Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 24 February 21, 2008
Jason Powell
Hey, welcome everybody to Episode 24, today is Thursday, February 21, 2008. It is 2:00 on the Eastern side of the world. We are a bi-monthly podcast, talk about tools, tips, best practices, etc related to church IT stuff. You can get more information, and listen to all the past podcasts and read transcriptions from the past podcasts all on www.churchitpodcast.com Today is open, talking about whatever you want to talk about. I want to throw out a few things to be aware of, Ministry Tech is happening, rapidly approaching, April 3rd and 4th, Oklahoma City, if you have not registered, please do so. The limit is 250 due to the facilities, so if you are planning to go and have not signed up yet, get yourself to www.ministrytech.org and sign up. Additionally, the Church IT Roundtable on April 5th also needs your registration, so if you are dragging your heals on that, it is also limited by space, so don’t wait until the last minute. Go register and you’ll be glad you did.
That’s the housekeeping tidbits. Does anybody in the channel have anything to add to that?
Apparently Not. Jason Lee, you got anything?
Jason Lee
No, but still working on some possible hotel type things, some people have mentioned they are interested in that information, when I get it, we are still narrowing it down.
Jason
I’ve got a few things about where people are staying because obviously it is fun to stay in the same hotel so we can hang out and chat.
Sp
Where are people staying?
Jason
I’m gonna stay wherever Jason Lee Pricelines me to. That’s all I know. Preferably someplace with a bed and a hot tub. We do have Church IT Roundtable hot tub activities post-day.
Look at that, my twitter thing actually did import into typepad. I’m experimenting with Twitter because I’ve been pretty lame about doing blog service so I thought maybe if I just [Time Stamp00:04:36] do a few Twitter things a day, it’ll make people happy, we’ll see, it may be completely pointless. But I am playing with Twitter and using Lout [MS?] Twitter to publish the tweets, all these names.
And in the world of cool tools, I am loving the Fox-it pdf previewer for Outlook 2007, love it. Handy to be able to look at pdfs inside of Outlook, click and they are right there. Very cool.
Any other cool tools?
John Wilkerson
I’m starting to manage the IT stuff at my church, Adirondack Christian Center in upstate New York. Have you used any of the pdf add-ins for Word and PowerPoint and Excel yet? It allows you to print directly to a pdf. Those are really cool tools, big time saver, certainly will save, since pdf creator doesn’t work on Vista yet, if you have any machines with Vista and you were using pdf creator as opposed to the standard Adobe products that can be cost prohibitive. I also work for a major technology and engineering university so we are always looking for ways to save some money and I’ve found that this is a great way, using those add-ins. And I was wondering if anybody who is on the call right now, we are going to be re-vamping our website and looks like we are going to be using the Drupal framework, [ www.drupal.org ]wondering if anyone out there has used it or is in the process of making a change and if they have, any suggestions for taking static pages and moving them over to Drupal. I’m working with one other guy who is a website designer but he mostly has been doing static pages in the [Time Stamp00:07:26] past and he is trying to wrap his brain around, how to get the static page into Drupal. Thanks to CSS, it’s a lot simpler than it would have been in the past. Anybody out there have any wisdom on that.
Jason
I know Matt, I can’t remember his last name, from the Geeks and Gods page, I know he is has talked a lot about Drupal and trying to use it for your content management solutions for your church, so I don’t personally have any experience with it, but it sounds like you already knew Matt was doing that.
John
Yes, I’ve been following his podcast for a while. That’s why we decided to move over to Drupal. I see David Spooner is listening in here, I know for their church they used Word press, I was interested in seeing how they did that as well, because Word press is generally kind of a one-horse show as opposed to a framework like Drupal.
Jason
Andrew just put something in the chat window.
Andrew
We were using Droomla [MS?] and just switched over this morning to a new Drupal site, so getting the final tweaks done on it but we cut over this morning, and I’ll tell you that Drupal is a little more complex but definitely a lot more powerful. I’m not sure I understand your static page question though.
John
Well, right now we just have static pages, so if anything needs to be changed, someone has to go, there is no CMS or anything, so someone has to go in and write the code by hand. So I’m just wondering if anyone here had any experience taking those static pages and moving them over to a CMS.
Andrew
I don’t think it will be any challenge, you can literally cut and paste, I would copy paste right off the finished page into something to clean up the html and remove all the formatting then paste it into Drupal, then later on, anybody can do in and edit using a wysiwyg editor [Time Stamp00:10:35] in two seconds. I think the most important thing is stripping your formatting off because CSS is taking care of all that, then pasting and then moving over the pictures manually, Drupal has something called a page, what you might want to consider though is that some of those pages might make more sense as feeds or something more dynamic than just static pages.
John
Ok.
Andrew
Like our news page went from a static page into now there is an RSS feed and people can subscribe to that and things like that.
John
Ok.
Jason
Any other Drupal news?
David Russell and the guys at National are using Expression Engine or something like that. Any other questions?
Speaker
Is anyone going to be at podcamp NYC in April? Are any of your churches doing podcasts, this one is more geared toward higher ed or education in general, I know some churches have school associated with them. If any of you don’t know what podcamp is, it’s basically a free conference, there’s a lot of people who show up from the podcasting arena, they give free seminars and you just get an opportunity to talk to a lot of people. Topics can range anywhere from getting a podcast off the ground and things like that. Just wondering if anyone is on the east coast and going to that. I’m not going to be able to go because I’m coming back from a conference in California.
Jason
Did anybody notice the thing about Microsoft is now throwing their hat into the play nice with Open Source, so they say anyway, giving out 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows desktop and server products. So it looks like they are going to be for principles that they are declaring are insuring Open connections, promoting data portability, enhancing support for industry standard, open engagement with customers in the industry [Time Stamp00:14:30] including Open Source. That is quite interesting. Microsoft has taken a stance against that in the past, so interesting news.
Cool, other stuff. It’s open.
Jason Lee, how is your link aggregation project going?
Jason Lee
I’ll have Jeremy give the update on that, I don’t think we are under any sort of nondisclosure agreement with any vendors we are working with now anymore so I think we have permission to speak freely. I’ll give the 10,000-foot view then let Jeremy weigh in on specifics because I don’t have a good understanding of all the nitty-gritty. We ushered one vendor out, we have ushered [MS?] out of the race for our business and we landed there for one primary reason, that was the devices we had demo-ed did not include any QOS built into the device as shipped and they wanted an additional $1900 to add any sort of QOS on there, which at that point the device they claimed the device became very complex and a little more difficult to manage and even after they read my blog, they basically said they can’t wave the $1900 fee even though that makes them comparative to their peers and other competitors, so with that and a couple other reasons, when we were doing our testing, our video stream would jitter quite a bit just when we would browse on another connection going through the fast pipe, or if we were to have a sizable download, it would hiccup, so we couldn’t isolate it but it doesn’t do it with the other two vendors we are working with, so it’s not my responsibility to figure out why their device didn’t work for us, it just didn’t. Since then, another player came to the table and their company name is Astrocom and they have a device that does the same thing and they got our attention because they were significantly less expensive [Time Stamp00:18:07] than the other two players in evaluation, and within two days got their hardware out to us and we started sampling it last Friday. One thing we like about them is their purchase price, which is substantially less, includes 3 years of support, 24/7/365, which is really cool, but I think we have ruled them out of the equation because they had hardware failure already and had only been in production for about two days. So that kind of made us wonder what we’re buying, is that why it’s cheaper, so it seems to us the best way to describe it is Radware [MS?] verses Astrocom now. Radware has more bells and whistles, definitely more granularity and the control of what you can do with it, but the Astrocom could very well work for us, just a matter of do we buy it for tomorrow or do we buy it for today not knowing what tomorrow is, that’s kinda where we are, several thousand dollars different price tag between the two devices, so that’s what we’re deciding at this point. We need what Radware is selling. I’ll let Jeremy chat about it but I think we are leaning toward the Radware devices.
Jeremy
I guess from my side, what we tried to do was just hit those pipes as hard as we could using whichever piece of hardware, as you mentioned the fat pipe didn’t have the QOS and also didn’t seem to be able to handle the traffic well enough, not that it wasn’t handling it, just not as smooth switch-over we might see on the other boxes here, so we noticed some jitter and lag on some of the streams, and when we would be downloading files as well as watching the streams, there might be an interruption in the stream temporarily when we don’t see that on the Radware box. As the Astrocom came in, the feature set looked pretty comparable, whereas with Fat pipe certain features that weren’t available, but it seemed like the Astrocom [Time Stamp00:20:34] looked like the little brother to the Radware, had the same amount of features, maybe just not with to the certain extent, whereas Radware has 10 different methods of load-balancing, the Astrocom has 2, so we just put those in and for a while we were just debating the price, whether or not we needed the 15,000 or whatever the difference, it was 5,000, but would the difference make it worthwhile, but we’ve moved away, yesterday we found that one of the ports went bad on the Astrocom that we were demoing so evidently four days of bandwidth streaming and multiple file downloads was too much for one of the ports.
Jason Lee
It wasn’t even really being used, [something about ATT but I couldn’t hear him very well].
Jeremy
So that’s just my view of things currently.
Jason
Good.
Jason Lee
We will probably make a decision quickly.
Jason
What else? Anybody want to share their technology goals for 2008? Our focus here at GCC, we’re starting off the year with a bottom up approach, going down to the lowest level of IT, down in the wires, panels, switches, and saying, “what do we not like about what we currently have and what should we do about it?” So we are trying to start at the very bottom layers of the network, document, record, brainstorm, what’s not working like we want it to, then figure out ways to tackle that. Then once we get done with that, then we will move up to the next layer. So we are heavily looking at replacing all of our Dell switches over to HP, redo-ing all the idfs. Color coding the cables so you know, not having to trace down what jack goes to what port and in this room, these things go there. And the other craziness was that the wiring contractors that did our building did not do a good job, there is no rhyme or reason as to why, in my office a particular port is [Time Stamp00:24:26] labeled what it is, and there are duplicate ports across the building, so you could have jack 222 in my office and a 222 in another office, so that’s part of our re-or here, so the second Saturday of next month, we’re going to have lots of volunteers here, plus Dave Mast and Justin Moore will be out at GCC helping us and we are going to just rip and tear and re-label things and make it like we want it. Bottom up approach here at Granger. Does anybody else have some plans?
Jason Lee
Lowe’s has Velcro.
Speaker
You can buy it by the mile from CDWG.
Jason Lee
But that requires prior planning.
Speaker
True.
Jason Lee
But when you are moving your data center and it’s the night of, and that’s the one thing that didn’t make the list, that’s not a big deal.
Speaker
Right, our church is small, so we don’t really have the whole wiring issue, but I’ve been talking to, surprisingly we have a large number of people for the size of our congregation who know IT at one portion or another so we are basically looking to go through and start updating some things. We’ve got machines that we use for our presentations during the services that need to be upgraded, probably looking to even upgrade the pastor’s machine that’s in his office and obviously the website redesign that we are going through. Since we are a small church, we can really tackle a lot of these things all at once, which brings me to another question that I have. Those of you who have larger churches, are you using a proxy and doing filter and if so what are you using for that?
Jason
Good questions. Here at GCC, we are using our Sonic Wall firewall’s content filtering on it and we are just blocking just the worst of the worst stuff through it, so we are pretty liberal with what we allow staff to hit via the web. I know some [Time Stamp00:28:04] churches take a more heavier hand approach, they don’t allow My Space and Facebook and it depends on the culture of your church. We are using Sonic Wall. In the school system I came from before, moving to IT here at GCC, we were using N2H2’s best product, that worked pretty well, we also used Search Control and that worked well, and we also used Squid Guard at one point, Open Source stuff, and that worked very well too. I don’t know if anybody here is currently using Open DNS, but it’s been discussed recently over on the IRC Channel.
Jason Lee
Dave Mast had some trouble with that as of recently where he had to switch away from it because of some issues with their DNS server there, local ISPs but typically it works pretty well. [MS somebody please tell Jason Lee that I can never hear him as well as the others…]
Jason
And it’s free
Speaker
Anybody using Astaro? [MS?]
Jason
I think that’s what Perimeter is using but Tony Dye is not here today to verify that.
Speaker
At Northpoint, we are using a similar set up as Jason but we are implementing LDAP integration into the Sonic Wall firewall which gives us the ability to set up [MS?] in Active Directory and use those groups to define content filtering dynamically, so we are getting ready to role that out by the end of this month, which will allow us to now be as stringent across the board but to give some granularity to users who need access to certain things that other users don’t need access to.
Jason
Andrew, are you guys using Open DNS for your school too?
Andrew
Yes we are?
Jason
Have you had crazy DNS issues? I’ve had DNS issues at home the last couple of days, obviously Dave [Time Stamp00:30:33] Mast is having some trouble.
Andrew
I had issues at home but the school is only operating until 3:00 pm or so, so I haven’t gotten any complaints from them at all, I only notice the issues from home over the past week a couple of times.
Speaker
And in that case with Open DNS you just have a router configure to use it or do you actually have like a white box Lenox server running?
Andrew
Everybody is pointing to AD boxes for DNS and those are pointing toward Open DNS.
Speaker
So you’ve got Active Directory pulling from the DNS?
Andrew
Yes.
Jason
Somebody says they are using Squid Proxy and Dan’s Guardian, heard that mentioned a lot.
Content filtering. If you go to www.churchitpodcast.com and do a search for content filter, I bet you’ll find a number of past transcripts where we’ve talked about content filtering. The part that stinks about it is that it doesn’t tell you where inside the transcript the word is so you’ll have to do a little finding the word inside the transcript. I’ll put a plug in for the IRC Channel as well, there’s a lot of stuff going on in there, it’s another great place to ask questions and get input from a number of people, typically a number of folks in there at all times of the day. Even at midnight, still a lot of people in there, interesting stuff going on. Not just geek stuff, the latest episode of Lost or whatever. Another community.
Speaker
What kind of policies do you guys have in place for the content management filters where say somebody visits something that they shouldn’t, their log, what kind of policies are set in place to address that or are there any? We have some issues here in how deep do we want to go, or research the sites that were visited to define if they were legitimate or not, that’s the kind of questions that I’ve been [Time Stamp00:34:02] dealing with.
Jason
Great question. Here we take a liberal approach, which is the opposite of the school system where I was. We were clamped down tight, that was part of my job, watching the logs, I had a screen running at all times, where are the kids trying to go? It was a constant challenge, even with 2 T1s, that was five years ago, we were always just hammering, so we were really trying to clamp down and keep people off all non-education related because we didn’t have the available bandwidth. Here at Granger, we are very liberal, the only time that I would go do any hunting or looking at the logs is if somebody brought an issue to us, so we do not actively look for anything.
Some of you guys have some policies?
Jason Lee
Our policy is part of our network use policy, we are not actively going out and checking where people have gone to, but should an issue arise, if pushed up to IT, we give the information of what the situation has been and it clearly states in the user policy that that is an Executive team level decision and if it warrants, it could lead up to termination. All our employees are aware of that. It’s not something we are actively policing for.
Mark Rock
That’s the same thing we do. We have the content filters set up pretty lose, it blocks the majority of the trash but we allow some freedom and our wireless is pretty open for most people to browse around on, if an issue comes up, we have an employee contract and a expected conduct, if they violate that, we have the right to go on the computer, and I also, if I’m working on a PC, I might check to see the log, but it’s not something we actively do. If someone feels there might be a problem, management can ask to go pull the logs off of a PC, if they are cleared, we might monitor, but I haven’t had to deal with that yet and [Time Stamp00:36:46] I hope I don’t, but we are pretty open on that too.
Speaker
Our church doesn’t really have a policy, we are still small, there is only one computer in the church that is even connected to the network. So right now we are just using a software filtering tool which has been installed, and basically there is only two or three people that use that computer, we don’t have any wifi in the building, which I’m hoping to change, I’d like for us to get wifi in the church jus tfor the sake of being able to do demonstrations especially once we bring the new website up online, since it is one computer that only two or three people used, the pastor is checked up on by the elders, things like that, the only employee of the church is the pastor so we don’t have any policies in place, but I can see the importance of getting those policies established in the beginning, that way when we do start bringing on other employees or just have a use policy saying, “If you are going to use a wireless, you’re gonna sign and agree to this policy,” I can see the wisdom in that.
Speaker
And you can keep those policies short and simple by just stating illegal or anything that would be contrary to the beliefs and moral standards of the church, you can put it pretty vague but you can put it in a paragraph in an employee’s contract then you can define it as you grow if you need to put more details to it. Illegal would eliminate a lot of the downloading music and things like that that can raise issues. I don’t think you should be too complicated when you start. I had a simple firewall up to block certain websites and we’ve grown, as we’ve gotten bigger to where we are relying on services to rate the website. I’ve got Photoshop, I’ve got places that do wedding photos [Time Stamp00:39:59] that are listed as porn so you have to keep an eye on which ones are popping up and double-check them yourself. If you just set block porn, you are still going to get legitimate sites blocks depending on the quality of service you use, but I would just start with a simple policy approved by the pastor and the board and then adjust it as needed. It doesn’t have to be an IT issue, just tell them what is needed, but the board or the elders need to make the decision and lay down that policy, then you just help them implement it.
Jason
That should not be an IT policy per say.
Speaker
Absolutely. I basically told my pastor two or three weeks ago about my desire to oversee the IT for the church and he wanted me to write some things up and I’m still in that process, just writing up a general vision of how a church as small as ours can use the web to make an impact. So I’ll definitely include that in the write-up.
Jason
Content filters, so fun.
Chris
I’ll throw my two cents in, I have been here in a while, but we use Web Sense but we’ve also got a school on site so we have to be a little more strict, we are also using the 800 pound Gorilla software, it allows everything, we’ve got all kinds of different access rights and privileges and networks and everything.
Jason
Do you track that back to student log-ins?
Chris
Yes, we track everything but we don’t actively do anything. We’ve got all the information in the database but we don’t go hunting and fishing unless we are asked to or required to. We do check in with what the teenagers and students at our youth center are doing pretty regularly though. Probably ran a report of what those guys do a couple times a month to see if there are any questionable large hit areas.
Jason
And with the school system, you can see particular [Time Stamp00:43:04] websites spread like a virus throughout the day, so if some kid found some particular website where whatever content on it, you can see it and monitor, ya know, we would monitor each computer lab separately, and every once and while I’d check it throughout the day and a particular website might get a few hits in the first quarter of the day, then it would start to grow and then by 8th period, the number of people hitting this website would be phenomenal and just kinda cool to see that growing and growing, then I’d just turn it off.
But we also had to deal with a lot of false positives back then too. A teacher trying to do research, so it’s not cool having stuff they need to get and can’t get to it, but I told them to let us know ahead of time what websites they’d be hitting with their students, but they wouldn’t pay attention to that.
Speaker
That’s where that feature that Jason was talking about in Sonicwall where you can set up rules per user or per group, user would be overly intensive, but the groups coming out of Active Directory and then setting policies so youth has this, pastors have that, you can break them into different groups and strengthen or loosen policies. Like if the graphic artist needs to go to some sites to get content while some of the those content sites are places high school kids like to go because there’s picture on there, so you can adjust those things. I think a lot of the content filters you are going to move more of that flexibility even without having to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Jason
I don’t know if it has changed but back when I was doing the school system stuff, it was a challenge to keep Google images under control.
Speaker
On the Web Sense side, it is really good. It is phenomenal, actually for all of the major search engines, they force all of the safe search options, so you can [Time Stamp00:45:54] set it so there is no way to disable the safe search features. You still get some junk but it is greatly reduced.
Jason
Cool. Good.
Jason Lee
One of the first quarter items for 2008 that we are working on is a big project for us is establishing a complete IT preventative maintenance policy strategy, etc. Whether it’s cleaning a workstation all the way to the server side, monitoring network flaws, checking back-ups, making sure back-ups will restore, what frequencies, etc. That’s a project our team is currently working on, to write up a plan like this is what we plan to do every month or every week, every day, whatever. If people want to weigh in on that, we’ll probably be posting a couple drafts on that on our blog so that if people want to weigh, what are we forgetting, what kind of tools can we use to streamline some of these things that we are identifying as recurring needs. One thing we don’t do is we’ve ask our users to do a helpdesk request first for just about everything under the sun, but we don’t use the helpdesk software to do those preventative maintenance tasks, just to use it as a reminder for us. But that’s a first quarter project that we are working on that will hopefully help things out. I would venture to say that more are in the same boat, we don’t document that well enough and adhere to those plans. Maybe it’s just us.
Jason
Plans? What’s that? Reoccurring maintenance, what are you talking about? Ha ha.
Speaker
That’s the nice thing about a small shop, computer goes down, you say, “Anybody got a computer laying around?”
Jason
Exactly. Swap and go. I’d like to get our laptops on some sort of a reoccurring schedule, if nothing else just to clean the grime off the screen. I can’t tell you how many people, I can’t believe they can even see the [Time Stamp00:48:35] screen from all the gunk that’s built up on it. Dude, Windex and a paper towel, use it.
Jason Lee
That’s been a great project when we rolled out our last batch of laptops, a required visit to one of our staff members every month by every laptop and that has worked out well for us. Just managing what’s on that machine and being able to update it frequently because you see it more frequently.
Jason
How are you tracking that? Just an Excel sheet?
Jason Lee
Right now its just in our hardware guy’s Outlook Calendar, so they are recurring appointments, so when they are missed, he sends me a note saying one missed and we follow up. Right now we are only keeping up with around a dozen laptops, but when we gave the laptop out, it was non-negotiable, your laptop will come back to IT once a month and it is not IT’s responsibility to track you down. But a piece of the puzzle we had to do is that it will only be here for an hour and when the hour is up, whether we are done or not, it goes back. So we want to respect their time.
Mark
I even extended that to the users laptop so we have laptops that we loan out and on carts and things that are used around there and I just went into the church Calendar and every third Friday, [lost sound]
Jason
Well anyway. Not sure what happened to Mark, he will probably be back.
You guys updated to the latest version of Service Desk? [phone ringing, trying to connect to Mark?]
Speaker
Yes, we moved to Service Deck 7, all has been pretty good with one exception, we use Service Desk to document all of our licensing, serial numbers and how many we own, software and what the support contract is on software, etc. Well when we went to 7, we went to go look up a serial number for a particular software package and we couldn’t find where it went in the software, so that’s [Time Stamp00:51:55] been the biggest hiccup for us, so we are working with Service Desk to probably have them recover a back up that we had made before we made the move and pull that information out and give it back to us so we can figure out where we are supposed to put it in the new version, because it is different. They do the monitoring or query of all your machines, it is quite deep in what it returns, almost too much information.
Mark
I’m going to have to check my phone system, it just went dead. But anyway, I just schedule an EMS all-church laptops that are out, the maintenance staff puts outside my office Friday morning, we run through them real quick, by noon they are out and then over the weekend, they are back out to wherever they need to go, once a month just to keep those going. The user laptops, we haven’t initiated it that far yet but I’m just trying to keep those, they get lost around the building on carts with projectors and in rooms, so I just went into EMS and scheduled them under hardware scheduling and every once a month on Friday, they show up.
Jason
Now are those users that the laptop is their only computer?
Mark
Yes, the laptops that I usually service are just the spare ones that are used for presentations, media, classrooms, worship and things like that, not used daily all the time, then there are probably another 15 that are user laptops, those I have a little more trouble pinning them down, and I haven’t forced that yet but I’m going to have to as they start getting older and start having more problems with them.
Jason Lee
When they are brand new, from day one, it worked out well for us. It was surprising how accepting everybody was.
Speaker
What kind of maintenance do you normally run on the machine?
Jeremy
We check for [Time Stamp00:54:32] updates, check the anti-virus, run through the logs, check to see if there is any junk, spyware, we have the Semantic already running on it, but I’ve found that some of them that don’t get linked up or don’t get on the network, they’ll get older, make sure they are on the network, make sure that policies that migrated to them, because some of these just sit on carts and never get plugged back in accept through the wireless, which if they don’t have a password, they don’t get onto our domain, so really we are just refreshing, updating, looking at the logs, run through Windows update, if they got an older version of Adobe, I’ll update it, last time through we made sure Office was all up to date on all of them. Looking for broken parts, missing parts, like as we grow, we put these security locks on these little plastic mobile carts and I said it really just makes it easier for them to push the projector and the laptop out of the church as they are running away with them. Ya know, we’ve tried to lock a few of those things down, so I’m just checking for those type items, clean the screen, just checking them over.
Jason Lee
Basically it’s just going over the machine, ya know if it is not here overnight when you are pushing out your updates from your server, you can’t check that, how is your AVS updating, things that because it is a mobile device, how are your workstations getting maintained and managed and how is that different for a mobile device, and make sure the hardware keys aren’t falling off, etc.
Jason
Typically, we’ll defrag the drives, take a look at what’s on the machine. Now with Vista, we’ll go into the performance and reliability tools and especially look at the reliability tool and see what applications or drivers may have had an issue or anything reoccurring, that stuff. We clean everything we get [Time Stamp00:57:19] in, so we’ve got bottles of Windex and we give the laptops and great scrub-down before we return them back to the user and they are always, “my goodness! It looks so nice!” We take some canned air and blow out the keys with all the toast and matter that gets captured under there. We do pull them in when they are coming off of warranty too. We get all of our Dell laptops with complete care, so as they are rolling up to the end of the third year on that complete care, we pull them back, give it a thorough look-over, run the Dell hardware diagnostic tool which takes a good hour or so for that thing to run through all the different diagnostic stages, then we almost always have Dell come back in and replace the hinge and replace any of the palm rests or any part of the case that has a crack or blemish or whatever so that when the machine is now off of warranty, it is as nice and as perfect as it can possibly be, hoping that we’ll still get another year or two out of it, or sell it on e-bay for better than it would be.
John
We do some of those same things here at the University where I work, I’m managing about 50 laptop users and most of our stuff is done automatically, just about everyone is back in the office and on the network within a week or so, we’ve got an Enterprise class, anti-spyware tool that runs on the machine plus Symantec, obviously we use Windows update servers, things like that, so we really don’t find that we have to do a lot of maintenance because most of our users just do one certain things, so we find the drives don’t get too defragmented. Usually if we get a service call, we use Contig [MS?] that Mark [MS?] wrote, he is working for [Time Stamp01:00:07] Microsoft now, which runs way faster than defrag so we can defrag a hard drive in about 35-40 minutes. Most of the complaints we get is that machines are running slow, and usually a scan disk and defrag takes care of that. I don’t think we’ve had a spyware or virus problem in 7 years and I’ve got over 100 users. So it sounds like what we are doing here. There are several different tech supports on campus, I don’t know what they are doing. We can install and uninstall software based on what’s already installed or not installed on that computer and some of our maintenance tools we can do as well, we wake the computer up and run all our updates overnight, and it doesn’t work for all the laptop users, but generally the users have their computer in the office once a week or once or month so we can do those things remotely, it’s nice. When they are getting close to the end of the warranty, that’s when we get them in and polish them up and replace anything that needs to be replaced, cosmetic.
Jason
Good. Well we are at the one hour mark, maybe a good place to cut and run until next time. Still trying to work out a way to get somebody that’s very Vlan savvy maybe from HP or something like that to come on and do a Q&A with everyone, seems like Vlans always come up here and there, that might be kinda fun. Somebody is asking a Mac question in the channel. Do you find that Mac users are harder to get their laptops from? It is hard to get Mac users to play nice typically.
Speaker
Well they don’t need maintenance or have any problems, so..
Jason
That’s what I hear, I wish mine was, no kidding, again, it is not a Mac piece of software, but the Mac that we hook up to our TV to watch Lost every night is running Firefox, and no kidding, at least every night or every other night, Firefox craps out and [Time Stamp01:03:52] my wife looks at me and goes, “I thought these Macs had no issues,” so we chuckle and move on. Love to the Macs, marketing hype makes me ill. All good. We’ll save Macs for a later date, that could take a long time to talk about.
Speaker
I got my first one in here, I put Fusion one it, made it full-screen, booted to Fusion and I covered up the little Apple thing with a sticky note on it and put it on his desk and I was accused by every Mac user in this city so I had to fix it later so he could get to the Mac side, but I was having so much fun. But to get to Shelby and some of our other functions, he had to have both of them, but Fusion seemed to work pretty good for doing a split, so I have entered the Mac world in the last couple months, and I had a guy from corporate started calling me saying we’ll help you with pricing and we’ll do this and that and sent me his email, I told him I’m not going to be switching completely over but it’s interesting to have them coming out and contacting businesses. He’s in California which doesn’t help me here in Nebraska but at least there is someone I can call for pricing and licensing and stuff.
Jason
We discussed this last week, we finally got our Apple web store up and running and launched so we have an internal Apple web store that basically it’s the same pricing as Willow Creek right now, so we do enough Mac volume that when I pitched it to our Apple Enterprise rep, he was like Yeah, we can make that happen. Create the cart, give it out to our staff, they can go create their cart, comes to me or our Tech Arts Director, we can approve the carts or forward, and even with that our Apple rep said not to hesitate to create a cart and shoot it to me and see if we can do better. Probably everybody saw that Apple got rid of [Time Stamp01:06:38] the Xraid, have a new version of Xsan, Xsan 2 is now available, they dumped the Xraid from their product line and they’ve partnered with Promise for all their Xsan, [MS?] so that was an interesting piece of news this week.
Speaker
Now I think I’m glad I didn’t just buy one two weeks ago.
Jason
Yes. If anybody is interested in crazy Equal Logic pricing, I mean insane pricing, let me know, shoot me an email, a very short window of opportunity but there are some crazy things going on right now, I can’t really tell you about it but shoot me an email we’ll dialogue some more. I still need to get back to some people, bear with me. We’re getting there. Good place to stop. Our next one will be the first Thursday in March, the 6th, look forward to seeing everybody there. www.churchitpodcast.com will have the transcripts of this episode within a week or so, so until next time, live long and prosper. The chat line and the phone line stays open as well.
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