Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 25 March 6, 2008
Jason Powell
“Recorded Live.” I typically say that every time we do this, and it has probably gotten annoying, [MS Probably?? J ] but for some reason I like to say, “Recorded live” and then see what the transcriptionist does with it. Sometimes Margaret leaves it in, sometimes she deletes it. And probably most of you could care less. [MS Jason – actually they pay me extra to leave it out, along with all your “uuummm”s. J We just haven’t figured out a way to leave them out of the recording too! J Just kidding with you – you’re Awesome! Or I should say “Sweet!”] Anyway, welcome everybody, today is Thursday, March 6, 2008, this is Episode 25. Wow, that’s like a quarter of a hundred, something-centennial. What’s fun today is that in the studio, live today, Dave Mast and Justin Moore are here, they are helping us out with some wiring projects that we’ve got going on, so they are here and it was a podcast day, so, be kinda fun to have live guests here going on. Some quick housekeeping stuff, if you listen to this and you’ve not checked out the transcriptions, head over to www.churchitpodcast.com and all the Episodes, 1-24, are available to you transcribed for you to search and check out and read through. We still need help editing the transcripts for URLs and certain words that the transcriptionist doesn’t know, so if you can help do that, that’d be sweet. Let’s see, we’ve got Ministry Tech coming up April 3rd and 4th, Oklahoma City. Last I saw, registration was pretty close to being full. If you have not registered, please do so, get yourself to www.ministrytech.org and sign up. Additionally, the Church IT Roundtable on April 5th, it’s a separate registration, so if you are dragging your heals on that, get it going.
We are also looking at October, mid-October, somewhere in there for the Fall Church IT Roundtable to be presented by Sea Coast Church and Trace Umpke, Trace is [Time Stamp00:03:05] here. So we will hopefully nail down some dates on that, it will probably be a two-date event. It will be awesome, a week would be great. It will be in Charleston, the weather will be awesome, we are hoping to do something cool with spouses, or significant others! So if you have a significant other, doesn’t necessarily have to be a spouse, hopefully we can figure out something fun for them to do while we are chatting geeky stuff. Charleston is a great place to hang out. Fun for the whole family, I’ve been told. I think those are the housekeeping details. Why don’t you guys tell who you are and where you’re from and what you do.
Justin Moore
Justin Moore.
Jason
What do you do Justin?
Justin
Everything. I’m the IT department for my company.
Jason
You’re not a church IT guy yet?
Justin
Just a volunteer, small church.
Jason
Cool, where are you from?
Justin
Shelby, North Carolina, 45 minutes away from Charlotte.
Dave Mast
Nothing much new on Dave Mast, I’m the IT Director at New Point Community Church in Dover, Ohio, not to be confused with North Point but they do sound the same. Aside from IT, I do a little bit of video and just recently my job description changed and I am no longer a part of video production, I just handle the care and training of the equipment, so that’s a cool shift. That’s really about it.
Jason
Awesome, I’m glad you guys are here, I’m looking forward to working you like dogs, I mean, hanging out with you and having you help us with our wiring project.
Today is completely open forum, we do have a hard limit, we need to be done about 5 of 10 minutes before 3:00, so we’ll keep that in mind, but it’s open forum. I see a number of people in the chat window talking about Apple saying that they are going to do some Exchange integration [Time Stamp00:06:04] with the iPhone. Who has details? What do you know? I need details, info.
Speaker
There is a Microsoft press pass release, I’ve got a link I can post in the chat window. [MS Need to insert link from chat window]
Jason
I’m gonna start asking questions. I assume Apple somehow bought licensing of Active Sync from Microsoft? Is this what we’re thinking?
Speaker
I just got the link passed to me, I haven’t read it yet.
Speaker
That looks like what went on, Apple and Microsoft starting talking last year apparently, according to Terry Myerson, Corporate VP for Exchange at Microsoft, so they are all licensed from Microsoft.
Jason
So who did they have to pay to keep that under wraps? That’s like hot news. You know there are a number of people at Microsoft that knew this. Found something good: “We started talking with Apple about licensing Exchange Active Sync before the launch of the iPhone last year.” Wow.
Speaker [MS Is that Jeremy? I’m not recognizing voices today, remind them to say their name when they first speak].
Keynote today on it, it was announcing it will support like remote life and the whole nine yards on Active Sync.
Jason
Wow!
Jason Lee
Sounds like the idea of remote wiping [MS?] iPhone.
Jason
But if you remote wipe iPhone, there could be…
Speaker
Windows device completely factory defaults it, theoretically, they could lose all their music and other stuff.
Jason
So if you can, how come Entourage doesn’t have this?
Jason Lee
We’ve just started playing around with 2008 and it really isn’t much better than the previous releases of Office for Macs other than it does the new document format, that’s about the only change I’ve seen.
Nick Nicholea
I’ve been working [Time Stamp00:09:01] with it for about three weeks now and it doesn’t fully Sync with Exchange, it is still missing Categories and Tasks and probably a number of other things I haven’t even discovered yet.
Jason
It’s just using the OS stripping, so it is not a full client at all. Now our people that are using Entourage 08 are saying that it is a lot more stable than the 04 version.
Nick
I would concur with that, but what I end of doing on my Mac is running Fusion, so I’ve got Outlook always open in the background just because that’s the only way I can get my RSS feeds and some of the other things I need to have happening.
Jason
Exactly, that is very interesting news. Very interesting. Now my only gripe is the network that the iPhone is on, at least in our area it is not high speed. I think the iPhone is sweet-looking.
Speaker
Well the iPhone only does, what is it, Edge? It doesn’t do the high speed network so even if you had it in your area, it still wouldn’t do it. Can we now over the air sync our iTunes directory to my iPhone through Active Sync? That’s what I want to know. Just kidding, I wouldn’t want to do that.
Jason Lee
Why not, cause they’ve already thrown the stupid iPhone plug-in into everybody’s installation of Outlook once you install iTunes, which causes Outlook to barf, so why not? Just change everything and don’t tell us about it. I think Microsoft gets their hands slapped for that don’t they?
Jason
Everybody needs to be slapped in my opinion. Interesting. So this is not live until June? When can you start to Active Sync your iPhone?
Speaker
On the bottom of the release was that June was the update that will activate all the stuff. That’s at the bottom of the FTK information, but I would think it would be for both.
Jason
If you are in the chat window, slap your info in, name, position, church, blog address, so we can keep track of that stuff.
Speaker
It also says the update is free for the iPhone but there will be a small charge for the iPod touch for these updates.
Jason
That’s like when Apple did the goofy charge so your wireless card could go from g to n. Remember that?
Chris was in the IRC channel last night, this is his first time on the podcast, glad you could join us. I see a lot of familiar faces here. Cool. What do you want to talk about?
Speaker
Google [Time Stamp00:13:52] also released a Calendar sync with Outlook yesterday.
Jason
What? I haven’t read blogs in like a week and the world has gone past me. Tell me more.
Speaker
It’s a little plug-in you can download and it will sync Outlook with your primary Google Calendar, whether it’s Google Aps Calendar or just your g-mail calendar. They also released a Contacts ACI too, which should allow some people to write up some aps to be syncing your Google Contacts with your Outlook and your mobile phones and your whole nine-yards.
Jason
Our Senior Pastor got a Blackberry not long ago, he doesn’t use any of our Exchange account stuff but his administrative assistant does, so we finally convinced him to get off of AOL, how many other people have Senior Pastor using AOL? So he’s off of AOL, switched over g-mail and the g-calendar and of course his secretary is wondering how she can sync Outlook to g-cal, I sound like the goo-cal software network, about 50%, so this is interesting and exciting news for me. This is going to help my wife too. Is it two-way sync?
Sp
Yes, or one way, you can choose.
Jason
That is awesome! Podcast done! We’ve delivered two great nuggets of information, the world is a better place. Everything solved, Google and Apple taking us by storm.
The Google site release is somewhat new, maybe a week old now? So Justin and I and probably Dave if we have time will talk about trying to get the Church IT Roundtable site, what would that look like on a Google site? Google aps so we can have Calendar. We have a Sharepoint site but it is hard to manage. So if we can do it through Google – win! What IT guy doesn’t have a g-mail account already? Not that you need a g-mail account to use it, but that would be sweet.
Also in the news, I don’t [Time Stamp00:17:00] know if anybody else has played with Office live space, live work space, beta. I finally got my first invite after 4 months of waiting, I kicked the tires. It’s pretty sweet, but it is missing a huge piece in that it does not allow you, at least in this beta edition to do any live editing of documents. So you can publish stuff up and preview it over the web, so I pushed up an Excel document and you could view it right through the Office live workspace, whatever it is called, you could preview it but to edit it you still need to pull it down. There is a little plug-in you can install on your pc that will let you synchronize and pull stuff up and down from it very easily but still the ability to have a spreadsheet on the web and have people edit it, and I’m sure Microsoft is working on that, but that’s one strike against the Office live beta product.
Nick has an announcement.
Nick
For Ministry Technology Institute, not to be confused with ministrytech.com. We got a phone call about two weeks ago from Christian Management Association, are you guys familiar with them? They do a national conference every spring that attracts about 2,000 people from ministries and churches, probably about 80% ministry like para-church stuff and about 20% churches, and they said somehow we missed, we dropped our IT track by mistake, can you guys help us out? So we put together an IT track, Steve and I did, in a matter of about six hours, got a great line-up, and it starts with an IT roundtable. So if anybody is available and interested in checking that out, go to my other company’s website, which is www.mbsinc.com I think we’ve got a link to it from there. Let us know what you think. We are calling this Ministry IT Summit and our thinking is we grab that [Time Stamp00:19:46] name plus the name for Church IT Summit and we’d like to take the model a little bit further and see what it might do, we’d like some feedback.
I’ve had a question that is feedback oriented that I’d love to get some input from you guys on. Ministry Technology Institute is a distance learning course that certifies people in how to do IT stuff in the church and ministry environment and we use Talkshoe, and you guys know Talkshoe pretty well because we are all on it right? One of things we are thinking is, ok Talkshoe is cool, it’s got some definite advantages but it feels a little bit old-school, so we’ve been doing some research for about three weeks about the possibility of building a presence in Second Life and I know Trace, you guys have a presence there because I’ve been to it, what do you guys think? Good idea or not? I’d like to get some feedback, positives, negatives?
Jason
Can you do voice inside Second Life like conference call stuff.
Nick
Yes, you can wear a headset and talk directly. I don’t know if they have a call-in like this does, so if we felt like that was a need, we’d probably have to use another service for that. I guess the idea is that in a classroom setting, you can all be sitting in chairs and you can see each other and talk to each other and all that kind of stuff.
Has anybody here spent any time in Second Life? That you are willing to admit? It has a dark side to it.
Jason
The only thing I know about Second Life is from Terry Storch when they did their live church in Second Life and there were naked avitars and some rather interesting things going on.
Nick
Yes, there is definitely a dark side to it. The surprising thing to me is that there are a number of universities and learning institutes, like Harvard, [Time Stamp00:22:22] who have a presence there, the only way you can get into their area is if you’ve got their group membership. And I guess a number of corporations are setting up sites there as well so that they can have meetings with their staff around the world, they can have libraries where basically you’re checking out pdf documents and stuff.
Jason
Dell has an island in Second Life, I don’t know what you can do on their island.
Nick
We have the possibility of buying the island at a pretty good rate just because of some relationships we’ve already begun to forge there. I’m a real life ocean surfer so I surf in Second Life, but I think that’s for something different.
Jason
David is asking what kind of bandwidth Second Life takes.
Nick
I don’t think the bandwidth is that heavy, it all depends on what your resolution is. It does definitely eat up your processor on your computer, and after doing that for about 2 weeks, we decided to check the ports in our system over here to see what kind of data had been transferred, and when I looked at the number, 17 gigabytes, and my lead engineer said, no look a little closer and it was 17 terabytes! I guess I been spending a little too much time in there. But I’m running a high screen resolution and I don’t have it down at all.
Sp
That sounds like it will get you kicked off the cable modem faster than running vitorant [MS?]
Jason
And who would run vitorant?
Sp
Only for ligitimate things.
Nick
I’m hearing crickets on this topics, they don’t have experience yet on Second Life or just not sure.
Jason
I have no experience in Second Life.
Nick
The surprising to me is they anticipate breaking the 10 million user barrier this year.
Sp
How many of those are active?
Nick
Good question, hard to say. They call them residence, so I think all they are [Time Stamp00:25:22] saying is 10 million residences, so it could be accumulation over the years.
Sp
I think I read an article in Wired a while back talking about Second Life and how some companies have spent a lot of money to put up a presence there and met with less than a large crowd in return, but obviously some people are doing some popular stuff there too, so probably depends on the area and what it really is.
Nick
There are some people making some serious money in there, but they are in the tiny minority. A lot of people set up shops and all sorts of things, and I’ve got to believe they all lose and the only ones making money is Lindon Lance, the creator of it.
Jason
Well, like anything, it may take a few more years for the general population to catch onto it. Look how long it took Facebook to become seriously popular.
Sp
They had to open up to non.edu addresses too to take off.
Nick
Trace, have you guys run into or tracked any statistics on what you’re doing in Second Life there yet?
Trace
We are not doing anything in Second Life. I looked into it a couple weeks ago but I haven’t been back since.
Jason
I’ve got to get my first life in order first.
That’s interesting Nick. I’d be curious to know how that goes over. Of course if you’ve got students already subscribing and you say this is the vehicle we are using, it’s not like they have a choice.
Nick
It’s not like we’d be going in there to try to make money like so many people do, setting up shops and selling items. Really, we’ve already got the business model that says this thing is up and running and that’s just where we are doing it. Thanks for letting me bounce that off you guys. If anybody has any feedback on it over time, shoot me an email. I’ll put my blog [Time Stamp00:28:17] and email address in the chat.
Jason
Right. Good. Other topics. You might be curious why Justin and Dave are here at Granger. We are doing a nice wiring infrastructure over-haul where the goal, which is huge and I don’t know if we’ll achieve it by Saturday night, but basically we are yanking a bunch of network gear and panels and wires out of an old audio rack, pulling all that stuff up through the ceiling and re-landing it into a different location inside the room into a new rack, new punch down panels, putting in new big beautiful HP 4208 switches, we’re color coding all the patch cables so that things are logical. Then a couple other things, not necessarily moving the wiring around but doing all the patch cabling and then we are re-labeling, re-number scheming the entire building. So when you look at a face plate, like in my room, it’s 128 or something like that, there’s actually a 128 somewhere else in the building, thank you cabling contractors. So in the future when you look at the data ports on the face plate in a room, it will actually make sense. The first letter will tell you what idf it is in, the second letter will be what punch panel it is in, then there will be a number 1-24 which will tell you what port, so you should be able to look at any wall jack in the building and be able to very quickly know exactly where it goes. So that requires I don’t know how many drops there are in the building, a lot. We have to not only label the face plates but we have to pull the face plates off, label the cables on the inside, label the cables where they terminate down to the punch block, label them on the outside.
Jason Lee
Was that Justin moaning in the background realizing the scope of what he signed up for?
Justin
Me and Dave actually. We’re doing what? I knew I should [Time Stamp00:31:00] have asked more questions.
Jason Lee
You might want to just hop in a car and come over here for a few days, get out of Dodge while you can.
Jason
Well, we are so tired of this mess, trying to troubleshoot things, and you can’t figure out easily where something is and where it goes, so I’ve got a big thing on the whiteboard here of all the things to do. Our motto this year is ‘bottom up’ so we are starting at the very bottom layer of the network saying what stinks, what blows about it, and lets fix it. So at the bottom of your network is your wiring, so we looked at it and said what do we not like, and there are a lot of things we don’t like about the wiring infrastructure, the labeling, so this is going to be a huge improvement on nailing that piece down, then we will move layer by layer up through the network as time progresses and make things better.
Nick
That’s gonna be a great move for you guys Jason. One of the things we’ve seen having worked with so many ministries around the country is typically the IT function grows without a strategy up until it reaches a certain level, then you realize you don’t have a strategy. And the only way you can fix it to support the larger need is to go back to the beginning and start fixing the little pieces to make this thing run right.
Jason
Exactly. All those little things you say, “We should do that someday.”
Nick
It takes courage because it is a big job but you guys will be rewarded for it.
Jason
It just takes time and energy. It is not glamorous by any means, all the wires and labels and terminating. It’ll be really sweet when it is done. This will force us to re-do all the documentation at the wiring level. So with the new switches, we can actually go into the switches and put what port switch belongs to who, which module A port 3 because to …, that [Time Stamp00:33:55] also means that we are changing our Add/Remove, some of our processes on the other end so if an office changes or somebody changes, this will now be on the process list. So when somebody moves, this will be on there, you go into the switch, re-label, change some documentation so that in the future it will be nice and easy to figure out where stuff is. We went ahead and got the Procurve [MS?] Manager Plus software so all our switches, we’ll get some nice reporting, statistics, monitoring for those. Everything will be home run back to our big daddy core HP switch. We didn’t have enough money right now to be able to replace all of our Dell switches, but that’s a future goal to replace all Dell switches with managed HPs, then we can manage everything down to the port level monitor traffic. It will be great.
Nick
That will help you track people who are using Second Life.
Sp
Figure out where the 14 terabytes went!
Jason
I would smack somebody.
I just saw that the Wi Spy is coming out with a new version, Wi Spy is now 399, I must have gotten the press release, it will be able to do signature stuff, it’s supposed to be able to look at the signature from an access point, the rf signature and tell you if it is a Lyncsis or a D link, so it sounds interesting. I’m curious to see how well that works. Fun stuff ahead.
What else is going on?
Cricket noise. Dave has an awesome cricket sound.
What will you use to build your documentation?
We are pretty much dumping everything into Sharepoint. Windows Sharepoint services, we are using the wiki feature and we are also uploading documents that we currently have. So Sharepoint will be our one-stop shop for all IT documentation. Yes we do use Visio for the drawings. We will be able to get some [Time Stamp00:37:24] pictures, I didn’t bring my better camera though. We all have camera phones.
Michael Foster is asking about Spyware removal software. A bunch to choose from, we just moved from Webroot, Spysweeper Enterprise edition and Synamtec’s antivirus over to Sophos and we are liking it. It does antivirus, antispyware, and firewall, and executable blocking, pretty sweet.
Dave
New version of Symantec Endpoint production 11 does all that too. We have a license but haven’t installed it yet. And Sunbelt software makes some good antispyware only stuff, enterprise version as well. www.sunbeltsoftware.com I think.
Sp
You have not deployed 11 yet?
Dave
Have not deployed it. I have the media kit here already and the licenses and everything. We’ve noticed it’s just a horse, so we just haven’t implemented it yet. And it changes the structure of how you do security management even at the desktop with firewall and whatnot, so we just haven’t dove into it yet.
I’ve heard if you don’t deploy it the right way, you can lock yourself out of some things easily, so I haven’t had time to look at it yet, we just got the media kit two weeks ago. We had to renew our subscription. I wanted to switch to Sophos or take a look at some other options but financially Symantec made the most sense for right now.
Jason
Somebody left a comment on my blog: I can’t help but ask, now that the iPhone is giving Exchange support, or they going to be the latest officially unofficial devices around for you guys? Carl from church@chapelhill.com That’s funny.
If it does Exchange and does it right, we will support it. Apparently we are saying we only support Windows mobile devices because obviously it is easy to hook them up. We did have somebody [Time Stamp00:40:07] bring us a Blackberry Monday, said, “hey I bought this Blackberry” I said, “Why? What were you doing? You didn’t come ask us? Dude, you better go back to Verizon.” So he went back and got himself the new Q and he is digging it. Maybe 5 minutes it takes to set up a Q or a Trio or i760. Digging my i760 phone, loving it. Compared to my Trio, it is sweet.
Sp
Even the palm base OS stuff with the Exchange Active Sync is pretty easy to set though. That’s primarily what we are running here, various of Sentro and the 650 and 700 p and such. It doesn’t do Task sync and doesn’t do remote device wipe or anything like that but it will do calendar, contacts, and email with direct email push on the newer stuff.
Sp
One interesting piece to the whole Blackberry puzzle, down in Savannah on his blog that there is a flavor of Blackberry server that isn’t the whole kit and kaboodle enterprise that cost three or four grand, and it is actually for the first user free and then a hundred bucks for every user up to 30. Granted we are not going down that road because we don’t want to support another server and have to manage, but for those that are wanting to go down the Blackberry road, it is a more cost effective solution.
Jason
Dave is using Bez [MS?]
Dave
Yes, our xo is a Blackberry user and so far has not been willing to move to a smart phone or at least one that is Windows mobile based, so we went through the process of setting up the express version for him and it is quite a learning experience the first time around, you have to do some permissions in your Exchange server, but once you get it set up, it is pretty flawless, and he has been enjoying it.
Jeremy
This is Jeremy, Chapel, we put it in about 3 or 4 months ago and we love it, but there is a learning curve, [Time Stamp00:42:36] we’ve got the enterprise with 20 because we already had a bunch of crackberry users that we couldn’t get off, so, asking a person with a Blackberry to get rid of it is like impossible.
Sp
Our Senior Pastor wants one now too, so I’m gonna be interested to see what direction that goes.
Jeremy
That’s where it started was from the Senior Pastors, they were syncing with their assistants and having a lot of corruption problems because they were syncing on multiple machines and the bez solves all that. We also looked at it as a way to maybe try to curb the influx of iPhone.
Sp
We may have to rethink our policy because we’ve said if it does Active Sync it, if it is Exchange, we would allow it, so [MS couldn’t hear all of what he said]
Sp
Is there anything bad about Apple supporting Active Sync?
Jason
No, if it is licensed Active Sync from Microsoft, it should be easy set up.
Sp
Active Sync works the same way, I don’t think it is a real different issue, even for our users, we said we’ll make sure it is connected to the server, but if you have in your data plan and troubleshooting your data plan, that’s you and your carriers deal, so we don’t support it anyway, [MS static, can’t hear].
Sp
They are claiming full support for email and calendar and I assume the rest, I don’t know if they’ll do tasks or not but they’ll do the email push, the remote device wipe, if you need to wipe a lost phone remotely, so it is definitely in cooperation with Microsoft, so it looks like they are doing the whole kit and kaboodle, possibly even better than palms.
Jason
That will be a great productivity boost to our guys that have iPhones.
Sp
It would be great if they could take that one step further and develop an Exchange client for OS 10 that would actually work with Exchange.
Jason
Well hopefully this is the tip of the [Time Stamp00:45:06] iceberg.
Sp
If Apple and Microsoft and working together now, and obviously they are, then it should be only good things to come.
Jason
If you can nail the Outlook piece for OSX, then I’ve got a lot more, I’m probably going to look at it at a different level of support. If it will do that, then a lot of my reasons for not supporting it kinda diminish because the big deal right now is if you get an Apple, you can’t Entourage, or you’re going to have to stick virtual stuff on it which will slow it down and more overhead and licensing and ya da. If it just works out of the box, beautiful. I’d probably start using my own Mac again. I switched back to my Dell from the Mac and life has been a lot better. I like the Mac, just for me and what I do, it didn’t make me happy.
Sp
It is a challenge but it is more fun when you are off work.
Jason
I’m never off work unfortunately.
Sp
Does anybody here know what that means?
Jason
We need to go work for Nick, he’s out there surfing.
Sp
All we need to do is start our own coming or go work for Nick and we should be able to take all the time off we need to.
Jason
Well, we are at 2:50 and the three of us need to go. Margaret will probably get this transcribed in a couple days or so, that’ll be great. If anybody has the whole chat thread, if you captured that, if you could grab that, copy and paste and email it to me, jpowell@gccwired.com that would be helpful. We are trying to keep the thread text captured, it helps with the transcription stuff. Thanks everybody for coming, we meet again in two weeks, which is the 20th so until then, the phone line and chat window will stay open, feel free to chat amongst yourselves.
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