Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 8, May 17, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, May 17, 2007, this is Episode 8. 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.
We are not in our typical rotation but we will be back on the regular schedule next month.
Topics today, ongoing thread about tools, maybe some local roundtable updates. I’ve been curious to know, how do you measure IT help? What metrics are you gathering, what are you giving to your boss to help them understand the state of IT, and how do you convince your boss that you need more help? How do you minimize distractions? We are interrupt-driven, and then from the log, questions on VPN, so we’ll get those in as well.
First, Kool Tools. I’ll put a plug out for www.mozypro.com I know it has been talked about already, it is so sweet. You can go to the www.mozy.com website and get a free version, it will back up 2 gigs of data, you can pay $5 a month to back up unlimited at home, not business. I’ve got it cranking at home, taking the photos and stuff and shoving them to mozy’s discs and it is nice. It’s all upload. The mozypro is geared more for small and medium businesses. The price is phenomenal. For churches, the price is about $4 per host, and then 45 cents per gig. The client is slim, they have a sweet back-up set. I’m playing with it, right now we are trying to upload 45 gigs, we’ll see how long that takes. You can throttle it, like different during the day and at night. You can schedule it to be a more traditional back-up or leave it in its default every two hours. It’s got a 30 day trial. That’s my Kool Tool. I’m still loving SpinVox.
Tony
PdaNet. I’m at Jeffries and you can’t do anything here, but I am online through PDA net. I had never heard of, Rich told me about it, June Fabrics. You buy a license, but I haven’t bought the license, I clicked the download button.
Jason [Time Stamp00:07:49] Lee
You’ll get nailed in 30 days Tony. I’ve used it before, they will finally hit you after 30 days.
Tony
I’ll gladly pay it when it gets here.
Jason Lee
Are you in an area where you have the G3 speeds on your PDA?
Tony
Theoretically, but I’m Cingular which doesn’t give me much of that, so, but the theory is good. I’m very please with this.
Jason
Other cool tools?
Sp
Ed Buford has been my cool tool for the week. He has saved me on an Exchange issue. I’ll give him a plug. We’ve got major problems with DNS outbound and reverse look up and all sorts of fun stuff like that, I posted on the IT site the issues we are having and basically it’s an undocumented error that Exchange gives you but Ed has been helping me track some of that down.
Jason
Great. www.ebuford.com A person can be a cool tool.
Sp
I’m using the Adobe Media Encoder. I’ve just started using it but I’m pretty excited about it. I was able to deliver a real-time Flash 3 last night. We have the Adobe Flash media server but this was actually being able to stream real-time so taking our Wednesday night service and instead of using just Windows media, we used Adobe Media Encoder last night and pumped out a real-time Flash stream.
Jason
Nice, how much?
Sp
The tool is free. The Flash media server is pricey but I’m going to play with Red 5 which is not but the best but they have an Open Source Flash streaming server called Red 5.
Jason
Speaking of Flash, Trace do you have any more info about live cast?
Trace
Yes, I had a phone conversation with them this week, they are not going to be doing live yet from what I understand. Brad Murray only maintains the Windows media servers for live church, but they are going to be focusing mostly on simulated live, they were running into too [Time Stamp00:12:18] many issues with trying to stay live and add the rest of the experience online service experience along with the video. I think they are going to stick with the flash for more, because it is more accessible across multiple platforms. That’s what I got from him, that’s he is just going to continue to develop better tools for simulated live video.
Jason
Andrew isn’t here today, but he just had a recent blog post about Neocast and some of their beta stuff and it sounds sweet.
Trace
The company that does ABCs online stuff, it’s all http streaming and they are about to go high-def on ABC. We talked to them and they are not ready yet to go public with their products. ABC has been their main company. If you check out their stuff, quality is unbelievable. I think you will see the networks pushing online video stuff to a new level.
I think the live solution is still up in the air as to who is going to come up with the best thing for that.
Jason
You can get the chat log if you email talkshoe, I’ll try to do that from here on out.
Brian
Jason, for those of us sitting at Taco Bell, can you give a run-down of who all is here?
Jason
Sure, we’ve got a good crowd, Trace, Tony, Dave Webber, Jeffrey, Dave Mast, David from Indianapolis, Sperge, John, Jennings, Bill Krane, William Phelps, Jason Lee, a bunch of people.
That’s a good transition.
Local IT Church Roundtable update, any tidbits about the Fall Roundtable.
Brian
Not much, we’re gonna have 3 or 4 different rooms, we will split people up into groups of 15 to 20 people and we’re gonna connect those together using Macromedia Breeze or whatever, that is the current thinking. We are going to try that out here shortly in mock fashion. That’s about it. Any questions? Registration is not open yet, we are trying [Time Stamp00:17:49] to nail down a couple of things that will affect pricing and we want to get those straightened out before we open registration.
Jason
October 3rd and 4th, go over to www.apianway.blogspot.com
Good.
Anybody doing anything locally you want to plug in for?
Tony
Jeffrey doesn’t want to talk. This is weird. Next Tuesday, we’ve invited a whole bunch of people, Jeffrey sent out 500 postcards to a massive list of people he came up with. Jeffrey and I were at a Mac meeting today talking about church IT stuff. I did a presentation there called “What your IT guy wishes you knew about him” or something like that, just repeated some of the stuff we said at the Roundtable last year and had a little flyer that says, “Invite you IT guys to come to the Roundtable in Atlanta next week” and I think it was well received.
Jason
I wish I could make it, long commute.
Brian and Cliff, did you put together something locally?
Brian,
It got cancelled. We’re going to do that on the 31st, just some of the local guys that we’ve all met, just bring them all together, nothing formal.
Jason
I know things are happening all over. Michigan, Atlanta, Houston, things are moving and shaking. Not to detract from the Fall Roundtable, we are going to do something at Granger on September 26, kinda like the Innovate Conference we did last year. Join us. Dean is going to be here, that’ll be fun.
Tony
ACS is having their national user-group meeting this week, and Dean plans this event day for church IT people. About 15 or so show up, it was great. I’m feeling very guilty, all the stuff that Dean did for us in Houston, Dean just pouring stuff into what we were doing, he didn’t do any of that for his own customers. He hosted them nicely, but everybody bought their own lunch, [Time Stamp00:23:50] I was the only guy wearing a Church IT Roundtable shirt, and stuff like that. I felt guilty. Great discussion, people who had never before connected with us but now hopefully are. If they hear me saying that about Dean not giving them a shirt and dinner and they are gonna be upset at him. But he’s really a great guy.
Jason
I told Dean that he could be a participant at the Granger thing, he doesn’t have to sit on the sidelines, he can come chat IT stuff with us. So maybe that’ll help him feel loved.
Jason Lee
I was down there with those guys in Florence a couple weeks ago, we took a team down to try to evaluate where we are going church-wise but also where ACS was going. A plug for Dean and all his folks, they are top-notch, Dean especially understands the vision of church IT. I think I can say that he definitely wants to help all of us church IT people as customers. I have the benefit of being an ACS customer. It was a good time for us to talk to him and his staff, they’ve got some top-notch people down there.
Jason
I feel that Dean is the real deal, he’s genuine, doing whatever he can to help us all, I think that is awesome.
Jason Lee
I am still in dialogue with him as far as what they might be able to do as far as long term back-up solutions for church IT, off-site, whatever, they are trying to look at a price break for existing products and maybe look in to developing a new product that might fit our needs better for system back-up, not just database back-up. So I sent an email to him today about that, they are still working on it.
Jason
You know, it would be helpful if you, Jason Lee, would blog about it! It only takes once a week, that’s all we need, well it’s all we require.
Jeffrey
Jason, Tony gave a plug for that ACS product today, you can tell Dean about Tony’s plug.
Jason Lee
That’s a great product for what it’s build to do, I just ask can it do what we’re asking. Yeah, it’s a great product for the cost, I can’t say anything bad about that.
Tony
I had more discussion with Dean at this user-group thing about stuff that ACS does that nobody knows. I think I told ACS customers about stuff ACS does that they didn’t know. I was the only non-ACS customer in the room and I knew more about what they were doing. I told Dean I was going to come be his PR person.
Jason Lee
We had a heart to heart with him about that a couple weeks ago. The sad thing is that there are products that ACS can facilitate for the church markets that aren’t just church management applications but none of us know about it, so we leaned on their marketing guys to come up with a strategy to get this stuff out.
JC
I don’t know why though because you become a customer, they spam you like three times a week, so I just ignore all their emails so that’s why I don’t know what they’ve got going on.
Jason [Time Stamp00:28:54] Lee
I’ve never gotten an email from them, maybe my spam filter is getting this.
We did have a strong conversation with them that we didn’t want spam from their marketing department but they needed to get their marketing together, I was pretty firm on it.
Jason
Good stuff. Alright, let’s switch gears to the area of IT help. The question is how are you measuring the state of IT? Are you collecting metrics? What are you doing with those metrics? Do you have anything to hand to your boss that has a general overview of IT help report? What is a way to grab data, what data, to present to upper management? Discussion?
Sp
We are using What’s Up Gold or What’s Up Pro, whatever it’s called, to track server availability, hard drive utilization, ram utilization. Also during business hours, what is the relative up time of the server infrastructure?
Jason
Are you giving that to anyone or is it more just for your use?
Sp
Just our own at the moment, we haven’t been questioned for any metrics yet.
Jason
Ok, the reason I’m heading in this direction is that I am being questioned about producing metrics, so trying to figure out what makes sense.
Sp
From my pre-church world, one of the things we captured and reported were helpdesk tickets, average amount of time on those, that sort of thing.
Jason Lee
Did you use those numbers in conjunction with a service level agreement to show a benchmark? Or how did you help establish the parameters?
Sp
We had a service level agreement that basically stated that under normal conditions, all helpdesk would be closed within a certain time. We had different classifications for tickets, emergencies, different terms.
Jason Lee
How public do you make those agreements? That’s [Time Stamp00:33:17] one thing we are working on right now. We have established them but we haven’t communicated them to our users. Does that go network wide or just upper management?
Sp
We always did it to everyone, that way people knew exactly what to expect. If they are calling because one program is acting awkward, they have to know that a computer that is not working at all has priority. I think, because we are in a church, the people need to know that there has to be a priority.
Jason
When a helpdesk request comes in, should we be communicating to them when we think we should be able to resolve it? We are processing that, we want to respond as quick as we can, but here’s the priority information.
Jason Lee
Would that be a static number or a dynamic number depending on what’s in the que?
Jason
It would depend on what’s in the que.
Jeffrey
I would suggest not telling the user what priority they are, because to them every user is the highest priority. I would suggest using an estimated completion date or time when you expect that their request will be fulfilled.
Sp
The helpdesk system we used was fabulous, we used Numera Track-It and it would automatically send an estimate of when a normal request should be completed by. I was curious what everyone was using in the church world for helpdesk anyway. Are we all Inbox managing.
Jason
For Granger, we were using Inbox, then we went to Track-it and used that for about a year, I got fed up with it, we are now using Service Desk and we really enjoy it.
Sp
Jason, when you bought Service Desk, did you pay for it outright or are you buying it by the year?
Jason
I think we are on a yearly contract.
Jason Lee
I think the way they do their pricing plan now is that it is built in with a one-year maintenance contract, we just bought it also.
Sp
We are about [Time Stamp00:36:54] 6 days away from the end of the trial and so far everyone is loving it.
Jason Lee
Although their support doesn’t speak clear English.
Jason
Thick Indian accents, but they try hard.
Jason Lee
They are very tolerant of that though if you ask to be transferred to someone you can understand. The one thing I don’t like about Service Desk is that they’ve rolled out several other products like their Asset Management product that is a separate piece that they are promising to Service Desk users that will be rolled into the Asset Management, that’s been about 4 months since it got released and it really did what Service Desk should have done from the get-go. So from the development standpoint, they are moving forward.
Jason
Other churches are still using Track-it. Brian, you are still using it right?
Brian,
Yes, we are. We are starting with What’s Up Gold and we’re having What’s Up Gold monitor and measure our Track-it so it measures the current open tickets and creates a graph for it. Our network guy just figured that out this week and we are monitoring it that way.
If anybody is interested in those scripts, just give me a shot, I’ll put my email it.
Jason
I believe Terry at Fellowship Church was using Track-it but looking to switch to Service Desk. Derick and John are using SysAid by Ilient. Derek, comment on that?
Derick
We’ve been using that about a year, got a nice full-fledge trial, free support, free usage, it’s got a nice administration screen, it searches the whole network, pulls all the computers on network, loads it onto them, tells you what they have in ram, memory, programs, operating systems, latest updates, all that, customizable forms for all users
Jason
Good. Other measuring IT?
Tony
I don’t know if this is a help measurement [Time Stamp00:41:18] but it has been helpful. I keep track of how many accounts we have, how many email messages come in a day, what is the size of our total data storage at any given point? Because they are easy metrics to have, I have kept them. They sound very boring until you look at them across several years and realize since 7 years ago when we said we will not be adding staff, we’ve doubled. You can say we didn’t really add staff, we just added volunteers with accounts. I love going back to that and saying, “To me, how was that different?” Just those raw numbers, how many telephone extensions do we have, things like that. You show those numbers, and say how does a church a staff of 150 have 250 user accounts and 700 telephone extensions? Somebody has to deal with that. What is the size of your daily back-up? It sounds useless until you see how much it changes. I want to show but haven’t come up with a way to measure it, we used to have a guy that worked with us who came out of the cable industry and he talked about Spin and Churn and that’s what I would like to be able to show. Spin is your staff turn-over rate, an incredible factor of impact for IT. The Churn is the same people but have changed what’s on their desktop. New program, reconfigure, faster machine. Those are sometimes harder than new accounts. Those are the things I want to show, I just can’t come up with a good measurement of. We also pull some statistics out of our church database and just show number or records in the database, number of members, number of families, number of households, and when you start tracking those back to our storage size and number of accounts, all those things begin to get related to each other. I sorta want to track our facility square footage, which doesn’t change much but show how that compares to those other numbers. Sometimes the numbers you don’t think are important can be very useful.
Sp
One of the metrics we report on the most are web page statistics, how many hits, all those web stats, and then streaming statistics. I’m reporting those more than on the helpdesk side or any IT stats.
Jason
I think helpdesk is a given one, typically whatever product you are using is going to be able to produce those reports with much difficulty. On the plane ride back from the Spring Roundtable, I had my legal pad out, I think we were talking about metrics at the Roundtable. Back in my Novell days, Novell had this simple web page where all the servers showed up as a stop light, red yellow, green, you could see the health of every server, easy eye glance. Where everything is green light, sweet. If it’s yellow, hmm, something might be up. Obviously, red means get out of your chair and go to the server room and start digging in. What would it look like if we build something like that here. A stop light for network, Internet connections, switches, firewall, servers, storage, maybe stuff needs to be [Time Stamp00:46:36] patched but we haven’t had time. A particular server gets re-booted more than once a week, what’s going on there? Just the desktop client health, what patches are needed, how is anti-virus, stuff that will come out of helpdesk, user-health, what’s the state of our IT team?
Jason Lee
I think that’s one thing we often miss is the metrics of how healthy are our staff and our volunteers and what are we doing to monitor that.
Jason
Exactly, I’d give us a big red light on that right now. I think that is really important but what metrics are you using to define that and how do you pass that on. That was a big one for me. How do we get to a green light? That’s hard to nail down, other than how many hours we’re putting there. Bookstore Manager could be a whole podcast itself.
JC
One of the things we do where I’m at, we’ve got a program called Cacti that monitors snmp devices, we have two autonomous networks here and we’re basically a hosting facility for the government institute that I’m working for and we determine bandwidth saturation and stuff like that using Cacti and any future customer coming in, we determine the bandwidth requirement, we keep track of that stuff with Cacti.
Sp
I’ve used Cacti and love it.
Jason
I noticed that Op Manager has a new version out. It used to be free for up to 20 devices, they’ve changed it down to 10.
So, you need to prove to somebody that you need more staff, what do you do?
Sp
Ask them what they need you to have for them.
Ask them which priorities they want you to drop this year.
Sp
No, we have to be positive.
Jason
I remember Jason at the Roundtable saying that you need to go to your boss and saying what metrics do you need from me. For whatever reason, that has never crossed my mind, it’s always been me getting metrics for us here in IT, not thinking about going to my [Time Stamp00:51:01] boss.
Jason Lee
And I live under an umbrella of grace in case my boss happens to listen to this, some of those metrics may seem completely asinine to us as IT Directors, but as upper level management looking at the grand scheme of things and the bigger picture, there may be a particular metric that doesn’t make any sense to us that really hones in and gives information that’s needed on a higher level than what we are thinking. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in the last nine months, ask those questions and be frank and honest. What do you need to see and hear from me to monitor the health of my department as my supervisor. I thinking of the guy who asked if he should pull the plug out of his server, my first response is that it would work once, then you’ve used your credit. Part of it is thinking of me managing my staff – if they pulled that on me, it wouldn’t fly well, so it wouldn’t fly well with me boss either. I think it is working well together and not creating that friction by doing something that might be comfortable for us IT geeks but doesn’t make sense to the rest of the world.
Mark
I’m still trying to find that service line between being a servant and being reasonable with staff volunteers and the amount of hours put in and trying to find that balance. This really helps, I started to drop the line about six months ago and say we gotta hire some more people, but you are right, I need to go say, “What do you want to see, is it the fact that no one takes vacations, no one leaves, if we’re sick, there’s nobody here, what do you want to prove that we need to increase the IT staff?”
Jason Lee
And quite honestly, some of the things you are saying like not taking vacations, there is validity to pointing that out and there’s validity to saying, like I always work backwords [Time Stamp00:53:24] from those kind of situations and say to my boss, “Ok you want 100% up-time, well ok, this is what it’s gonna take to do 100% uptime.” Can we do that, probably not, ok 99%, and then back yourself off. It seems to be more productive to go backwards, if this is your end result is desired, this is what it’s going to take for me to be able to achieve that as a team. And my rule of thumb for volunteers is I’m never asking them to give more time volunteering than I am willing to do, and that may not be in IT, it may be in some other church ministry. So I think how many hours can I ask a volunteer to put in over and above their work week, helping to gauge that in a healthy way, so that one, you’re not burning your volunteers out, two also to create a healthy environment. Sometimes it is more work to recruit and train a volunteer than to hire a staff person but maybe that’s the best solution to the problem long term.
Jason
Great stuff.
Jason Lee
Don’t think we have it figured out, we are working on this.
Mark
Jason when I got back from the meeting, I tried to use you as an example. One of our elder’s son attends there on your board and they went out there to view your church as we grew, so I got back and had my first meeting and said, “They’ve got three people on staff and we’ve got one.” That didn’t help me much, I’m trying to find an equal size church to compare ministries and stuff because I’m scratching at straws. When I went to the IT Roundtable, that was what I was looking for, where to go with volunteers and staff.
We run a little higher than 1200. Now I just got the budget request and they want to do nine check-in stations to do the Children’s Ministry, I did the pricing, six days a week I’m working, Sundays I’m on call, you are going to have [Time Stamp00:56:43] to start looking at this radically, you cannot have the check-in stations go down on a Sunday morning. You can volunteers doing stuff but if the SQL server goes down, we will have to figure something out. I love listening to this, I’m making notes, but I’m trying to do this in the right attitude. I will work and server because that’s what I’ve done, but now it’s my job and I’ve got to have some other aspects, but I also need to be able to do a good job and there is a point where Mark is going to leave to go to a seminar or somewhere and who carries the load when I’m gone and how do we deal with that. And if I get sick or something happens to me, we laugh at that, but I’m trying to deal with my administration here to education them to the fact. We will add a pastor at the drop of a hat and I understand that ministry is number one but at some point, where does IT grow?
Sp
One of the things we have done on our end, our head pastor has been instrumental in helping with this, he sees IT as a ministry because without us, a lot of these other ministries would not be able to function or function as effectively because we help them get things done faster, improve communication, etc.
Jason
It is important to be able to take data weekly or a couple times a month up to your boss and be able to present the data just so it is always in their face, so they are thinking about what we do. What I’ve experienced here is that we grew really fast and IT was, ‘well they will be able to handle it’ and we tried as hard as we could, and all it takes is a couple of critical things to happen, you get so far behind it is hard to catch up. We need a helpdesk guy. And by having helpdesk metrics, it wasn’t too hard to show what’s happened in the last three years, we’ve quadrupled machines, we’ve added staff, and so on, and they were like Wow. [Time Stamp00:59:50]
Jason Lee
I think that is something we have to own up to, I wasn’t pushing that information upstream in a way it could be digested appropriately. I may have been pushing info upstream that was completely worthless, or may not have been pushing anything upstream. So one thing I have found effective is to get an audience with your supervisor or leadership team on a regular basis. That’s what I would encourage you to do Mark, sit down with your supervisor, that’s been helpful to me. For them to be able to help me make decisions about what projects get completed and which ones have to come to a halt. Someone else is helping you making that decision. It’s probably a decision I could make on my own, but not the decision I should make on my own. Assessing that and seeing where the decisions I can make and should make are two different things.
Mark
I have taken that first step. Last August, we had a new administrator take over, I only met once at budget time, then I finally went up and said, “Look IT is something we need to talk about, so now we’re meeting to talk, getting feedback, and a lot of people will complain to the Administrative Pastor but never gets time to come talk to me and I need to know about these things. If someone is unhappy, let me know and I’ll take care of it. Now I’m hearing from you guys that I appreciate, I’m glad this came up, I have to provide the right information to then, and present it once, talk to it again in a couple weeks, having documentation, presenting it the right way. I’ve got a page of notes here.
Sp
Part of that is accountability both ways. I leave almost every meeting that I sit now asking what are the action steps from this meeting that you expect me to take and, so then when we get back together in two weeks I can either say I screwed up and didn’t get them done or hey I got this done, where are you on your list. I’m accountable to my supervisor but I’m also handing off tasks that are accountable to the IT department too.
One peer church you might want to check with Mark, I’ll volunteer Josh at Westside Christian Church, I think they are about the same size as you. I think he’d be a great person for you to talk with.
Mark
I’ve always tried to make myself available to other churches and now I’ve reached the brick wall where I need to find somebody, and this thing has been saving for me to get involved with this group, just to hear what’s going on has always been helpful to me.
Jason
It would be helpful if we had an online database of just stuff like church IT stats and whatnot. I’m going to blog on this, a list that would be helpful like when you need to hire, or to see churches about my size, how many staff, do they have a school, a giant list of helpful information.
Sp
I thought it would be great if we could come up with, it would be cool to see what all the churches are using to facilitate, like what are they using for a helpdesk, what back-up software, firewalls?
Sp
I just posted that the Chirldren’s Ministry, without contacting IT has decided to roll out this check-in program, and I sent something [Time Stamp01:06:04] out and I got back 7 responses within a couple of hours. But it would also be interesting to see on that list what you guys are using for check-in. What are some of the features you like? Are you using Shelby and why or why not? Just a contact to say, “Hey, how is what you’re doing working?” before I send a month and the money to get this set up, it would be great to know the pros and cons about the things people are using. Then when I get it set up, I can do the same thing for others.
Jason Lee
That information repository is kinda what I was talking about last week, when Jeffrey was hosting the podcast, one of the things we were talking about, I recommended a place people could go and query for other IT people in their area for localized roundtables and I think that kind of information would be key also. You could search for individuals, non-individuals, organizations, structure, etc.
Jason
Yeah. I get at least a few emails a month from people looking at staff, tell us what IT staff looks like at Granger. And I don’t’ mind answering those, but if I had a place to point people to a database with all this data in it, that would be beneficial on so many different levels. At some point, Granger will need to hire more staff, I’ll need a place to look for effective information.
I don’t know if we solved anything but this is good discussion.
Sp
What is the IT site you guys are posting on this stuff?
Jason
Just on each other’s blog for now. I’ve got two posts that say something like church IT staff stats or church IT stats, and a list of questions. I’m getting ready to make a post of just basic questions on my blog, until we have a better place to put it, on my blog called Church IT Stats, we’ll see what happens with that. Jeffrey has a wiki going, www.citrt.org
My [Time Stamp01:11:14] guess is eventually that will become where we put all this information so it’s not scattered on all these different blogs. We throw out a question and chat. Tony is doing something. Also note that Cliff now has a church it blog role that you can download and put it in your own blog, he is keeping track of all the different church IT blogs that he has found and knows about, go check out www.apianway.blogspot.com
That’s one place to be able to see a whole bunch of church IT blogs. Also www.churchtechblogs.com I’m not sure about that name but there’s an aggregator out there pulling together all the church IT blogs.
Sp
How do you get yourself added to that aggregator?
Jason
Just contact the owner, somewhere on there it says emailadmin@churchtechblogs.com
The only problem with it is that I don’t subscribe to it because I’m reading all the other blogs, but the guy that owns churchtechblogs logs on there as well, so I miss what he posts because I don’t want to read all the other stuff that I’ve already read.
I think we’re getting there, we’d like for it to happen faster, but we’re getting there. We’ve got the local roundtables popping up everywhere, we’ve got the Fall Roundtable coming up. We’ve got Dean at ACS trying to help get church IT people connected, that’s the first step, is getting all the other church IT folks out there, there are hundreds, how do we get the staff and volunteers talking to each other? That’s where we have got to start. I’ve not done a good job at that yet, it’s on the plate, what can we do right in our back yard?
Any other final comments on this? I’ll have a blog post on this soon. I’m getting into a metrics mode.
We are at one hour and fifteen minutes, we appreciate everybody’s input. Phone lines will stay open, the chat window will stay open. Keep checking the blogs. Mark, stick your blog in [Time Stamp01:16:35] the chat window. Until next time, June 7th. Thanks everybody.
Well, better late than never ... here's a short recap from the recent episode #8 Church IT Podcast.
We had 16 folks on the conference call, 12 via chat window only, and 10 live audio stream only listeners. Can you believe that to date, the 8 podcasts have seen a total of 965 downloads! Sweet! Keep spreading the word ... Geeks for Jesus!!
COOL TOOLS mentioned
Mozy.com and MozyPro.com for online backups
SpinVox.com - voicemail to text!
PDAnet - use your mobile phone as a broadband modem
ebuford.com - Jason Lee said Ed was his hero this week
adobe media encoder - creates real time flash stream
Red5 open source flash streaming server
Local and Fall Kansas City Roundtable Updates
Some GREAT discussion on "how do you measure IT health"? What metrics are you capturing to show your boss the "state of IT" at your church? How can you go about trying to prove you need additional IT staffing?
Once the recording was stopped, a number of us chatted for another 1.5 hours! I'd encourage everyone to set aside 2 hours for the podcast. The first 1hr 15mins-ish for the recorded stuff and the rest for the post show phone chat. It's kinda funny that once the record button is off the discussion becomes a bit more "lively" as people seem to feel more free to talk :-)
Again, we're doing this interactive podcast every 1st and 3rd Thursday at 2pm Eastern (-4GMT) over on talkshoe.com
The main topic for the next podcast (June 7th) will be on volunteers and Church IT. Come listen to and share your experiences both good and bad about working with volunteers in IT.
