Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 28, May 1, 2008
Jason Powell
Good afternoon everyone. Today is Thursday, May 1, how can it be May 1st already? 2:07 p.m. We could make this thing actually start at 2:10 and by then everybody would show up. This is the CIT podcast, we do this every first and third Thursday of the month at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. It’s a place for church IT folks, you don’t have to be in the church, a place where IT folks get together and talk shop, best practices, questions, discussions. Also we have a website, www.churchitpodcast.com where you can find the transcripts to each show that we do, and they are all nice and searchable so you can go back to any prior episodes and look for say, networks or do a search for Script Logic and you can find information about stuff we’ve talked about. We also would encourage you to check out www.citrt.org that’s the funnel we’re trying to drive everybody to for what we call the Church IT Roundtable, which is kinda our group, so to speak, our movement, our grass roots effort to connect church IT folks. So definitely check that out, it is a place to hook up with everybody’s blogs. If you have a church IT related blog, there is a place to get yours into the aggregator, you’ll find links to the church IT survey, if you’ve not taken that, please put your church data into the survey, it’s all good stuff. We also have an email list, that’s the IT discuss link on the citrt.org site, so there are all sorts of resources available for you, check them out, see how you like them.
So today is basically wide-open forum. I would also say that if you haven’t checked it out, we do have a web cam aggregator, so a number of us are using Ustream and slapping web cams on our desk where, if you’re a voyer [MS?] type person, you can watch us all day long. The web url is in the chat channel and it is also, we need to move this over to citrt at some point, it would be easier to tell people how to get to. The url is www.wantmoore.com/citrt-cams.php so there you go.
What are we going to talk about today? Anybody got a question?
Justin
Do you want to talk about your recent Postini pricing?
Jason
I can certainly, basically, if you are a 501C3, you can now qualify for some sweet Postini pricing. What is Postini? Postini is a hosted anti-spam, anti-virus offsite email solution where basically you point your mx records to Postini servers, their data center, they wash all the email before it even gets into your environment and they capture stuff for virus, spam, it’s a great spam solution. If you’re using Gmail, you are already using Postini, you just don’t know it. Anyway, the pricing was, I used to pay $21 something per user per year for Postini and with Google’s acquisition of Postini, now that price has gone down to 3 bucks per user depending on which level you get. The hitch that I found was that they require a $1,500 minimum order, if you want to get the third level, their highest level of service, which includes one year of email archival, let me check my blog, www.jpowell.blogs.com $8.50 per user, which is just crazy good. So I ended up saving almost $1200 bucks over what I would have paid going off of the regular contract price so I am extremely happy, plus we’ve got a year of archive services that we never had before. The ability for our user to go onto the Postini website and look at their email, so if they delete something in Outlook, they could call IT and have us help them OR they can go to the web link and they can actually look at their old email straight through the web, so that’s pretty cool. 66% discount for non-profits. Thank you Google.
Has anybody else done any Postini ordering yet? I know some people have looked into but don’t know if anybody has gone through the process. Nobody.
Sp
I’ve got something cool we’ve been working on, I don’t know if anybody has read about it on our blog. Our programmer is actually on the other side of the cubicle wall listening at the moment, I think he is going to try to package up some of this stuff and post the code, but for everybody who doesn’t know what it is, we’ve had a problem, when I started on here, we had 12 calendars that all have to be kept up to date at the moment, so we brought Sharepoint in and on line, actually a couple of them but we still had different ones, like we were using Event U calendar for just our website and it was double work, you still gotta go and post everything there again, so we kinda collaborated it on a idea where we could take Sharepoint and use it’s web services and actually pump it right to the web and we have that up and running, and later on today or first thing tomorrow, he is going to post a new one, a new build of his work that is going to have the different ministries, so you can turn ministries on and off or turn locations on and off, and just filter the calendar any way you want. So it’s been a pretty cool project.
Jason
Very cool. When I read that, I was like Oh look at that! Somebody is doing what we’ve been wondering how you do. Sharepoint onto the extranet.
Sp
Actually, once he started doing it, it wasn’t a big deal, he just had to go and, you know, Microsoft is notorious for bad documentation so that was the biggest struggle, but we’ve got a couple other neat Sharepoint ideas up our sleeve we are going to try to do this year too.
Jason
Cool. What else is new down in your neck of the woods, Florida, right?
Sp
Our elders are praying about us launching another multi-site, so we are getting excited and ramped-up about that. That is always a lot of fun, so just a throw out there to everybody, the multi-site we launched a year and a half ago just got approved for building a building for it already, so it went from about 100 people to about 1,100 or 1,200 in about a year and a half, so it’s been pretty exciting.
Jason
How’s the Ruben network doing?
Sp
Wonderful. It just keeps on cranking. We’re still thin clienting [MS?] like crazy, becoming bigger and bigger fans of that.
Jason
Are you doing thin thin or embedded xp thin?
Sp
We’re doing thin thin, we actually have, on my desk right now, I got an xp embedded but we’re thinking about that for like a digital signage project that we’re playing but we’re using Windows PE 6 devices for our thin client from HP. Love the HP, using the 5520 to 5530 are the models I think we’re using, we’ve probably got 30 or 40 of those deployed at this point.
Jason
We’re looking at thins for our child check-in machines.
Sp
Those you want the xp embedded though for sure.
Jason
Yeah, we need dot net cranking on those guys. I know Ian over at Church of the Resurrection, they’ve gone that route, they are using Arena check-in, said it is working quite well for them, so we’re F1, so it’s like ya know, as long as I’ve got dot net. And in our case, we need to have the ability for a pci wireless card we could slap in there, we’re pretty heavy with the wireless check-in. But what a great, it reboots real fast if it needs to, you don’t need to run virus protection or anything on it, flash it and you go. Uses very little power, no moving parts, slam-dunk. Because we are using older gx 260s for our kiosks machines and we are already starting to run into battery issues, hard drives have already started to throw sectors, so we’re looking at replacing them, and it’s like well, if we can put some little xp jobs out there, we save space, electricity, the machines are more reliable, etc.
Sp
And they will run longer off the battery back ups.
Sp
We finished our power calculations, and for us it is not that much, maybe $2,000-3,000 a year. Pretty much everything we have deployed right now is, I don’t think we’ve got anything deployed that is more than 3 or 4 years old, 85% are flat screens at this point. When you blogged it, it was like a week before I had one of my help desk guys running around with a kilowatt checking all of our gear.
Jason
Awesome. Somebody else also posted on my blog that they are doing the exact same thing, maybe Jeremy Good from the Chapel in Chicago. Funny you mentioned this, we are doing the same thing. I’m very curious to see what our power consumption looks like. The question is, just on the PC side, suppose that we could save $2,000-3,000 over a year’s time if we turned the machines off during the evenings, then the big question is – is that enough? If it’s only a $2,000-3,000 savings, is that a good return on investment because now I’ve got to push patches out during business hours and potentially people will have to reboot during business hours. Somebody mentioned, mabye it was you Chris, that you just have a particular evening that you let the machines then the rest of the evenings you are powering them off during the evenings.
Chris
We were talking about that, but I think, I don’t know what the break even point is, I’m not going to make that decision, I’ll let me boss make that decision. Let the church administrator decide if $2,000-3,000 is really worth it. I was expecting it to be somewhere along that cost per month. If that was the case, then sure it makes a lot of sense, but a couple hundred bucks a month, I don’t know, I’m thinking about how much time you are going to pay someone to sit there while a service pack is being installed, and all of a sudden, the economy of being green going down in a hurry.
Jason
Well then maybe you just don’t patch but once a month.
Chris
I don’t know if I trust Microsoft that much.
Jason
We actually turned off all patch management for about nine months, no patch management, zero, so the end machines, I’m trying to remember why, I think it was when SP 2 was getting ready to role out and everybody was afraid that SP 2 might break the world, so we disabled SP 2 and we also just completely turned off Windows updates, of course that was a few years ago, we are obviously patching now.
Sp
Has anybody looked at what it costs to run their server room yet?
Jason
I’m doing the whole thing. I want to see how much those SANs, all those disks, there is going to be some great power consumption there I’m assuming.
Sp
I was going to suggest you power those off every night, that won’t be a problem.
Jason
Yeah right! Don’t think so!
Sp
My old place, every time we’d power a SAN down and bring it back up, we’d lose a disk somewhere.
Jason
Not good. I’ve positioned my web cam so everybody can see Kramer and the Terminator.
Sp
I figured out a cheater way of figuring out your server load, if anybody is interested. We have an APC 10 KVA req mount UPS [MS?] in the server rack and you can log into it and it tells you the amount of wattage it’s burning, so all of our server room runs through that, minus the air conditioning of course, but that gives you a quick, I’m burning 24,000 watts.
Jason
Nice, our UPS is old enough that we don’t have any land cards in it, so in the future plan is to put some new UPS units in there that have some land management, but I’m just going to buy probably 6 or 7 of the kilowatts and they way our main server is laid out, four of them in there should be able to monitor everything, it won’t give us down to the exact individual device, but each certain segment of devices or these devices on this power strip, here is how much it’s costing to run. I’m very curious to see what all of the dual power supply stuff does as far as power draw. We’ve maybe got our back up server, which is not really a server, Gateway extravaganza, but everything else is dual power supply. I’m very curious to see what happens if you put a kilowatt on each side on each leg of your server and what happens then if you unplug one of the legs. So what’s the difference between running a server with one power supply actually activated on it verses two? Is it a significant difference between the two?
Sp
I’ve always wondered if they are pulling equal power through both of them all the time anyway. I’d be interested to see that too.
Jason
Yeah, it’s like a cool science experiment. Considering my background in physics and teaching and all that good stuff, I haven’t done that in so long, I’m excited to plug stuff and write down numbers. Now in the school system we had watts up meters [MS?] and you would actually plug them into a pc with a serial cable and it would then graph out the power usage. It was cool because you could take a pc that was powered down and plug it into the watts up meter, power it on and you get this sweet, at the beginning it would spike majorly and then you could watch it fall down and even out, I thought it was cool.
Jonathan Pierce
While you guys are talking about UPS, I’m looking at buying some UPS right now, you guys got any brands or models you guys are excited about or anything you guys recommend?
Sp
I’m an APC snob, I admit it, they are not always the cheapest, I’ve always used them, but I don’t know. I’m open, if we were going to buy a new one today, I probably would shop around.
Jason
We’ve got some Power ware stuff, not for the server rack, but we are running APC units like Chris and probably like a lot of you guys for the main heavy duty production areas then we started experimenting with Power ware, so we are using Power ware for all of our kiosks and unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s just the model we bought or batch we bought, but we’ve had a number of batteries we had to get replaced, so I don’t know if that says anything about their core data center line but so far I’ve not been impressed with the desktop line we bought.
Mark
We use APC here and I’ve been going with the 3,000 and with the xl so you can add batteries to them, I tried sizing them down a little bit more and trying to get the right size, I finally just started buying one bigger than what I needed and they run longer and I don’t have a whole lot of problems with them, they just take up space.
Jason
I’d be curious too to see what the difference between 120 and 210 looks like.
Sp
My whole data center is 208. I did that when I came off of the DOD side, it runs so nice because I only have one, a 208 50 amp feed, so I’ve got one feed from the main power bank and it goes in and basically the servers all run cooler because they are not doing so much high amp conversion stuff, however that all works out, you run lower amps when you run higher voltage. And it just feels cleaner. I don’t know why but we’ve had a lot of issues, there may have been other factors also but we moved everything in the data center to 208 and I’m in love.
Jason
Are most of your servers, do you set them up to run straight 208 or are you still doing transformers and using 120 for special plugs?
Sp
No they go straight 208, most computer power supplies today are auto-switching, except for your desktops, your desktops have still got the switch in the back of them, you just flip the switch and it goes to 208 to 240 is the range it flips on but all of my servers are automatically sensing power supplies, all my switches are too. If you look, most of your gear can run anything from 110 to 240.
Jason
I’ll have to check into that, because right now we’ve just got 2 30-amp lines running up to the server room.
Sp
What we did is I put one of those 10 KVA APCs in when we first moved into this server room, and the plan was, hopefully this coming year, I’m going to buy a second rack and we’ll have a second 10 KVA 208 in it and then we’ll have one side of each rack plugged into each APC so you’ve got true full power circle redundancy. However, we’ll see how the budget goes.
Jason
People are always surprised that we have no generator for our church. I don’t know how much a generator costs but I’m assuming they are expensive.
Sp
We don’t either. Maintenance heavy.
Jason
I think there has only been one time in the history of our church, 25-26 years now, that service was interrupted by a power outage, so return on investment, not, at least around here, for now, that could change tomorrow and we could start dropping power all the time, but for now there is no need to have a generator.
Sp
I’ll tell you what we did, because we live in lightening capital of the US, not the world, but we were having problems where in the summertime our Wednesday night and Saturday night services, if a lightening strike was anywhere close, it would blink the power and if we took a power blink, all the projectors in the sanctuary would reset, all the intelligent lights would have to be reset, usually we trip breakers on our amplifiers for the sound system. There is a company out of Tampa that I used to work with and I called them and said what’s a 50 KVA battery back up gonna cost and they gave us a whole long list of numbers. What we really wanted to do was survive the blink, they came back and this is totally a God story because they came back and said we’ve got a silicon 50 KVA that we just replaced, why don’t we sell it to you and we’ll put all new batteries and guts in it. So for about, and I know this number sounds high but for what it’s covering it is awesome, but for about I think it was $11,000 or 12,000 we got a 50 KVA battery back up for our sanctuary, so it is covering our whole video room, our audio room, everything required for the production of a service is covered by that.
Jason
That’s sweet.
Sp
Yeah, they are cool guys.
Jason
Those partnerships, man, that is so keen.
Sp
If anybody is ever looking for an APC, I will be more than happy to share their information. They ship.
Jason
Awesome. Good. What else is going on with people in the church IT world?
Dale
This is Dale, I’m out in California, how are you guys? This is the first time on your call.
Jason
Good, welcome! Tell us about where you are at, your church, what you do.
Dale
We are in Coasta Mesa, California, I’ve been attending the church for about 16 years, I came to Christ at this church and the pastor body-slammed me last year and told me I needed to come to work here, so, after a lot of praying and so forth, I decided to take the position. I’m Executive Pastor of Operations, so IT is one of the things, I’m also in charge of Accounting and Facilities. We have about 2,500 people that come on a weekend. I’m the first person on staff that has ever known anything about IT, I started my career running a systems integration company in the early 80s, installed Novel Netware 1.0, dating myself, I used to write Cobalt code on punch cards, things like that. So just doing a lot of clean up here on our servers and so forth and are cabling systems are a mess. My project right now that I’m looking at is our Macs, which I really know nothing about, I’m wondering if anybody knows much about these guys. Our video guys use tons and tons of storage, which I know you are familiar with, and we’re looking to go high def and so it’ll just get worse, so I’m looking to build some type of storage solution and multiple terabytes for these guys.
Jason
I think every podcast we do, Macs and storage come up during the talk, because everybody is trying to figure out, what do you do with the Macs and what do you with all the storage they are eating up.
Dale
And it goes beyond storage, because the video guy is just one person right now, we are looking to go multi-site so we are going to need to make it a multi-user solution, as he is really doing it all on his laptop with an external drive, and it is high speed but there is absolutely no back-up, so if he crashes on a Thursday or Friday, we’re not going to have video that weekend.
Jason
We’re right there with you, we’re trying to figure out ways to help our Mac users. It was a topic at the last IT Roundtable that we did a month or so ago. A lot of times, the Mac guys aren’t necessarily thinking about back-ups or redundancy, they are just trying to use their creative juices to create the media, so it is up to us to come behind them and support them and say have you thought about back-ups? And here’s a couple of options for you. There are so many options and so many directions to go, it’s hard to tell you. I mean, for low-cost, you can build your own storage solution, just a single raid [MS?] [MS? Other uses of “raid” in this paragraph] card. And here’s what we did for one of our Mac users, if you go to my blog and search for getotastic [MS?] Mac, you should hit one of my blog posts where we basically took a PC, gutted it out, put a power supply in it, and filled it up with like 8 hard drives, put a nice 8-port data raid card into this guys Mac and ran the cables out from behind the Mac into this PC case, and that is his storage solution. So he’s got, I want to say, 2 of the drives out of 8 are raid zero so there is no fault tolerance there, but it’s a great rendering environment for him. Then the rest of the drives are all raid 5, so when he gets done with a project, he sticks them onto the raid 5 disks and so now he’s got some fault tolerance sitting there. It is still very fast, 5 drives at raid 5, that’s still pretty fast, and the cost was just the raid card, the drives themselves which isn’t much these days, and we found an old PC case and I bought a good power supply for maybe $150. So there’s kinda a home built solution. So you’ve got that end, or you can go all the way up to crazy expensive Xsan solutions which, you’re probably not there because it is so expensive.
Sp
About $25,000 to get started.
Dale
That’s what I’m looking at, basically a $50,000 proposal for an X serve with a, I don’t think they are using an Xsan, apparently some other company is doing that now.
Jason
Promise is selling the X raid.
Dale
That’s it, it’s Promise.
Jason
The Xsan has it’s own beast, so you can start by attaching an x raid via fiber channel to a Mac Pro if you wanted, so that’s actually what we’re doing with one of our main weekend capture machines, is this big honking Mac Pro with a fiber channel connection directly to an X raid, so then, your cost is, you need a fiber channel card and you need the cost of the X raid. Now only one Mac can talk directly to that X raid unless you want to start chopping up the individual sides of the X raid, so it depends on how many editors are trying to hit this, or you put a Mac server in front of the X raid and then you just share it out.
Dale
Right now we have the single editor but we want to have the ability to go to multiple and then also because we’ve got two different venues, we want to be able to stream simultaneously the different video in those venues.
Sp
Are you streaming live video or captured recorded video?
Dale
Captured recorded video for right now.
Jason
You don’t need a Mac to do that.
Sp
What are you going to stream it with?
Dale
I don’t know.
Jason
Windows media encoder baby!
Sp
The reason I’m asking, we do multi-site already and we do live. We are within 600 milliseconds of each other for our multi-site so that’s why I was curious.
Dale
Right now our two locations are on the same campus, but we are looking at going multi-site where they would be miles away, so we would need to be able to stream live at that point, essentially what you’re doing. So that’s got to play into this as well.
Sp
Talking about live, it gets tricky.
Jason
No kidding.
Dale
How are you doing the live? Are you streaming it through using the Internet, or VPN?
Sp
No we are glass the whole way, Time Warner Telecom so we’re on IT fiber the whole way. We are using a company called Streambox, we use them to stream our video back and forth.
Sp
The only reason I was asking, it gets tricky, for us we send two signals from our main campus to our multi-site so we’ve got a wide shot of the stage so you can see the pastor walking around back and forth and that camera never moves, kind of a lock-down shot, then we also send what we call our side screen or our program shot, so that could be a tight shot on him or it could be his notes or a video or whatever, so we send both of those and it’s tricky to get them and keep them in sync.
Dale
Who am I talking to?
Chris
This is Chris Kehayias.
Jason
Good stuff. And the other option for your Macs is you just use a Windows server, then use storage behind the Windows server, which is what we’ve landed on for a lot of the future Mac needs, we already know how to manage Windows servers quite well, we don’t know Mac OSX server, we have a copy of it and we’ve played with it and don’t like it so much, so why don’t we try to use IT storage and what IT already knows to store the Mac stuff.
Sp
We did a hybrid of what you’re talking about Jason. We actually have, our chief editor, we threw 2 terabyte drives into his Mac and then did a raid zero on them internally so he can do his capture and his rendering and do all of his editing there and then we got a big 2 terabyte, same thing as you, we used an Erica card and a bunch of drives and just built an array for them to store it on, on the other route, they can edit locally on destructible storage and then once they are done, we have them archived off to the network.
Jason
We are kind of making what I’m going to call for now, archival storage on the Windows side of the world, so they do all their editing and what not on the big Mac Pro and then once they have determined that this is now an archive piece, then we are figuring out just the low-cost, what I’ll call dumb storage. So we’re looking at some Promise iscuzzy stuff, very low cost, it won’t do any cool stuff like our Equal Logic, but if I’m just talking archival, I don’t need to spend a lot of money. Right now we have a chunk on our Equal Logic san that they archive stuff to, which we’re trying to figure out, we call that the swap space, so when they get done doing stuff, they’ll kick stuff over the swap space, supposedly somebody goes through every once in a while and cleans up the swap space.
Sp
Our 2 terabyte system that is supposed to be being cleaned up has about 140 gigs free on any given day.
Sp
Do you guys back that up to tape as well?
Sp
Once a month.
Jason
We’re not backing it up to tape yet. Not yet, but it’s in the grand scheme of what we’re trying to do with storage.
Sp
Even though it is big, this is a quantum super loader tape unit, and that’s $8,500 bucks, fiber attached.
Jason
And most of this, and again this is IT talking with our production and technical arts staff saying how can we help you, tell us your pain points, so we’ve got a great working relationship with our tech arts guys. Then I go back to our executive pastor and say here’s our options and here’s where we’d like to go and here’s what happens if we don’t, and then leave it up to the senior management team to determine if the cost is actually worth the investment. So suppose we want to back up all of these video elements, here’s how much it’s going to cost, and at least right now, there has not been enough return. So right now the critical stuff is on redundant drive, I don’t know how the Equal Logic could ever blow up, a major disaster would have to hit the church in order to kill that data, but that’s something that is brought up to the table too. What if a tornado does hit the church? Now down in Florida, I’m sure you guys are talking hurricanes, California you’ve got earthquakes to deal with, so if we lost this data, what does that mean to people? So at this point, people are saying it would stink, it would just really stink, but the amount of cost to make sure it is offsite just isn’t worth the investment. And each church has got to figure that out.
Sp
We’re kind of in the same boat, I looked at it and it’s like, I like data, so every once in a while I run a report against the server so when somebody files for last accessed, I would say probably 75-80% stuff on our video drive, once it has been done and we’ve cut a DVD or cut a tape or whatever with it when that sermon series ends, it doesn’t get touched ever again, but it is just there, “just in case”.
Jason
I wish I could, I am under NBA [MS?] so I can’t say much but there is a product coming in beta, hoping to get to play with this thing, that is going to help lots of people with this exact situation, so let’s just say, I can’t, biting tongue. We do use mozy [MS?] pro to do some offline archival, if you will, all of our financial stuff is shot out through mozy pro off site every night but of course it is small files, but there are solutions coming that will be able to take your data, even giant video files, as long as they are not accessed very often, it is really sweet. Cool stuff is coming. Everybody is trying to figure this out, it’s not just churches, every company is trying to figure out how to manage storage, what do you do with archive? And what’s going to happen someday when the government decides that us non-profits have to be socks-compliant and all this other stuff and you’ve got to have 7 years of email retention and oh my goodness. All that to say, I don’t think any of us have a great solution for you.
Dale
Well this is great feedback, gives me a lot to think about, so I appreciate that.
Jason
No problem. I would say if you are looking at the Xsan stuff, make sure you get an Apple engineer and grill them up one side and down the other because the Xsan will not do a lot of the stuff that I was led to believe that it does.
Sp
It’s a bear to get it to work with Windows and very expensive.
Dale
Yeah, right now they’ve got the X serve with the Promise raid. And then I can take advantage, they’ve got a server version of the Final cut software so I can have multiple users checking out projects and checking it back in and synchronizing the systems.
Jason
Has anybody played with that yet, for real? Final cut server. We read and we hear about that your people can hop on there, and you’ve got a timeline to work from and it does elements, metadata to elements, but I don’t know yet anybody who has actually played with it to be able to verify it actually does that. Here’s the cool stuff that Final cut editors will love. We need some church to go out and buy Final cut server and put it through its paces and report back to us.
Dale
We’ll probably do that for you. And then you can all pay me and that’ll help offset the cost of this thing!
Jason
Too funny!
Dale
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Jason
No problem, glad you could join us. We’re here to help, at least ask more questions. I don’t know if we have many solutions but we talk about the same things over and over.
Sp
We have a lot of pondering.
Sp
Have you tried posting it on the Roundtable website? Not everybody is necessary on here, you might get some feedback from some other people through the IRC, post it up there, there might be someone else doing something different that might give you some feedback.
Dale
Where is that?
Jason
There is a link to the IRC Channel on www.citrt.org church IT roundtable.
Posted in the chat room there, which actually brings up a good topic of discussion. The www.citrt.org website is there, we’ve got links to stuff, but it is lacking, so we are trying to figure out what we do with it so that it becomes a huge value, something that could be one of your trusted resources that you would visit a few times a week. So what would it take? What would the site have, what would it offer that would provide such a tremendous value to you that you’d go look at it every week? Already, we are aggregating church IT blogs, we’ve got links to various other resources, what does the ultimate funnel look like? I’ll throw out one, I think it would awesome to have a prayer request, praise, some cool thing, you want to put a praise out, some little function where you can enter prayer requests, a great God-sighting happening, maybe you are getting ready to have a kid, or somebody sick, or trying to sell your house, whatever.
Sp
Parenting advice on the Roundtable?
Jason
A community calendar would be helpful so you can see what events are going on across the country, because we are hoping that what we are doing on a national scale with meeting twice a year, people will start reproducing at regional locations. At Granger, we are doing a Roundtable every fall right in front of our Innovative Church Conference. Jason Lee is trying to kick up a central Illinois Roundtable. Tony Dye and those guys in Atlanta, several of those churches there, they meet every month and a half or so, so it would be nice to have a community calendar to go look. And if you’re doing something, you could update the calendar. Obviously a database of sorts of all the different people involved with what we are calling the Church IT Roundtable. So maybe you don’t know that 10 or 20 miles down the road that is involved with the Church IT Roundtable and they are doing voice-over IP and you are trying to figure out how to do voice-over IP, bam, you’ve got a resource. Or you are trying to figure out the Mac stuff, or live streaming, these are things that smaller churches are really trying to figure out. It used to be just the bigger churches were thinking about live streaming, now churches in a thousand, maybe even smaller, are talking multi-site and how do we stream stuff, so finding people that are somewhat knowledge experts in live streaming or even just recorded streaming would be a great benefit.
Sp
I would second that one. I know that we’ve helped three churches get up to stream, and they are less than 500 people kind of churches who want to do live streaming on the web, just in the last year and a half or so. I’m not looking for brownie points, I’m just seconding that there are a lot of little churches out there who are looking for help in a lot of these areas.
Jason
Absolutely. I get emails every month from people wanting to ask questions, and I’m happy to try to help, it is just hard to find the time, and that’s what I want this time to be. You’ve got these questions and instead of trying to do one on one dialogue, here’s a place where you can come, pop in, and not only do you get my lame answer, you get the benefit of all of our answers, and you guys are a lot smarter than I am, so. What else should it look like? What does it need to do, what kind of things are we not thinking about as far as what this portal looks like?
Sp
Is there any way right now for people to actually post a question and it blast everybody?
Jason
If you go to the IT discuss link, we have an email list, a list serve, and there’s a forum, so if you’ve not subscribed to the IT discuss email list, I’d certainly encourage you to do that, because a number of us are already involved with that, so it’s another great place to get in, ask questions, and we’ll have all sorts of questions, how to handle cell phones to I’ve got this particular error code inside of ESX, has anybody seen this before? To I’ve got a user I’d like to thump upside the head, what would you recommend?
Sp
Where’s the IT discuss link?
Jason
If you go to www.citrt.org, I haven’t been here in a while, the IT discuss forum is the last link over on the left, so it is a forum, but if you click that link and head over to IT discuss, somewhere in here is the email list, which is actually a forum, again this is why we are trying to figure this out. We’ve got all these separate resources that we are funneling through this website, so it is like what do we need to pull in and make better or change? If you go to www.itdiscuss.org and the second little row there under the heading of IT, the IT discuss link, discuss all things IT, that is actually a list serve, so if you click on that, you will see everything that has been happening inside the list serve. I believe if you post via the forum, I’m trying to see where you register to get onto the email list.
Sp
I think it is an option when you set up your account on the IT discuss, if you want email alerts, if you want to digest daily, or if you want every message to come through.
Jason
So, a number of us are subscribed to the IT discuss forum there. I don’t watch any of these other forums, but there are others. The IT discuss one is the main dog. Then other things like should we do any sort of a membership so we can actually get some money to do maybe marketing or pay developers to create the website or something like that? Would $25 a year to be part of the Church IT Roundtable, is that crazy? Does it make sense? Is it a good idea?
Sp
Maybe $24.99?
Sp
Let some of the vendors sponsor and pay for us.
Jason
Yes, there is potential to integrate vendors into it. But that’s sticky.
Sp
They usually want something in exchange.
Jason
Luckily, most of the vendors are very interested in helping, and I truly believe that their hearts are wanting to help us verses the sales aspect of it. Obviously, Dean comes instantly to mind, he is just a nice guy, he is an IT guy, he just happens to work for ACS and they happen to have a product focused on churches. But how would that work? Suppose that ACS wants to give us $10,000 and every page has the ACS logo on it?
Sp
I’m alright with that!
Sp
I’d be willing to put their logo a lot of places for 10 grand.
Jason
But then Fellowship One comes along and they are like, well we will raise that to 20 and we want our logo in the middle of the first page and this many pixels, so I don’t know that we are, then you start getting into administrative things a lot more, and right now, we are very loosey-goosey, there are meetings happening behind the scenes talking about what the future looks like, and we’re getting ready to do the thing at Seacoast in the fall, if you haven’t heard that yet, October 8th, 9th, and 10th, Seacoast Church Charleston. Trace Pumpke, it’s going to be awesome, don’t book your flight yet, but put that on your calendar. Is Trace here?
Sp
He said he couldn’t make it today, just go ahead and clear that whole week on your calendar though, it’ll be a blast.
Jason
Yes, you are going to want to be at the Fall Roundtable, it’s going to be awesome.
Sp
Come early, stay late.
Jason
Yeah, so just stick that in the back of your head, think about it, what should the site look like? How should it function? What does it need to be the ultimate resource to help you? What do we need to do so it helps you? Right now I don’t know what help it provides, I use it when I can’t remember where the link to church IT survey is. We’ve got a Flicker group, we’ve got a Facebook group, I’m not sure why my blog and Tony’s blog are listed there and nobody else’s is.
Sp
It’s that $10,000 donation you’re going to make!
Jason
Yeah right, let’s remove that link quickly.
Fun stuff. It is now 3:08. Does anybody else have issues trying to get the talk shoe, like the real client to load?
Sp
I had issues just getting to the site this afternoon.
Jason
Yeah, it took me a while to get onto the talk shoe site, then I kept getting invalid log-in whenever I was trying to launch the actual talk shoe client, not the web client, but the real client. It’s a good thing it is free.
I’d also like to stick in your head to discuss at some point, a question of what do we want to do differently with the podcast. I’d like to get more guest speakers involved, we haven’t done that in a while. We’ve got ideas, what do we want to hear, do we want to get somebody from Microsoft on to talk.
I can mute all but I can’t tell where the audio is coming from. The web client needs some work. That’s probably a great place to wrap this up since you are all muted. We were getting tired of that sound. When I hit the stop button, the phone line will still stay open, I’ll unmute the mics so you can still chat via phone, the web chat feature still stays up, so once I hit the stop button, those two things are still available. Get yourself a web cam next time and join the web cam aggregator page, kind of fun to see everybody live. Why people would want to do that, I don’t know but it is fun regardless. So www.citrt.org is the website, be thinking about that. What do we do to make it bigger, better, faster, stronger? Think about the podcast, what kind of stuff would you like to see discussed by some industry expert, maybe a certain topic. We could get somebody from Aruba to come in, maybe talk about some wireless stuff, or Cisco or HP to talk about the best way to Vlan, or whatever, storage. Send me feedback. www.gccjason@gmail.com Also don’t forget that the www.churchitpodcast.com website is up if you want to check out any of these transcriptions. Typically, this show will be transcribed within a few days or so, you can check back to see what we talked about. You can also download the episodes right off of the IT website as well as iTunes. So with that, I will say stop, unmute everybody and life will go on.
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