increase over what you had last year,” I’m like, that may not even cover, interesting.
Tony
We have gone out of our way, my budget, I’m not sure I want to share this publicly but I guess I am. We’ve had those years where we say we are staying flat from last year, no changes, and I will submit a budget that is 100% more than last year. The ironic thing is that in years past when I presented a budget that was 5% more, I had to fight for it. But when I did 100% more and showed why, they said, “Oh, that makes sense.” I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to rip off the church, of course that is not what I’m doing, but we split our budget out, we completely re-did out budgeting process and I now have basically four sections in my budget. I have the operational costs, just the stuff it takes to keep the lights on, so to speak, and I never have to negotiate that, it is so clear, all the basic stuff, and that is a huge chunk of our budget. Then I have a second chunk that is maintenance, and that is to say that if we don’t do these things, we will slip behind, this is to keep us up to date. And it is easy to put that off for a year but that means it will cost you more next year and [Time Stamp00:34:50] then I have a third section that I call support and training and all that stuff, and don’t repeat this, but if we make bad hires, it is going to cost us a lot here. Who we hire and how we do them makes all the difference here, if we want to hire people with bad technical skills, it’s a ministry choice, but how well you want me to support you, there is a cost involved with it. I can very cheap or I can be very expensive, but that is really not even my issue, you tell me how much support you want and we will give you a dollar value. And finally the fourth section is development cost. If we want to go do something new, that’s the one I always argue for they say not this year. And then in mid-year, they come and ask to do it.
Jason
Cool, thanks Tony. If you could blog on that for us all, that would be really helpful.
Tony
I’ll put that in my que, I’ve got about 60 articles that I have yet to post. I have to catch up the Roundtable stuff, but I’ll add that to my list.
Jason
And provide dollar amounts and percentages.
Anybody else?
Right now when people come to me, the directive I’ve been given by my prior boss is that IT right now is to cover the essentials, a pc for each staff person with basic software. Then somebody comes up and wants One Note for their entire department, which is great because I’m a big fan of One Note, but I have to ask for an account number to charge it back to. Here’s how much it will cost and the time frame. Send the message to the departments to be mindful of IT expenditures and try to budget for them.
Tony
Let me throw another thing out here that may or may not be good stuff. I’ve been trying to work for years toward a model that I have not yet achieved, but I’m trying to get to the point of saying that every staff member has an [Time Stamp00:38:22] IT cost, and it is a variable because of desktop users versus laptop versus a tablet user versus an extremely mobile tablet user, there are different pieces in that scale, but we are trying to come up with just a really fixed number that says every time you bring a person on staff, factor all these other dollars into the budget, because we are real good on the HR side saying things like payroll costs and HR benefits, but every time we bring on a staff member, that’s a desk, office, telephone, computer, software licenses, connectivity, and, and, and so on. What I’m trying to do, I want to go into the budget and say, “Tell me how many people we have,” I run a mathematical equation and say, “Here’s the budget.” Done deal. If you add somebody in the middle of the year, here is the net add. I’d love to get it down to a monthly cost per person. Then we go to the next level of out-sourcing, we take it all the way and just say, “Tell me how many people you got,” and we got it done. I don’t know if that is truly conceivable, but conceptually, I keep trying to drive more and more in that direction. And it makes it so simple to control what things look like.
Sp
I came out of an engineering world and we actually did that. We called it our head-count cost, which was above and beyond the cost of having a person on staff, whereas if we hired an engineer, we knew it was gonna be about $8,000-10,000 for bringing that engineer on. Obviously the church world software is a lot cheaper. We had categories and classifications of types of users, and we would say, when it came time to hire for the year, we would ask how many engineers are you hiring? Are they electrical or whatever, and that’s how we would build our budget. Of course that was always buffered pretty heavy.
Jason
Cool. Right now, we just have [Time Stamp00:40:44] a lump sum that attaches to each anticipated new hire. When it gets a little messy is when I get told that we have a new hire. They want to know if we have an old PC sitting around, and I’m like oh man!
And we are trying to be as helpful and flexible as we can. The next question is what’s this person’s function gonna be? If they are editing graphics and video…great! We’ll have to get creative. They didn’t ask for a Mac, so life is good. Just had to throw that in.
Any other budgeting questions or comments?
Let’s talk some Roundtable stuff. Highlights, what we awesome, what you learned.
I’ll begin.
For me, it really comes back to the whole idea of church IT guys and gals talking church IT stuff. It energizes my spirit to hang out with like-minded guys. I don’t even know what denominations were present at the Roundtable and the cool thing is that it doesn’t even matter. It never surfaces, we all have the end goal of Jesus Christ and what we can do to help spread the Word and I think that is so cool. Golden stuff. The Datacore people are still making my head hurt trying to figure out storage virtualization. Chris and Tony, you guys just knocked it out of the park. Great thing.
Chris, can you talk about what the video/audio future releases might look like?
Chris
At this point, I’ve got the DVDs for the Roundtable on my desk, I got them yesterday morning but I haven’t had a chance to look at them. I have a feeling what’s going to occur is that I will do some mild editing just to get rid of breaks and things like that and my intent is to release what will probably be 3 DVDs in the near future but I don’t know when. [Time Stamp00:45:16] We will just sell them at whatever it costs us to produce them.
Jason
Just make sure it ends in .99. $19.99 for a 3-DVD set!
Chris
I’m debating whether to get a fancy jacket for it or just stick it in while sleeves.
Jason
I suggest just the white sleeve, cause I will take it out of the cover and throw that in the trash.
Chris
As long as nobody minds, white sleeves it is.
Hopefully sometime in the next week, I’ll have more information. We have a DVD duplicator and I can print something nice on the front of them, packaging is an expense, I think the white sleeve is the way we’ll go.
Jason
You guys have done an amazing job.
Sp
Did everybody get a CD?
Jason
I don’t think so, what was on it?
Sp
Stephen Miller gave me a whole bunch of CDs to put in the bags and we thought we got them in there, but he actually arrived with them after we’d already started passing them out, so I’m not sure everybody got one. So anybody there is entitled to get one, drop me a line if you didn’t get one and we’ll send one out.
Tony
I’m sending you a note that I didn’t get a CD.
I don’t know if anybody else liked this but one of my favorite parts of the Roundtable was James, the Fairway consulting guy, and his story about when problems happen, his jumping out of the airplane, parachute problem, did anybody get a chuckle out of that.
Jason
Oh yeah!
Sp
I think Betty Grant was the greatest.
Tony
She was pretty neat.
Mike Gayle told me before hand that I would like her. And she showed up and I wasn’t so sure for a couple minutes, but only for a couple of minutes, then she was great!
Jason
I thought all the vendor stuff was very well done. My only critic is, “Don’t show me PowerPoint, show me what you got.”
Tony
Yeah, I had [Time Stamp00:50:06] that follow-up conversation with a couple of the vendors. That was bad.
Sp
I felt like one of the softwares was an unveiling and I was a little disappointed that we didn’t actually see it work.
Tony
I was impressed that Stephen and Kevin did show their products, live.
Jason
Now, with the power of VM ware, you can have a laptop and you could have your entire, web server or whatever you need, can run on your laptop so you are completely non-dependent on an Internet connection whatsoever. Show me your product, Script Logic, some of those extra modules you are telling me about, I can see some benefit but without seeing it… I’m more likely to buy it if I see it in action.
Tony
I was talking to Cliff this morning about the Fall Roundtable, trying to figure out what model should he use, did you Jason do it right, did Chris and I do it right, is there a right and wrong, and we finally zeroed in on the answer, it is so simple. I gotta look at my board to read this. The summary comments all boil down to just one thing, include more people and keep it small. That’s all we gotta do. That’s Cliff’s task for the Fall.
Jason
Such a simple thing.
As I look back, if you did the Roundtable in more of a two-day thing, in that room you had us in Chris, the audio was great, I could hear easily anybody within the room, so we could have actually had everybody in that room as part of the discussion. Obviously the moderator would have to keep the focus, but I look back and think you could have had even the outer ring be part of it.
Sp
I think we stuffed too many bodies in there.
Jason
I put a panoramic view shot on my blog, if anybody didn’t go and wants to see.
Another impression I had when I thought back on it was that the enemy wasn’t very happy with us being in one [Time Stamp00:54:07] location, so that brings a big smile to my face to think about a whole bunch of us getting together with the same mission and focus, that is pretty incredible, I’m 100% confident that the gates of hell were shaking that day.
Tony
I have to go back and repeat, going into this thing, I knew it was a disaster, we had so many things we were trying to do that there was no way it could work out if God wasn’t behind it, and sure we had our glitches but look at how much of that thing went right and that is such a God thing.
Jason
Big Yeah God!
Tony
Chris, can you repeat, I don’t remember the wording, when your pastor looked out Monday morning at all the laptop, but then you said he made a comment Tuesday at a staff meeting, can you repeat that?
Chris
That was a long time ago Tony. Ask me what I had for breakfast. I don’t remember. Why don’t you paraphrase?
Tony
Something about a comment he made about what was going on across the street and how incredible it was. Never mind.
Chris
Tony, in your blog, you had listed the people who were supporting us and one group that you missed, not on purpose, was our Children’s Ministry, they were the ones who were setting up the tables and taking care of drinks and food stuff. They did an awesome job.
Jason
Chris, you need to be blogging my friend.
Chris
I got a blog out there but there is nothing in it yet. First step.
Jason
Do we want to go down the rabbit hole of what the future organization anomaly conglomerate intergalactic church IT thing might look like or should we save that for another time?
Sp
You might want to have a separate one just for that.
Jason
We could just set a whole date for that. I emailed Phil Martin to get him to join in the discussion. There is discussion happening on many blogs. I just posted the link to another Jason, Jason Reynolds. Did [Time Stamp00:58:43] you see that one Tony?
Tony
I don’t think so, it is amazing how many there have been, I’m trying to capture all of them and they keep coming, which is great. I posted a thing yesterday where Phil sent me a Sacramento chapter, Nacbait.
Jason
I joined Nacbait last night and invited them to the podcast today, I don’t know that anybody I see here is from it. Hit my blog, I got a Google alert from Jason Reynold’s blog and he’s got a lengthy post, good, a lot of views on why he thinks we should not necessarily do some sort of a national thing.
Jason Reynolds
I just got on, sorry my post was so long.
Jason
Hey Jason! Your ears were burning. I think you did a great job and brought up a lot of interesting things. Shout out your blog address for us.
Jason R
www.ashleyandjason.com The title of the post is What Ministry Technology Church IT and Web Ministry People Have In Common.
Jason
Good! Well what we are thinking about doing Jason is maybe, in a future podcast, just focusing it on talking about what a national or an association thing might look like. I thought you had a lot of great points. That’s the first time I had seen your blog.
Jason R
I’m fairly obscure but I think there are lots of us out here interested in aggregating and coming together and we need glue to do that. While church ministries are unique, they have some of the same issues and struggles, so it would be neat to wrap everybody in.
Jason
Yes, and we look at where we are now and our movement, and wonder how many other movements like ours are out there. Many of you, like me, have probably got Google alerts sets for about any combination that I can think of that would alert me to somebody talking church technology, etc. So I see that the number of people that are [Time Stamp01:02:37] blogging is expanding out and I think that is a cool thing. I that is going to be the eventual vehicle we use to wrap every body in, it’s getting the information out. I look back and go, if I found out that this church IT Roundtable thing was going on, I’d want to be part of it. That’s kinda why it started in the first place, to get people together and talk shop. What is all looks like in the future I don’t know, but lots of us are talking, and people wanting to go.
William
I have the concept for you guys to ponder on, in terms of the groups I’ve heard mentioned, being technically oriented we are also like the facilities managers and that might be another group that you might want to potential examine to see if we want to do stuff like they are doing. I stuck a URL in there, they have a national organization, it might be easier getting information from the founders of that group.
Jason
Right, I have sent out some initial stuff, because our facilities manager came and I was talking to her about what we are doing and she told me to check out what she was doing with facilities managers and she gave what she thought were the pro and cons to what they are doing. There are so many ways to look at other models, and try to figure out what to do and not to do, to make it small and big at the same time, that’s the challenge.
Anything else before we wrap this up?
Sp
Is anybody using Sharepoint?
Sp
Do you like it? How does it benefit you and your ministry?
Sp
We deployed Sharepoint to use initially as in internal Intranet, we’re pretty much a Microsoft, but with the release of the new Sharepoint Services 3, we deployed a version of it that’s forms-based authentication and we are doing ministry management through it. Like our video and production ministries are organizing their volunteers using [Time Stamp01:06:13] a forms-based set up of Sharepoint.
Jason
That’s where we are heading with it to. We are starting with Creative Arts and trying to create a portal of volunteer and Creative Arts staff so they can have schedules and song charts and this and that in a place where they can get in and interact. What kind of licensing does that mean? It’s all a grey area, depending on what Microsoft person you talk to.
Sp
By using forms-based authentication, they are authenticating against a table on the SQL database, so there is no user requirement, and as far as everything I’ve looked at and checked, we don’t have to have the connector license. We are using a prock [?] license though so we are a little different, we’ve got the SQL processor license.
Jason
Interesting. Good. Thumbs up to Sharepoint. I talked to Sadie at the Roundtable, Willow Creek is using Sharepoint for a ton of stuff, they’ve got volunteers hooking into it. We are trying to schedule a time to get over there and look at how they are doing IT stuff.
Sp
I’d be interested in hearing other people’s feedback on Sharepoint stuff. Like when you go to the forms-based set up, it dumbs it down quite a bit, like you lose a lot of key pieces of functionality are killed when you go forms-based, like the image loading.
Jason
That’s not happy-sounding.
Sp
I’ve read a couple of articles online of people using it and they created a separate organizational unit in active directory and then they just bought a connector, expensive.
Jason
That’s the direction we are leaning right now, we’ve go on OU already set up, you can use some free tools from www.adventment.com that would allow administrative assistant to add people into that OU without touching anything else in active directory and easily set up permissions and change passwords and [Time Stamp01:09:45] pull people out. That’s another thing, those of you using Sharepoint, who is managing the volunteers accessing it? Our Creative Arts guys have 400 volunteers, I look at that and go into the fetal position, I’m like who is going to manage all these accounts and who has access and permissions, and craziness.
We are at the hour ten mark. I think we are at a good spot to wind down here. Quickly looking back to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Jeffrey has announced that VM ware is built into Blue 2 7 [?], that’s sweet.
Jeffrey had talked about doing a talkshoe the week before or after the next one of these, since we are only doing one in May. So www.itdiscuss.org is a great place to interact. Jim Walton has started a wiki for church IT related things. Jeffrey started a wiki over on IT discuss, so there are things everywhere, it is awesome. I love that we are all trying to help each other. Kudos. Also, if you’ve got local churches around you, engage with them. The more we can help each other, the better we are, building the Kingdom.
Jeffrey
So the talkshoe will be May 4th, which is Friday, around 2:00. Just look for a link to show up.
Jason
Excellent. Thanks everybody. Appreciate your time. Phone line and chat window will stay open. Look forward to seeing you next time.
Here's some quick and dirty post show notes from today's talkcast over on talkshoe.com. Some great dialog ... thanks to everyone who participated!
Get the audio/mp3/iTunes downloads here
Hope to see everyone at the next talkcast on May 17th 2pm EDT
TODAY = 19 callers, 9 chat client only, 18 live audio streaming only
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Kewl Tools
Jason P - SpinVox.com ... converts your vmail into text and sends it to your email!
Jared B - Space Monger ... makes a graphical representation of your hard drive
William P - ACS Financial Module ... separate module (don't need other ACS software) that their financial folks say is better than Quickbooks.
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General Discussion
Some discussion about the need to gather church IT stats to help other churches with hiring decisions. I've blogged about this already here. I'm thinking of just throwing up a surveymonkey survey so we can start collecting some data.
Chris K - curious what CMS solution people are using? Like Drupal, etc?
Andrew M - switching from Joomla to Drupal. Suggested contacting David Russell.
Chris K - who's using outside hosts for CMS solutions?
Small discussion about a data center co-location. Chris K has rack space. [definitely need to revisit this]
Chris K - anybody using 316 Networks or Akami or other streaming solutions as he's saturating his 75MB pipe ... over 500 users @ 282Kbps. Several options mentioned. Neokast.com, lightcastmedia.com, churchquest.com and others.
Jason P - Who's budget does unexpected requests come from? Some helpful discussion followed. Consensus seemed to be that IT handles essential needs and then each department needs to budget for "above and beyond" purchases (like CS3). Tony talks about some details behind how he budgets ... very interesting stuff ... SHHH, he really didn't want to have this recorded ;-)
A good bit of post Church IT Roundtable discussion. DVD's should be available in a few weeks.
Suggestion to focus a future podcast solely to discussing what an Church IT Association "thing" might look like ... perhaps wait until we can get Phill Martin from NACBA or other organization leaders to take part.
Quick question about Sharepoint ... who's using it ... likes/dislikes
VMware now part of newest release of Ubuntu Linux
Jeffrey Thompson planning a Church IT talkcast May 4th 2pm Eastern ... see ITDiscuss.org for details
