Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 22 January 17, 2008
Jason Powell
Hey, welcome everybody to Episode 22, today is Thursday, January 17, 2008. You can go to www.churchitpodcast.com to get all the special feed and full transcriptions to the podcast. Mucho thanks to Margaret who has been working furiously to get all of the older transcriptions done, and as of a few days ago, everything is now up to date as far as being transcribed, so if you have the time, we would much appreciate, if you have the time, if you would log into the wiki and go in and help edit the transcriptions for content, there are lots of URLs that could be linked to, there are product names that are probably missed and whatnot. If you remember that you were one of the people talking, go into the transcription and place you name in there. That would be a good thing.
Tony, did you want to add anything to the whole transcription process since you and Margaret have been kinda leading the task on that?
Tony Dye
I’ve been sitting back, she’s been doing it. I do nothing.
Jason
Well, you’ve been doing some editing after the fact though.
Tony Dye
Just barely, just to play with it for a minute. The total amount of editing I did was Tuesday night for about 10 minutes. That’s all I’ve done, I will do more but hopefully other people will jump in there too.
Jason
There you go. It’s a wiki, so all hands in, hop in, go crazy, make it a resource. We are finding that Google is not indexing the transcription pages, so Tony has created a page on his blog linking to all of those, so we’ll see if that does anything. The ultimate hope though is that after Ed and I recover from being gone all last week to Sharepoint training, we have a Sharepoint Church IT Roundtable site set up, but we need to flatten it and start it again based on some of the conversations we had last week. Ultimately, we’ll take these podcasts transcriptions and move them over to the wiki on the Sharepoint. That’ll be a good thing, plus we hope it will be a good place to add announcements, so we’ve been brainstorming a lot of stuff. Justin Moore has been taking a lot of notes, so we are hoping to do something really cool with that. We’re counting on you Justin to do something with that.
Let’s hop into Ministry Tech, April 3rd and 4th, we are confirmed that we are going to do the Roundtable day on the 5th, the Saturday, right Tony?
Tony Dye
Yes, I would say that. I had a conversation this morning, I’m not ready to announce it yet but some of us will be conversing this afternoon to firm things up but I think we are set for the 5th and we have a church in Oklahoma City doing it. So let’s make the assumption that we are doing it and we can all stand in the parking lot if we have to.
Jason
Well, we could just go to a hotel and sneak in. We had multiple roundtables at the hot tub in Peoria, that was a nice place to have a roundtable. Awesome. Moved from the hot tub to the pool and back to the hot tub. Great.
Is Trace in here yet?
Do we want to announce, I think we’re pretty sure that we’re going to be doing the Fall Roundtable, I’ll say 99% sure that Sea Coast will be doing the hosting for the Fall Roundtable, so we kicking around some dates. So we are heading for South Carolina in the fall, which will be awesome. We’re seeing if we can arrange something with ACS Technology since they are not too far away from there, we could go check it out, so stay tuned for that. If you like Charleston, stick that on your radar for somewhere in September or October.
Sp
I think my wife will want to go to that one.
Jason
And that’s another thing that we are tying to figure out. My wife wants to go to Oklahoma, she was disappointed when she couldn’t go to Houston. So several of us have been talking about how do we involve our spouses, so we’re kicking that around, hopefully we can do something. I think it would be funny and scary if a lot of our wives got together [Time Stamp00:06:10] and chatted. I’m sure it would be much laughing at our expense and talking about how the laptop is the other woman. So.
We’ve got Ministry Technology Institute, it kicked off its first class or session yesterday or the day before.
Nick Nicholauo
I think it was Tuesday.
Jason
Nick is on the phone, he is one of the co-founders of MTI. Do you want to give us a little bit of information on what you guys did, how many people, can more people join, some of that information?
Nick
I would love to. We announced Ministry Technology Institute in the spring and worked from there forward to get it up and rolling, it took a little longer than we though, but we finally got to open up the door for admissions applications and we had our first class orientation two days ago, so we’ve gotten a number of applications and I think 11 had been approved to date, and all but one of those were able to join us, so we had 10 students in the online orientation class, and 8 of them were from the US, one from Brazil and one from Singapore, and it was all done through Talkshoe. What we found was, and I don’t know if you guys have found this, I tried to use the shoephone voice connection in Talkshoe, I’ve not been real pleased with the bandwidth, but for the folks that were out of country, that’s the way they did it and it worked great.
Jason
I haven’t’ tried the shoe phone yet, I haven’t been brave enough.
Nick
So it was good, we helped them get a sense of excitement about what they were joining, they are the charter class, and walked them through the methodology of how they will be taking their classes. We have 51 classes so far and I think there are already 2 dozen posted online that they can start taking, and obviously more to come. The charter class is still open for [Time Stamp00:09:08] registration. We’ve decided that we are going to let it go al little bit further, I don’t know if we will cut it off at the end of January or into February but the exciting thing about that is that the rate is significantly discounted so let’s face it, we are cutting our teeth on some of the processes with these guys. It’s all about helping them to minister better using technology and supporting technology in their church, so we are glad to get it up and going.
Jason
That is very cool, I hope that is a phenomenal success for you guys.
Nick
Well thanks. It’s about serving and facilitating so we hope it is too. It really feels like God is in it. I might mention quickly that in our advisory board, we’ve a few guys who are also in the church IT area, one is Tony Dye, one is David {MS}and another is Cliff {MS – last names?}and Jason Powell, some little-known guy. We are excited.
Jason
It doesn’t look like David is on the phone. Is that anybody on the phone who is doing the class?
Nick
Trace was in there, he is also on the Advisory Team. David says he doesn’t have phone access today, but he is a pretty quick typist, maybe he can type something in.
Jason
I just realized, this is good, with the web-based chat client, you can copy and paste the whole conversation, the chat thread. With the fat client, you can’t do anything to capture all that chat. I just highlighted something and it dawned on me that I can copy it. That is helpful. I’m digging this client, except it doesn’t show the little flashing phone, so I give it one thumb up.
Alright, Sharepoint thoughts. Jason Lee, you and your team did a phenomenal job from registration, the whole thing was done well, the facilities were great, food was great, conversation was great. We hanging out each evening, going to different restaurants, which was great, excepting it was challenging for those of us on the biggest loser contest. Although I did lose weight last week so that was a good thing. Make sure you tell Linda and your staff a huge congratulations and thank you.
Jason Lee
I took them all to Longhorn on Monday to tell them “Thank you” and I passed along a great thanks from everyone who attended. I had some great feedback and passed that along. We had an amazing time hosting and having everyone in town and being able to share in the conversations and whatnot. A great experience with the Roundtable folks. Bill made a comment that he’d [Time Stamp00:12:59] love to do this again sometime. We loved hosting it, we are here in Peoria and if you guys need a place, if you can handle the snow and ice, you are more than welcome. We appreciate the kind words, I will pass along the thanks to my team.
Jason
Facility is the whole thing. Very well done! It’s too cold!
Jason Lee
It was funny to look over during the training and see Jason Powell wearing a parka the entire week.
Jason
All week I had my coat on. Too funny.
Now that you’ve had a couple days to recoup after a week of training into your head, how would you sum up what you learned and where you think you guys might go knowing what you know now about Sharepoint.
Jason Lee
Specifically for us, we had a great opportunity, with it being on campus for us, Bill spent a lunch with our executive team and sat down and cast some vision for Sharepoint and quiet a few of our leadership team is new on their radar, so they were trying to digest what is Sharepoint and what can it do, but from a 10,000 ft or higher view looking down on it, our team was excited to see some of the capabilities and whatnot. For us, it sent us back to the drawing board on how we would role it out. We’ve had Sharepoint services up and running two or three different times and shut it down and started it over again just in the development area with one production calendar, so for us it was a lightbulb moment, “Oh it can do all of this!” and it doesn’t replace your file server. That was a big thing that we were intrigued to hear Bill say, that it isn’t a replacement for your file server, but it is something to work in conjunction with or to improve your current data structure. So for us, it is continuing to go back [Time Stamp00:15:40] and do more planning before we start up again. But in the same sense, there are several things we’ve thought of recently that if we had our site up we could use it for this or that, so I think there is more under the hood than we thought before.
Jason
Exactly. Your point about really planning this thing out ahead of time. Bill told the whole class that Sharepoint is not something you just install and start letting people do stuff. You need implementation, strategy, a plan, and before we started recording, somebody mentioned that it is very much like building a website, you’ve got to get stakeholders involved. Obviously depending on how big you want it to grow, but it takes a lot of planning. I just got my Mindsharp Sharepoint posters today, I’ll put one of those on the blog. It is scary the amount of data on these giant posters, and there are 7 or 8 posters that you can get free from www.mindsharp.com and really helps you be able to visualize where some of the navigation takes you. Or how would you create a user, it has a flow chart of permission levels, so if you’ve played with Sharepoint, the navigation of the user interface is just not intuitive at all really, so having these posters to be able to look to see where something is located, it’s under this or under that, or hidden in this branch. Looking at the poster very quickly, it has some definite value. And it is free. You could wallpaper your room with this, it looks brilliant, you’ve got giant flow-charts.
Jason Lee
One thing our team came away from it with was the appreciation for Bill and Mindsharp, specifically Bill and his passion for ministry. That was a great encouragement to most people in the room, just to hear his vision and desire for the church to use technology and his passion for wanting to help leadership teams at churches across the country realize [Time Stamp00:18:15] the capabilities that exist from executive to executive level, for the owner of the company to be talking to the executive team of a church, being able to say it is not technology for technology’s sake, but “here’s how you can harness the technology to work for your church rather than your church working for the technology.”
It made a big impression on me how high of a value that is to Bill and for the local church and the church across the country and the world to succeed by using technology.
Jason
Absolutely, and if people didn’t catch it on the blog post, Bill is offering to us church IT people and church web people, any of their courses for the ridiculously low price of basically $200 bucks.
Jason Lee
That’s the entire summit that they do for a week and you can bounce from track to track at the summit for $199. And Bill made a point to say not to do a normal registration at the Mindsharp website and expect to get that price. Speak to Bill or email Bill directly.
Jason
So if you missed the Sharepoint training and are interested in it, it is not too late, you can still, Mindsharp has various locations across the country where they are doing training and he encouraged us to come back again or go to the Sharepoint designer course that’s a week-long thing. Certainly some options there for those who didn’t get to go.
Dave Mast and Justin Moore were both in the training. Do you guys want to mention anything?
Jason Lee
Justin, why don’t you comment on what you posted in the chat window answering Michael’s question about how Sharepoint works in conjunction, not replacing, the file server.
Justin Moore
I may not be the best person to talk on that point, but the thing that opened my eye was, coming from the disaster recovery standpoint, about how long it takes to restore these databases [Time Stamp00:20:46] you know, you can restore from back-up to file server in no time, but Sharepoint can get quite complex when trying to rebuild your farm and restore from there. As far as integration, probably one of the biggest things would be work-flow, which was extremely cool.
Jason
Very cool. Any thoughts Dave Mast? Nancy went to the training but she is not on the phone.
Jason Lee
Mark is in the room, he was there, his brain is still much.
Mark Rock
I was there. I guess one thing I took away is that if I go to another one of his classes is to mentally be prepared to walk away for your brain to be full. Bill gave us two notebooks that were 4-inch binders just full of workshops, labs, documentation, and whatnot and I think we got through only about 1 and ¼ of the notebooks, so that helps me appreciate how much was in there and how much, ya know, we just glossed over everything in a 5-day training and even how much more in-depth you could go.
Jason
Drinking from a fire hose.
Justin Moore
I had a chance Saturday morning before I went to catch my flight, to talk with those two guys from the church, Isaac and Jason, it was their second time coming to one of Mindsharp’s seminars and they said they definitely felt much more prepared after the second one because prior to attending their first training, they had never seen Sharepoint before either, so if you have even just a basic understanding of the technology behind it before you go in, I think it would be less taxing on your brain.
Jason
Yes, especially understanding what defines a farm, all those pieces, what is a site-collection, how do you do disaster recovery on your farm, yes, adding a site to a site to a site, all the possible pieces, how do you index things?
Jason Lee {MS I think it was Jason [Time Stamp00:23:10] Lee??}
I think the biggest challenging take-away was understanding the licensing piece. That was one thing that came up during the training, if you have a public-facing Sharepoint site that does not have credential users needing the connector license, then how do you license all that piece of the puzzle? I think that was eye-opening for us, something that wasn’t even on our radar at all, and whether we do a Sharepoint site that is open to the world or not is yet to be decided but that needs to be a variable in the discussion when we are evaluating is that something we want to do or not.
Jason
I think we came to the conclusion that the free version of Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) if you used FBA, forms-based authentication, so using SQL, not Active Directory credentials, we’ve determined that you still need a Windows server Internet connector license and it was something like $500 for unlimited connector license because you are still exposing a server 2003 to the outside world. Although Sharepoint is free and you are not using Active Directory, you are still exposing the server 2003 to the outside world. You need an Internet connector license. Now if we could get 5 Microsoft licensing people in the same room, we might hear similar or we might hear opposite, my guess is that we’d hear them fighting amongst themselves.
If anybody wants to see what we’re dorking with, the Church IT Sharepoint site is at www.citrt.gccwired.com don’t try to log into it cause like I said, we are going to flatten the thing, Justin is then going to install the search server 2008, then we will stick the Sharepoint services on top of that, since we were told that you can’t have Sharepoint services and put the search on top of it, so, per Bill English.
Jason Lee
One discussion we’ve been having too is the connector license and how does that impact us if we want to do a Roundtable Sharepoint site, I [Time Stamp00:26:15] think we will discuss that in the future a little bit more.
Jason
We should also note that Margaret, our transcriptionist, is in the chat window, she is not on the phone. Mestranscribe is Margaret so feel free to say high to Margaret, she has been transcribing all these things so I think we’ve got her curiosity peaked so she wants to come see what we are doing live, as it happens.
Sp
So is she transcribing live on the fly then? That would be amazing.
{MES insertion}
No, I was not transcribing live, I was too busy reading the chat entries, you guys put nearly as much in the chat window as you do voice (some relevant, some not – but interesting). I think the chat text should be made available on the wiki also. Lots of good stuff there too.
Jason
We would have to have a web-cam of that. Thanks Margaret.
Alright, Sharepoint, pretty much, we are an open forum for the rest of this thing. We are up to 18 people in the Church IT biggest loser contest. Folks are losing weight. There is a link on the www.churchitpodcast.com website that says Church IT Biggest Loser and if you click that link, down at the bottom, you can see who is involved. Tony Dye recently joined. There is around $400 up for grabs. Allen Hunt of VR6 Systems gave us a Garman Nuvi 200 GPS towards this cause, that’s pretty cool. We’ve lost 156 pounds so far across all the people. That’s pretty cool.
So, it’s open. Go crazy.
Nick
I just posted in the chat that Shelby talked to me about having an IT Roundtable at their annual conference this July in Orlando, so for those of us who are Shelby users, that might be something we are looking at.
Jason
Will you put something on your blog about that?
Nick
Probably once they confirm the final details, they’ve asked me to [Time Stamp00:29:41] help facilitate it because they are not Roundtable folks as far as putting it together and I’ve done that a number of times for others, so I’ll put that on there. And also the Shelby website is www.shelbyinc.com and they will have a link there to their conference.
Jason
Cool.
Mark Rock
I have a quick question, home-related. My son got a laptop, he is in his senior year of college, it has Vista on it, but the engineering college at University of Nebraska gave him a program that currently does not want to run on it. Has anyone tried, like on Vista, running VM Desktop or any other solution to put XP on it just to temporarily run this one program? My other options is to try to take a laptop that they don’t offer drivers for and install XP on it and try to track down every driver to make it work, which is my second solution, but I thought virtual might be a better way to go. Any ideas?
Jason
I’d grab VMWare player and you’re done.
Mark
I wasn’t sure which application was better for just running XP on a Vista machine. Is it Players the one? Or is Workstation the one? I was trying to look.
Jason
You could certainly add VMWare server on it and it would do the same thing. I used to have several servers on my laptop.
Mark
I put fusion on a Mac and that seemed like a great, so I was trying to look for the Vista solution to run Windows programs.
Jason
Another option, have you turned the UAC off?
Mark
No,
Jason
That’s the first thing I would do. Go into the control panel, go to user accounts, then double-click user accounts, you will see ‘turn user account on or off’ turn it off, it forces a reboot, and you might be amazed that it will load and be happy.
Mark
Ok, I appreciate that. He came home happy with [Time Stamp00:32:18] his new laptop, but of course you get real good discounts for this version at the University and it is a couple thousand dollars for the newer version, which is Vista compatible, but that was just something in the back of my mind. I will try the user accounts first.
Jason
Looks like a couple of people in the chat have mentioned Workstation, VMWare server. I’m more familiar with VMWare server.
Mark
The laptop is a beast, it will handle it.
Jason
Isn’t there a, I believe that Parallels you can buy a Windows version.
Sp
I think it is on it’s way to market but I don’t’ think they have it out yet, last time I looked.
Mark
My solution of going to XP and rebooting is that you don’t get any of the software or anything else that is one it, I’d just be chasing my tail trying to find all the drivers, so that sounds like a good solution. I will start with the easy one and work my way back.
Jason
Let us know how that goes.
Other questions, comments?
We got our second Equal Logic Array in Tuesday and man is that stupid-easy to join two arrays together. It took longer to rack the thing. Huge thumbs up.
Nick
I’ve been dreaming about something for a while, finally spent some time talking about it over here and we are just implementing it over here. It is a neat way to think about bridging over to unbelievers in our community. We are always looking for opportunities to do that, and we go through computers, desktops and notebooks here like you guys do and we are constantly coming up with old systems that probably aren’t going to be what we want to support in-house, but they’d be great for a student who can’t afford to get a computer for their school work, so we are initiating a scholarship over here where, with our local schools, we are going to let them know that at least on an annual [Time Stamp00:35:45] basis, we’re going to have a computer or two that we have prepped and if somebody meets certain guidelines, there will be a small application process, and they can have a free computer, we are going to go out and buy a cheap, under $200 printer to give to them with it, but a pretty inexpensive way to reach beyond and get to those who are in need in the community and help them out and maybe get a chance to talk to them about the Lord.
Jason
That is cool. A couple of people have had a geek day at their church where they’ve put flyers out to the community saying things like “Is your computer running slow” or “do you need an upgrade?” “Do you need somebody to look over your computer?” Have a community day at your church, Saturday, simple stuff. Your average Joe probably hasn’t defragged his machine in forever, and that sort of stuff. We’ve been kicking this idea around for 3 years, so we are getting closer to trying to pull off something like that on one of our Second Saturday opportunities here at the church. I think it is cool because not only does it give you the opportunity for an unchurched person to maybe enter the church for the first time, it also creates a great volunteer opportunity for somebody like me, if I wasn’t in Church IT, maybe if I’m doing IT in the corporate world, I could come help defrag a drive, do some anti-virus and spyware clean-up and that sort of stuff. So hopefully we will make something happen with that.
Nick
It’s great that you guys are talking about that. I don’t know very many who do and I serve churches all over the country, and it’s just a natural, at least for us, it is a good way to get rid of old computers that can still help somebody. When you buy them, they come with legitimate license for Windows, so all you have to [Time Stamp00:38:19] do is reinstall it so you know it’s a completely clean drive. And you can do that with your eyes closed while you are doing other stuff. Then we are going to put a legitimate copy of Office on it so they’ve got the minimum. A great way to serve. I think your idea is a great idea too.
Jason
I know Jim Walton and Bryson Medlock, Bryson is in the CITRT IRC channel every so often, they have both done these, maybe once a month or so. Not a much amount of people coming to them yet, but they are getting it done. They’ve got some documentation that they’ve said we could borrow to give to the people that are coming, basic trouble-shooting guides for the volunteers that are coming to help. It is definitely a cool opportunity.
www.churchtechmatters.com That’s Jim Walton’s blog. And www.geeks4jesus.org is Bryson’s website. Look on those, you will run into it. They’ve got pictures, they get shirts, black t-shirts that say “Geek.”
Nick
That is helpful, I will check them out.
Jason
Good stuff. Somebody posted that the PC version of Parallels Workstation 2.2 is available, $49.99. I’d recommend trying the free stuff first.
Mark Rock
I am working on my first I-Scuzzy and I’ve got some of the things set up, my question is, I’ve got a dual-processor I-Scuzzy and it’s got 12 drives and I’ve created the logical drives, but performance-wise, have you guys found, I’m trying to decide if I want to do a lot of little drives for different people to manage and secure them a little bit better, or just one large drive with more folders and shares going through it. Seems logical to me that more smaller drives gives me better control over data growth and what’s happening than a large drive, but I am also trying to figure out what you guys have done and if one gives you any better performance as far [Time Stamp00:41:31] as multiple or few bigger ones on an I-Scuzzy.
Jason
From what I’ve heard, at least our Equal Logic guys say that you’ll get better performance out of many smalls versus a few large ones.
Mark
That’s what I heard, I just wanted to see what everybody else says. I started working on it but I haven’t moved any data. I thought I’d put the groups on different drives. When you’ve got everybody on one drive like I do now, it’s hard to see who is taking up all the data and where the growth is, so for management I thought it will help me and I just wondered if that was best. You answered my question.
Jason
I’m just one person. Who else out there?
Sp
On your VMWare, do you guys host your file servers in the VMWare?
Sp
Yes
Jason
Ours is not yet. The last server that is not in the VMWare environment is our file server.
Jason Lee
Our file server is a VMWare server, but we do not have our file server disk as a virtual disk, it is an I-Scuzzy connection within the VM, so that takes some tweaking and bridging and virtual networking to get it to do that. So technically the host has two nicks and the guest also has two nicks. Then we make the I-Scuzzy connection to the volume on the san. And that works better for us rather than trying to make a gigantic virtual disk.
Jason
Anybody else input?
We think we have figured out the ultimate snack. Celery is typically negative calories because it takes your body more energy to chew and digest the celery than the amount of calories in celery, but celery has no real taste, it is not fun to eat, but if you get the right kind of salsa, it has zero calories, so you get your celery, let it soak in the celery and you’ve got this snack that tastes good, crunchy, you’re sweating, zero or negative calories.
Sp
It is entertaining to watch Ed [Time Stamp00:46:03] eat hot stuff.
Jason
Let’s change the topic.
Sp
Mark, with your I-Scuzzy question, are you allowing users to make direct connections from a desktop to your I-Scuzzy device?
Mark
No, it will go through the server as a drive, I was just going to make multiple drives, connections to through the I-Scuzzy on the main file server, so I’d make Data 1, Data 2, Data 3 and then build the folders, so they would access it through the connect like my IBM 01 server to drive, then to the shares on those I-Scuzzy devices. So they will be directly through that file server, but since on the I-Scuzzy, the server sees it as a local drive, they will just be hitting it, so does that answer? Instead of having 400 gig drives, I was thinking about having multiple 100 gig drives and mapping different users in different groups to each separate drives. The number of folders you build up with pastors creating and dumping stuff, I thought it would be more efficient to have more drives, that’s the direction I’m heading. When I virtualize, I’ll probably have on server servicing maybe one set of them and another serving the finance office so they’ll be different virtual servers servicing each drive through a path or a share.
Sp
Last week at Sharepoint, we were talking about how to build disaster recovery plan and you have to do it off of how much time you have to get stuff back when things so sour, and I guess we lived in that two months, I would caution laying too many layers of complexity from a back-up strategy, rebuilding those I-Scuzzy connections in a VM environment is tedious if you were to lose the server. The way we had it set up is one I-Scuzzy connection for the entire shared drive and then there is a plug-in for 2003 to trim the folder view by security permission, so they don’t even see the directory if [Time Stamp00:49:11] they don’t have permissions to them, and from a back-up recovery, that will be less time consuming than having multiple volumes connected multiple times to multiple servers, so I would say think that through before you make that commitment to go down that route, because one giant volume was easier to restore.
Mark
I’m in favor of simplicity; I’ll take a look at that. Thank you, that’s why I wanted to ask. I stay up at night running options though my head, that feedback is what I need.
Jason
I don’t think you will lose performance one way or another, I think you need to do it a way that you are comfortable that it makes sense to you so that when you do have to think through it, logically you’ve thought through it.
Mark
We tend to think it is easier to manage a large drive and then visually partition it by mapping the drive letters, that way when somebody grows out of space, you don’t have to change the way the drive is configured.
Sp
And that’s a hassle within the VM to grow the drives, just because you’ve expanded the volume on the san, Windows will look at it and go, “that’s nice.” We’ve had that a couple times where growing the san volume is super easy, you’re done in 30 seconds, but then you go into the VM guest and you see it staring at this partition and you have to grow the drive. In our case, copy it to a new volume and blow away the old volume, as we’ve got several extra terabytes of space currently on our san, we have the real estate to create the new volume, copy the data over and blow the old volume away, but if you are at a space premium that is an edge.
Mark
That’s more stuff to think about. I’m just trying to get this done and done right so I don’t have to re-do it. Those are the things I haven’t dealt with and I knew some of you guys had. I’m not using all the storage on it for that [Time Stamp00:52:03] same reason, I want to be able to create more or change out things as I go. That will help me.
Jason
I meant to have everyone stick your name, church, location, title, blog if you’ve got one in the chat window, now that we can capture the chat window, that will be fun. Maybe Ryan from Northpoint could give us a little bit about their Google integration.
Ryan
G-date, March 31, we’re planning to migrate everybody to Google Aps by the end of March, and before you all gasp, we didn’t have anything before so anything is a value add, we decided against Exchange because we are all Macs, and though Exchange could work, it limps along in Entourage. And then we looked at Zembra {MS}and I might kick myself later for not doing Zembra later, but it was mostly just the lack of a large capital expenditure to go to Google. We are actually doing the free version, we almost did the paid version, but the only three things we really cared about in the paid version is they guarantees three {MS – three what?} in the paid versions but all that really means is that if you go down, they will give you a free month, but it is the same exact hardware and the same network. The other thing is with storage, you get 25 gigs versus I think 5 on the free version, but when we started this thing we were at 4 and now we are at 6.9 because it grows just like the rest of Google stuff, so I’m cool with that; and then the third thing was message recovery through Postini, and we are just going to engage Postini/Google separately and get that, we haven’t called them yet but the plan is to get that as a service rather than paying the $50 per user, I assume that we can engage Postini at a non-profit pricing per user. So, that’s what we’re doing. We are provisioning the account to [Time Stamp00:54:29] the active directory, there are a couple of ways to connect Google Aps to AD and we are going with XIP, we haven’t got that working yet but we just got with them yesterday to track up a lot of things.
Jason
How many user accounts?
Ryan
Around 400. We got about 50 people that have been testing it for about 3 months and they just love it. They didn’t have anything before. It has it’s problems and things to deal with like phones and how do we deal with people that travel and don’t always have an Internet connection and keep in sync with their Macs and things like that. For the most part, there are answers for all of them, just what are we going to recommend as the IT support staff to help our users.
Jason
Now you’ve got I-mac support, you can pull it into Apple mail or whatever they want to use.
Ryan
And really cool on a Mac is Thunderbird with Google because they’ve got the plug-in for your calendar and it makes it sort of Entourage-like in that respect. I think we will recommend mail.ap because it is native, but the advanced users might use Thunderbird.
Jason
As far as Postini and non-profit pricing, let me know if you figure out a way to get that. Last couple of times I’ve talked to Postini, they’ve given us a very paultry discount.
Ryan
Maybe I’ll bang them over the head enough so that we can all benefit.
Jason
Tell them there are other churches wanting to look at it. I know Andrew is back from doing missions stuff. Are you guys fully Google Aps?
Andrew Mitry
We have our school right now on Google Aps, we haven’t moved the church over just because of the mobile situation because of having calendar sync equivalent kinda like what Active Link does with Exchange, there’s not really a good option for that with Google Aps yet and we depend on that on the church side, most of our users [Time Stamp00:57:12] are mobile, so that’s what we’re waiting for there, but we love it on the school side, they started using Google docs and doing more with it and getting immersed in the product and they are really enjoying it.
Sp
Have you guys looked at Goo-Think for mobile active sync for the calendar?
Andrew
Yeah, we looked at it but it didn’t seem like, from what I’ve read, like a seamless solution, it doesn’t run as smoothly as active sync does. And our senior staff has thousands of contacts and tons of calendar entries and I don’t want that to get messy.
Jason
Has anybody played with, I just read something about the new Entourage and it was kinda sketchy about, it mentioned Exchange but it never dove in and said what that meant. ‘Entourage is worth the upgrade if you use Exchange’, but it left it at that. It’s like, is it still doing with OWA stripping stuff or is it, I’m assuming if it was a true active sync connection, we’d really be hearing about it.
Ryan
We haven’t found a good solution to make it like active sync, that would be awesome. Around here, everybody has an iphone now and they designed the interface, so people are on wifi or the ATT Internet and they seem to be happy with that.
Jason
How many Macs you guys got? And terabytes?
Ryan
Around 400 Macs. Our service programming data, it’s 80 terabytes of hard drive and 70 terabytes of actual capacity. It’s awesome until you have to back it up.
Jason
That brings up a great question, how are you doing that?
Ryan
Right now we are chugging along with tape, which is awful but we have an RFP out with a couple people trying to come up with a good solution. The hard part is just expense, so we are trying to find, we’ve got one guy trying to do Oberlin {MS} storage with us and another [Time Stamp01:00:07] one, Apple is trying to engage us, they have a proprietary thing that was developed for the Israeli defense people, so that is interesting. The other one is the Datacore product.
Jason
Cool. How far is Sea Coast Church from Northpoint? How far would Charleston be? Six hours? I’m thinking for the Fall Roundtable, I could come to Atlanta first, hang out with Tony Dye, then go see Northpoint, then make the next leg of the trip to South Carolina.
Tony
A couple of us already talked about renting a big van and going from Atlanta to Charleston together.
Jason
We’d have to have a huge Winnebago with lots of antennas sticking out of it.
Anything else, we are at the one-hour marker. A couple of us have a 3:30 engagement. Andrew, do you want to give us any details about your mission trip?
Andrew Mitry
We were in Kenya for most of the time, we were there until the day after elections. I’m not sure if you know, the country is on the brink of civil war right now.
Jason
I read something about that and I was worried about you guys.
Andrew
By the hand of God, we left Kenya the day after elections and before things blew up, we were going to Tanzania to check on one of our mission stations there, we were supposed to be there for two days then return to Kenya and then fly to Zambia, but they were burning cars on the road and throwing rocks and we couldn’t cross back into Kenya, so we took a bus and a plane out through Tanzania and didn’t go back into Kenya, our stuff is still there. I thank God that everyone there is alright at our missions operations there and we made it back ok. It was a great trip, we learned a lot about how God can work through suffering and different things like that. It was eye-opening, I’ll blog more about it over the next [Time Stamp01:03:40] few days.
Jason
Awesome. Ryan you said you just got back from a mission trip as well?
Ryan
Yeah, actually I met my wife going to Macedonia in 2002 and we’ve been going back there. She is not Macedonian, she went on the team, so this is the 7th time that we’ve gone, we partner with a church over there to try to create relevant church in the city where they are mostly Eastern Orthodox and it is mostly a cultural thing than a religious experience or relationship. Their evangelical church is considered a cult so it is difficult breaking through that cultural barrier to even get people to show up to church, so we did like a Christmas concert, their Christmas is January 7th because they are on the Orthodox calendar, so we rented a public facility and put on a Christmas concert for whoever wanted to come and just said, “Hey we are not a cult.” We were really nervous about how many people would come because they are lucky, they’ll have 30-40 people at church, we were like, if everybody comes from all around the country, it’s really small, maybe we’ll have 200 people. We ended up having 700 people show up, it was outstanding. Almost none of them were Christians and we put on a big production, we relied on their local resources instead of bringing over a bunch of American stuff and American people, so I think they saw that it is not that hard, they could do that every Sunday. It was cool.
Jason
Cool. That reminds me, I need to get in touch with our India staff, they should have gotten their Dell computers by now, need to get them hooked into our servers over here. USA technical support to India, I love the irony.
I have a twitter account, I keep finding people subscribing to my twitter, and I just can’t figure twitter out. Does anybody care if I update what I’m doing as I go throughout the day? Is that of [Time Stamp01:06:55] any value? I’ve got a disconnect with twitter, if anybody wants to enlighten me. Now I see where it would be a cool thing is if all your staff was subscribed to your twitter account, you could give them updates in disaster scenarios, so if you are in hurricane area and everybody was in twitter, you could tell people what’s going on. Somebody was at the Nashville Roundtable and they were using twitter to keep people apprised of their network and when it was going to be back up, something had happened, their servers were down for a long time, so they were giving people updates, I see value in that. I can’t see the value in me telling people what I’m doing daily, that’s what my blog is for. I’ll do more blogging in 2008.
Other questions or discussions? Interesting things? Oh a cool tool, this thing rocks! You’ve heard me talk about www.Dameware.com their mini remote control tool rocks. It is very inexpensive, license per administrator, so it doesn’t matter how many client machines you need to remote control, all you need to buy is one for me, one for Ed, one for Kyle, and we bought a couple licenses for our tech arts guys so they can remote machines as well on stage or in house, and somehow I’ve missed the fact that Dameware has this NT utilities tool, so I checked out this NT utilities tool and it is amazing, awesome. Imagine if you will, I need to do something in the command line on one of my servers, well, typically you’d log into that server remotely with a command prompt and do what you need; with this NT utility, I can command line right from inside this application, I right-click on the server, go down to command and get a command prompt window, I type in the commands and I can run. Now granted, I’m the IT Director so I do very little of this, but Ed finds this a very valuable tool. I was showing [Time Stamp01:10:31] him this yesterday and he was drooling. You can add and move Exchange account, you can add people into active directory, you can remote control machines, it comes with the Dameware mini remote control as part of the NT utilities bundle, on and on, you can right-click on a computer in your AD environment and look at whatever you want, you can start and stop a service, you can move files back and forth between boxes, it will tell you who your domain controllers are, master browsers, and that’s just me playing with it, and the price is slick too. $280 for one user, and you can typically get non-profit on Dameware products. www.dameware.com and it is their NT utility, 30-day full-blown trial, it is slick. I looked at it and within 5 minutes I was like I’m buying this. And I know it will do a lot more. Huge thumbs up. That’s my big find.
Sp
I just posted in the chat a question about a product called Veblitz {MS} I guess it is a spin off of Feedburner, but it allows me to do newsletters via SMS different conduits, is anybody using that, any success or nightmares with it? We are moving away from he product we are using now, we just came across Veblitz and it has a pretty good interface for developing the newsletter and then allows the user to choose what medium they want to subscribe with, there is really no cost difference, if they want it in five different ways, from what we understand, you pay the same price per subscriber. Anybody? {MS url?}
Jason
I’m using that on my blog. You can use email to get blog updates. For some reason there are 50 people getting my blog updates via email, which I find very interesting. I’d love to know who those 50 people are and what role that they are in. I don’t want to stereotype, [Time Stamp01:14:25] but I’m guessing it’s Senior Pastor type, but I don’t know why a Senior Pastor would read my blog, or why most people would read my blog in the first place.
Travis
I don’t use RSS at all, I never got into that. But RSS and RRS newsreaders, all that stuff, it never really clicked with me, so I understand people that would subscribe to your blog as email.
Jason
My parents are doing the mail thing. They don’t have enough websites that have RSS feeds.
Travis
Maybe that’s it, I have my email open all day every day.
Sp
What do you use for your email application?
Travis
Outlook. 2007.
Sp
You can do your RSS feeds directly into Outlook 2007, it is a nice feature.
Travis
I’ll look at that, I only just started using 2007 based on somebody giving me a beta into the xobni {MS} add-on, which is cool. Usually I’m in Outlook 2003 on our servers, during my day job.
Sp
You probably have a folder in the mailbox account in Outlook 2007 that says RSS feed, right-click on that and it gives you an option to add RSS feeds so I have all mine pop into Outlook, it’s pretty handy.
Jason
Cool, it’s about time to split. Any last minute items? Ministry Tech coming up in April. We are doing a Fall Roundtable at GCC September. We are heading East in the fall, maybe next year, we could go west young man. Where’s Michael W. Smith when I need him. Somewhere warm, maybe Nick could give us surf lessons. That would be hilariously, a bunch of us geeks trying to surf. Kodak moment galore! {MS – I’ll go to that one just to watch!}
Alright, it’s been entertaining. You could surf and surf! That was bad, time to leave. We’ll see you on February 7th for the next podcast. Be there, we will try to get a guest speaker [Time Stamp01:19:28] to talk about vlan stuff, switch-level stuff. Stay tuned. I’m ending the call. The phone line and chat window stay open. The Church IT IRC channel, more and more people are showing up in it, go to Justin Moore’s blog, www.wantmore.com He has a whole list of getting onto the IRC channel, so. Gotta go.
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