Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 30, June 19, 2008
Jason Powell
Hello everyone and welcome to the Church IT Podcast. This is Episode 30 of the Church IT Discussion podcast. Today is June 19, 2008. We do this every first and third Thursday of the month at 2:00 p.m., but we need to switch the schedule, that’s one thing we are going to talk about today. You can find mp3 downloads and iTunes links, and you can find all the prior transcriptions at www.churchitpodcast.com So if you are curious about what we’ve done in the past or if you are interested in a company like Aruba, you could do a search for Aruba and through the transcriptions you can see what podcasts have talked about Aruba. Sadly, it does not highlight the word Aruba, so if somebody has a better suggestion of how we can do that, I’m all ears.
On the docket for today, I want to talk about any Roundtable updates. I forgot about the Biggest Loser 2 contest, I’ll say something about that. We do need to change the time of the podcast if not even the date of the podcast. We’ve got Taylor Smith with us today and he is working on a new volunteer management, web 2.0 application that he is wanting to develop, so we will let him give us a spill on what he is up to and what he hopes to accomplish, how we can help with that. Chris, down in Florida, has some new info on the Flash streaming stuff they’ve been working on. Everybody loves Flash. Then as we have time, we will open it up to whatever.
Biggest Loser 2, there’s still time to enter, we just finished the third week of the competition and I haven’t looked at the results today but last time I checked, the combined group had already lost over 200 pounds, that’s pretty sweet. And the total pot was up to $900 I believe, so that’s pretty tasty as well, and it appears that at least the 3 church management solution vendors, Shelby, ASC and Fellowship One are working on a way to kick in some prizes for the Biggest Loser 2 contest. So, if you’re interested in joining, head over the www.churchitpodcast.com down in the lower left side, there is a link to the contest, hit the link, hit the paypal. It’s all good.
Trace do we have any Roundtable updates?
Trace
We do. Hopefully within the next hour or two I will have registration up online. Registration until August will be $50 and after that it will be $75. So it would be beneficial to sign up early. It’ll be up and more information like schedule and possible topics and vendors and partners will also be listed there this afternoon. Go to the website www.citrt2008.com or just go to the normal www.citrt.org website for a link there.
Jason
Give us the dates and all that good stuff again.
Trace,
It’s October 8th-10th. Right now I’m looking at doing some early arrival activities on the 7th so if you get here flight or driving on the 7th, you can come on over to the church and register, get some tours of the facilities and go out to dinner, that’s been a tradition for early arrivals. We are looking at the first full day, October 8th will be mostly roundtable sessions. Thursday the 9th, we’re looking at some vendor demonstrations but not we’re going to be stuck in a room and have to watch a list of vendors, we’ll have multiple rooms set up with vendors in multiple rooms so you’ll be able to pick which ones you are interested in and float around according to what interests you. That day is shaping up depending on how many vendors we can get in. And then Friday the 10th is looking like a bonus day, if you’ve got the time and budget to stay that day, we are looking to tour some local businesses, one of them being Blackbaud, which is a large software company for non-profits just down the road from us, they’ve offered to give us a building tour and feed us and we are also looking at the possibility of making a road trip to ACS, which is just up the road, it’s a church management system provider. Right now that’s how the schedule is shaping up. That will be on the roundtable website later today.
And I think Chris asked can we register now. The registration will be up before the end of the day today.
Jason
Do we have a hard limit on how many people yet?
Trace
Soft limit at the moment is 120, 160 is probably going to be the comfort maximum.
Jason
That would be huge!
Trace
We will hopefully see within the next 60 days how many people we can get signed up on the early registration and get a feel for how many people might come. It may be a last minute decision for some but we are planning for up to that many, so come on.
Jason
Airline tickets will be about $3,000 if you don’t get it now. And there is airline info and hotel info on the blog as well.
Trace
Right, we got some good deals on some nice rooms. Two of the closest hotels near us, very nice hotels. The rooms are actually suites with a separate bedroom so if you’re bringing the whole team, there’s plenty of room to share. And they include full breakfast, not just a box of cereal, a full breakfast and one of them is actually offering a manager’s reception, I’m not sure what that is, but it seems like VIP treatment. But those are pretty good discounts off of what those hotels usually charge. Comfortable place to stay, it’s going to be nice.
Jason
I don’t know that we have anything formal yet but it sounds like there could be a significant amount of spouse activity for this particular roundtable. My wife is really wanting to go.
Trace
Yeah, we will look at pulling together and organizing any spouses that will be coming or help give some information of things to do and places to see.
Another question in the chat, you don’t need to get a rental car, maybe we can hook you up with someone else. Otherwise the hotels are about 5-10 minutes away from the church, not really a decent walking distance. The airport is about 20-30 minutes away from the church. I’d recommend a rental car unless we can start hooking up people and tag-teaming on rides, or even rooms if you need to try to save money. And if anyone knows a website that helps you do that, please share it so we can help everyone out.
Jason
Any other roundtable questions?
The 160 will just include the IT people right
Trace
Right, those who will be attending the sessions.
Tony
Trace, you may have already mentioned it, did you get confirmation from the hotel that they can handle lots of people using their wireless.
Trace
I will follow up with them on that, but they’ve assured me they are better than the others, but I will try to go to both of them and get some tests of what they have going on there.
Jason
Great. We certainly appreciate you hosting this Trace, and as always, we are willing to help as you need.
Trace
If you have any topics, please send them to me, or vendors or products that you would like to see and we’ll see what we can do.
Jason
Is there a thread on the blog yet to capture that info?
Trace
Yes but there hasn’t been much feedback from it yet though.
Jason
So if you haven’t left any information on the Fall Roundtable blog, get over there and put it down. If you want to listen to a vendor or product, you’d like to see something, put it on there. Good. Get your registration in.
The podcast, I cannot do 2:00 pm almost every time because of our multi-site stuff ramping up. The last podcast we talked after the recording stopped, and it sounded like enough people are interest in doing something at night. That might be a good time to move this to versus trying to squeeze it into everybody’s packed day work schedule. So one of the things I threw out there was how does a 10:00 pm or 10:30 pm Eastern time slot work for everybody? Does that make your life easier because you’re not trying to work it into your day’s schedule or does it make your life worse. One thing that would be nice is it would allow us to include more volunteer type people that have day jobs and can’t use the phone, stuff like that. So right now I’m going to say we are going to move it into a 10:00 or 10:30 time slot. The day I’m very flexible with, so Thursday I can take or leave. Anybody got any thoughts? You hate it.
Sp
Somebody has to start, I don’t like it. But you have a good point about the day job thing.
Tony
That wouldn’t be my first choice, but it is important enough to me that I’ll make it work.
Jason
I’m thinking too, west coast wise, three hours off. Most people can probably stay awake until 11:00. Except maybe some of you older guys, that could be an issue. But I’ve gotten emails from Tony pretty late, so.
Tony
And you’ve also gotten them at 5:00 in the morning, and it’s funny how you don’t ever respond then!
Jason
Yeah, I usually try not to. That’s my time.
What I’m going to do is try to stick a poll into the blog, like the armbridge where everybody could click on their top five options of when they could do this thing. I know night stinks, I don’t necessarily want to do it at night, it impacts family, but hopefully your kids are asleep but it impacts husband/wife time.
Sp
What about weekend?
Jason
I’m going to say weekend is out. I just want to protect everybody’s weekend time. Typically weekends a lot of you are probably doing weekend technical stuff. I guess the thing to do is change it and if nobody shows up, we’d know it was a bad time spot. But I want that in your heads if you’ve got good ideas or strong opinions, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Tony
It’s funny, in the couple of minutes you’ve been talking about it, I didn’t care for it much when you started it but it is growing on me real fast.
Jason
Excellent! My power of persuasion is working.
Alright Taylor, I think you are on deck. Spend a few moments and give us why you are doing this, what’s your ultimate end goal, and we’ll give you feedback.
Taylor Smith
I am Taylor Smith from Louisiana, sorry for the crazy accent. Basically what I was looking at doing is an open-source type of application for, well I guess it came out when I was talking with some guys in the IRC channel the other day saying what would be a good thing to write and some of the guys said one thing they are looking for is a volunteer management application. I said we can look at that. My motivation is two-fold. One, I’m wanting to do this in Ruby on Rails. I don’t have a lot of experience in Ruby on Rails, really none at all. I’m a VB.net web developer so I want to push my boundaries and learn something new, especially with web applications going that direction. And also, in this testing environment I’m doing at night, not during the day, so it is a side project. I want to do it well and help the church as I’m doing it. I’m a music minister and an IT type guy, so I think it would benefit everyone if it was something that would fill the need. So some guys threw up volunteer management. Volunteer management isn’t hard-coated in stone, I’ve thought about it but if there is another need that is more pressing, we could look at that too, but it seems from what I’ve heard, it might be needed out there. And I was thinking kind of a planning center online meshed with base camp type functionality would be a nice feel. Anyway, I talked with Chris Adams, his nickname on IRC is 117, and he sent me some notes that they had taken on that particular web ap idea for volunteer management and they are pretty good, pretty detailed starting ideas for what it should look like, and I was wondering if anybody else out there has any good ideas or what they might be looking for in that type of application.
James Higginbotham
Actually, I’m kinda curious what your feature set might be. The reason I ask is because I’ve been working on a volunteer scheduling tool for a while and it’s build on Rails, it’s been out for a couple years, kind of a private beta, and one of the things I’ve found, if you want your project to take root in open-source community is really to keep it really focused and useful, which means try to spend less time on the plumbing stuff and more time on something very useful for your leaders. So I think coming up with that initial feature list based on what people are looking for, it’s gotta be pretty compelling and if so, you’ll get some pretty good traction pretty quick.
Taylor
Ok. What Chris sent me, what I’ve been looking at, this is the basic, a brief feature set that he listed here and it seems pretty good to me, so I was working on this in my mind and playing out diagrams and that kind of thing. But some things that he wrote out were basically four areas. One, just a volunteer management side, things like storing the contact details, grouping the users based on level such as admin, maybe a project manager, those things. What we are looking at is basically some type of skill set, I was thinking of a combination of free-form tagging, just being able to tag volunteers with whatever you want to tag them with. Also, a certification that is more hard-coded because you might want something for, let’s say for someone working in the nursery, they might need a background check, so that is something that would actually expire at a certain point and you might need to run another one or however. Or you need CPR certification, that would need to be tracked on a volunteer level. Also job management, this is more in the project set up, you would have specific job descriptions that would be used over and over again and then for each project, you would create an instance of that job description, so like for this project we need some carpenters and some electricians and then you’d be able to search for people to fill those job instances based on skills, tags or certifications. Then that allows you to assign different people to projects for a specific length of time. The third area would be communication, being able to send out emails based on job descriptions, projects, groups, specific people, RSS feeds for specific projects, a volunteers-needed list,, or even an RSS feed that matches your skill set to open jobs. Like a “jobs recommended for me” list. Then area four would be reporting, like a volunteer list, history, training history, your basic reporting. I see that Dave put in should I be writing a map if J Higginbotham already has one out there and that is a good question.
James H
Just keep in mind that mine is intended to be commercial although pretty low cost, so it is not open-source, so if you’re looking to do something open-source and you have an extreme motivation to do that, it would be different, but I went into this project, I had it on my heart for 7 years to build a web ap. From the days when I had to try to figure out how to get major domo set up on the Lenux box to be able to have a mailing list before things were a lot easier today. I realized that the church needed a lot of assistance and I wanted to build the equivalent of a Source forge.net [?] and for churches to have tools that you can add or remove based on what your team needed, and it’s easy to get the plumbing started, but to actually get a solution out there that people are interested in instead of just going in there and checking it out and say they can spend a lot of time putting data in but it’s not going to do anything for me, it’s very difficult to get traction, open-source or commercial either one. From my perspective, I would recommend that whatever you do, pick something that solves a pain point that you are dealing with or your other leaders around you or other people in other churches that you know of are dealing with as a severe pain point and just solve that and don’t spend too much time on the infrastructure and the plumbing, just get something up that will solve that problem and then keep going from there. That’ll give you a chance to learn Rails to go through all those steps and then produce something that people are using which will give you the incentive and the energy you need to keep going. So maybe it’s a report, maybe it’s some sort of communication tool or communication point and then just go for it. Keep yourself really focused, take that list and pick one specific thing and do it well and start with that.
Jason
Any way for any of the leading VHMS products to at least get data into your solution so you don’t have to have somebody doing data entry entering all the volunteer contact info into yet another database, so if there is some Ati and do a data dump or whatever.
J H
Not to dominate, I actually have some experience integrating my product in with Fellowship One since data exchange is over the web and a little bit easier to do than Shelby or ACS. My product offers the service so I’ve got to be able to mine through Firewall to get that data, but it worked out really nice. I don’t have that feature exposed into my application publicly yet. It is sorta on an ad-hoc trial basis in the background for customers, but it’s really nice because it saved them from having to type in 3,500 users at the time, so it keeps everything synced up and keeps them from typing all those users in.
Taylor
Definitely the synced info I agree is a must because if it is not synced it is of no value. I’m going to be looking into the ways to do that and what comes up the easier. I would see and agree that Fellowship One would probably be the easiest one to go into and the others may not be as easy. If anything, it would probably be some kind of data dump to be able to do that, but syncing it up and maintaining that sync is probably going to be a hard hurdle to get across, I would think. And it might take some discussion to figure out the easiest way to do that.
JH
And I guess my point was before you do all that other infrastructure stuff, just solve a problem without that integration, just pick one piece, and solve the pain point and do it and start getting some people using it. That’s what I did and I did the Fellowship One integration and it is a hard problem to keep things synced and especially if you do bi-directional synchronization, it is very difficult. But I would put that on your list but I wouldn’t tackle that early on for sure. If you’re really just wanting it as an exercise to learn Rails and to do something to benefit the church, I would say pick something you think a lot of the lay leaders could benefit from and built that out as simple as possible and let them do the data entry in the beginning. Just keep the data entry small, keep it short and simple until you start to get feedback. If you want to chat offline, I’ll put my email address in the chat and we can chat offline so we don’t talk through this whole call.
Taylor
Sounds good. Any other pain points that you guys are coming into in this area? Features of this that would be a huge point for you guys?
Tony
I’ll bring up something that’s probably not at all what you’re looking for but I’ll just throw it out, you were talking about managing the volunteers, have you looked at what the volunteers actually do and one of the questions that has come up here that we’ve been trying to find a good solution for is how do we use volunteers to help actually do data entry or manipulation or whatever within our database, so how do we switch things the other way around to where we make volunteers auxiliary staff members without them having to come into the church? Again, I think that’s probably way outside what you are trying to do but I’ll throw it out there as something to keep in mind.
Taylor
I was definitely envisioning this, this is probably not exactly in response to your statement either Tony, but definitely looking at this as an application that would be available externally. I’m also looking at this as not just IT volunteers but also volunteers across the church. So you might be looking at just service volunteers, carpenters, electricians, nursery volunteers, kind of a full sweep there, although it is being birthed out of an IT discussion but also coming from across the church.
Jason
From what I’ve played with Planning Center Online, I liked how the volunteer scheduling and whatnot of that worked, but of course, I don’t need all of the mp3 and song sheets, but if you could take something like Planning Center Online and rip out all of the, I don’t know if you would rip it out, but to me, the volunteers I interact with, we don’t need to see that stuff, but it could even be just a filter I assume. At least from an end-user perspective, I think a lot of the draw of Planning Center Online is that it looks very easy, large buttons, on the emails that the volunteers get, there’s a huge yes or not button in the email.
Taylor
Yes, he has done a wonderful job about making that application user-friendly. I’m a music minister and I use it with my team. It is wonderful for the worship staff and I kinda wanted that feel, an idea of easy to use but it absolutely met a need in my planning. There are other solutions out there but this just made it so easy to do and to handle, so that was the point I wanted to deal with and do that in another area for the church.
Jason
That may be difficult because how each ministry works with volunteers is probably quite a bit different in some regards. Obviously there are lots of complications on the worship arts side, but I don’t know what that would look like from Children’s Ministry. I assume the base level would be similar but I don’t know as you branch up and out, would it still apply? Those might even be questions that you just have to go to ministry departments and ask for their feedback.
Taylor
I would think a lot of user stories for this would be definitely helpful, seeing how the user is going to interact with the application, the way they work now and interact with their volunteers and then try to express that through this software would be nice. I just wanted to get the idea out there. If anybody wants to contact me with an idea, a must do, or a don’t worry about, I’ll put my email address and contact out there. We’ll just try to keep our discussion going and I’ll work on this in the background and I’ll give an update every now and then about where we are.
Jason
Cool! If you could make something like Sharepoint. I want Sharepoint but I don’t want Sharepoint. How’s that for a target to hit? Make me something that will do everything Sharepoint will do but I don’t have to do it like I have to do it with Sharepoint.
Taylor
I don’t think I’m to the point of Sharepoint yet. But to answer Tony’s question, no, I have a blog but it hasn’t been updated for about three years so I need to get back on the bandwagon there and get a blog back up and going, and I think that would be a good way to keep an update on that.
Jason
But you’re hanging out in the IRC channel so there’s bonus points for that.
Taylor
Yeah, if anybody does need to get in touch with me, I’m usually in the IRC channel.
Jason
Good stuff. Let’s see. Shifting to Chris, you got time to tell us what you’ve been up to with Flash?
Chris
I guess about a year ago, I blogged that we were playing with Flash live streaming and it was kind of infantile for a while but now that the Flash media encoder or Flash live encoder 2.5 is out, we’ve got a solid solution. We are going to launch the live player this weekend, and we’ve got a beta player for our archive and I’ll post a link to it if any of you guys want to jump in there and take a peek but it’s really slick. It runs full screen really well, a lot better than http download so we’re pretty stoked about it. This is a prototype that we built internally. We are excited about it. We basically integrated it in with our regular streaming infrastructure and it’s pretty nice. I don’t know more than that to say, I’ll blog about it in a week or two and put up all the technical stuff on how we did it. We are using the full Flash media server 3 so we’re excited about it.
Sp
So you are streaming internally? You’re hosting the entire stream?
Chris
Yes.
Sp
What kind of Internet connection do you have?
Chris
75 meg over fiber.
Sp
To your building? Cool! I wish I had that. We’re using Flash with Flash media encoder 2.5 as well, but we are not internally, we’re just sending it out to an outsource company to do our Flash.
Chris
Long story short, we launched a multi-site church that was live so we have a live multi-site church that we pump two video streams to so we ended up building a massive almost a wan infrastructure and we ended up more or less getting the 75 meg to the Internet thrown in, so I know that sounds bizarre but they had to build fiber to two locations and justify the cost and amortize it. You’d hate to hear about how much it cost but that’s how we implemented our multi-site church so, we just kinda streamed from it so it is kinda handy.
Jason
But you are not using the Flash for the actual service though?
Chris
Yes, not to the multi-site church but for our Internet congregation.
Jason
Ok.
Sp
Chris is talking about Flash? Where are you located?
Chris
We are in Melbourne, Florida.
Sp
No way! Ocala, Florida! What’s the church?
Chris
Calvary Chapel, Melbourne.
Jason
Road trip!
Chris
Come on down for a visit, anytime, we love having people down, or we can come visit you. I don’t know if anybody saw it on our blog but we are in the, I know we just had some mild Sharepoint bashing a few minutes ago but I gotta tell everybody we are loving it. We’re starting to do some neat stuff, we just posted our entire staff contact list out of Sharepoint direct to the web and what’s really going to be cool is in a week and a half when my guy gets back from vacation, we’ve got it on our beta site but he didn’t get a chance to post it before he went on vacation, but our programmer figured out how to pull everyone’s picture attachments right out of Sharepoint and plug them into our website. I’ve been telling him he needs to get a blog so you guys can all start grabbing some of these code snippets that we’ve been building and playing with. We’ve got some crazy ideas, our whole calendar for the church is, we are making a move right now to manage the entire church calendar in Sharepoint then we basically publish that to the web, so it’s real time, ministries post an event to the calendar internally, it gets approved through the work flow and then it is immediately live on the website so, pretty slick.
Jason
You guys should be hosting the Sharepoint thing.
Chris
We could definitely talk about it. We could show you guys maybe at the Roundtable or something about how we are using Sharepoint. We don’t have it all nailed down but we are using it a lot, got a lot of ministry stuff happening on it. And we are using the free one too.
Jason
Even better! I definitely want to see that. You’re going to Charleston?
Chris
I’m planning on it. While we were having the talk today, I emailed my boss and he has pretty much said we can go, it’ll be fun.
Jason
I guarantee if you presented a topic on how you are using Sharepoint in the church, there would be quite a few of us attending. I would.
Chris
I’m willing.
Jason
I think the trick with Sharepoint is you need somebody on staff who is a developer geek.
Chris
We’ve actually been talking with a company about doing some additional Sharepoint programming that we might contract with, I haven’t got pricing yet. But if that works out, I’m always willing to share. If this works out, I’m more than willing to share information about how we did anything. But I don’t want to tell you the stuff that doesn’t work, there’s always plenty of that.
Jason
That’s good to know too. We had issues with reoccurring schedules in Sharepoint. Reoccurring events, I’m trying to remember what the issue was.
Tony
I think the issue is that it doesn’t have recurrence. I know it doesn’t on tasks, I’m not sure about calendar stuff but I expect that’s the problem.
Chris
It definitely does on calendars because if you look at our website right now, all of our church services are a recurring meeting that was built in Sharepoint. I’ll send you a link. But I’ll tell you from experience, if you do anything beyond a normal recurrence, there are issues. Like they have some funky options in the recurrence area and we’ve seen several major issues with using some of their weird occurrences, but if you use a normal one like something occurs every Wednesday or every Saturday at a certain time or even every other week, it works pretty good. But if you start trying to say first and third of the month. What we tell everybody is if you want to do second and fourth, just do one recurring meeting for the second and do one for the fourth, don’t try to tell it second and fourth because that’s when things get hairy.
Jason
That’s the issue.
Chris
We just tell everybody to create two meetings and that solves the problem. I’ve had the same problems in Outlook before, it just gets kinda weird.
Jason
Right. I’m excited.
Chris
We are stoked. If you take a look at that player, we’ve all just been getting really excited over here digging into all of the Flash stuff. That same player you’re looking at, all we do is pass a different parameter to it and it goes live, and if you click through all the buttons on it, it is pretty neat. It is reading all of our media information out of the database. So if you change that sermon number, it will grab any sermon and it is reading all of it through, this part is cool cause I wrote it and my web developer guy is a really awesome code writer, so whenever I write anything kinda cool, I feel like I can rub elbows with him for a few moments, and then he shows me crazy stuff he wrote and I’m out of the game again, but it has a proxy page which reads all the information from our database, creates XML on the fly and delivers that to Flash, so that’s how all the parameters are passed in that way, so it is pretty cool. We can scale it, it can read our entire archive media already so we are pretty stoked.
Jason
When you do your Sharepoint training, let’s look at that too. We keep talking about, we want to archive all these different media elements, weekend services, mid-week services, junior high, senior high services, and have it available whenever anybody wants. A staff member can do view a service from two years ago on a certain Saturday or whatever.
Chris
Yeah, if you visit our website today, we’ve got stuff that goes back into the 90s. Audio, we don’t have video way back then but we only save our Sunday 10:45 and then our Wednesday night service, but our Fusion group, they have a teaching archive up there, it’s our young adults group. They are doing audio now but they are pushing me to do video archiving as well. Fun stuff, as long as you’ve got the right tools. I put a whole thing out there on my blog about how we stream with a Visio diagram and I’m working on one our whole media capturing conversion process. It’s fun stuff. The coolest thing has been, the series our pastor just did, we saw some amazing numbers, over 2,000 people in a week watching an archived sermon, that was very exciting. Now that’s not every week, we are usually in the 800 to 1,000 a week, but he just happened to do a really cool series.
Jason
Awesome!
I have a question about broadband. Verizon or AT&T, I guess the carrier doesn’t matter, people’s experience with it, doing any software as a service. In particular if you are using the F1 check-in application. Anybody have any experience with such? Obviously it will do website, no big deal. I believe at our Elkart [?] campus, we are going to have two computers for child check-in, a guest services machine that will do registration over the web, credit card transactions, and another computer that will do Bookstore Manager and credit card transactions. So we’ve got basically four computers that need Internet access. The feeder that we’re using may or may not allow us to tap into their Internet pipe. They may or may not allow us to bring in our own Internet pipe. So I’m just trying to come up with Plan B if we can’t get access to a dedicated line. Can I realistically do this with a Verizon DVDO card? Then obviously the web stuff should work fine, the credit card transaction stuff should work fine, child check-in should in theory be ok.
Sp
Jason, the numbers at check-in, what their infrastructure people say at Fellowship Tech are 72K up per machine. At the Dynamic Church Conference, they did a specific presentation on using mobile broadband for check-in and I think the notes for that are on the Experience F1 site, so you might want to check into that. I went to part of that. We went through a similar situation where we went into a school and we weren’t sure if we were gonna be able to use their Internet and at the last minute they gave it to us, six months later they kicked us out but that is another story, but I did get a 5750, I still use it myself. The difficult part is, in whatever area of the school you are, will you get enough bandwidth and signal, because when I was in the school I was only getting one bar and that was problematic. Are you planning on getting a 3g router or just individual cards?
Jason
That’s the next question. Cards a viable solution, if we got a router, how many machines could you realistically..? Say there is a strong signal, and there should be, that’s the middle of town, the main atrium space of the theater, shouldn’t be anything interfering there.
Sp
One thing I’d say before you go out and buy three cards, check it out real time with at least one card to see what kind of signal, because sometimes you think you are going to have incredible signal strength then you get in there and say what’s going on here. I just drove down to Washington yesterday with two or three of our people to our regional users group, and driving down the Washington beltway, which you would think is as much a suburban area as you would want, cell phone signals just go in and out, you never know, so that would be my biggest concern. We were going to use it but we never used it in production, and we still may but our satellite situation is one, we are not trying to compete with Saddleback for having the most locations but it seems like it had been working out that way. So I’m still using it but I haven’t gone the 3g router route yet. But they did a presentation on it so you might want to check the Experience F1 site, their notes are there.
Jason
Check-in presentation, look at that, download presentation, John Ventry, ok. I can give John a call, go right to the source. Cool.
Sp
They have churches that are doing it so it must work. He is the one that suggested it to me, give him a buzz.
Jason
As long as I’ve got John, we’re good to go. He used to be a church IT guy. Cool. That’s the purpose of doing what we do. That was the connection I needed.
Sharepoint information, Flash streaming, Ruby on Rails stuff.
Sp
Another thing to add to that, that concept of networking and things like that, yesterday I took my F1 champion and our check-in coordinator down to McClean Bible for the rug and we saw three little things they were doing that we never would have thought of them on our own and they are such simplistic things. Amazing, take a simple two-hour trip and visit somebody else and get their input, it was incredible. I’ve gone to conferences where I’ve spent $500 and didn’t get as much out of it, so it is neat what groups like this can do in that respect.
Jason
I think that’s the whole cool thing about the roundtable method, it’s not really a presenter driven setting, it’s I’m asking a question and people are coming up with solutions. I’m even using twitter to ask questions and I’ve gotten responses back and I was like – that’s exactly what I’m looking for. So I’ll plug, if you’re not joining into the IRC channel, get involved, there is a great opportunity to ask questions, get feedback on stuff, ask questions about what people are chatting about and you’ll learn different things. Obviously we’ve got this podcast thing, we’ve got the big roundtables, we’ve got small regional roundtables here and there, and if there is not one close to you, start one! We’ve got a roundtable coming up September, it’s on my blog. If you are interested in coming to GCC, we’ll be doing that. We’ve got the CITRT.org website, we’ve got the IT discuss email list, blogs everywhere, the CITRT website it organizing a number of blogs, somebody’s got a twitter aggregator for church IT stuff. Ways to keep us all connected, good stuff. I love it.
Any last minute things, questions, comments, concerns? We just hit the hour mark.
Sp
I’m curious, I read in the IT forum list that I just signed up for, someone was talking about doing their certificate for their server and buying one, did anybody think about doing one of their own, and it’s actually you just export a certificate and give it to a client and everything works fine.
Jason
I know there are issues with that,
Sp
I’ve been doing it for over two years and it has been working great.
Jason
I know people are running their own certs. Do you have to install those on mobile clients don’t you? W
Sp
Yeah, when I set it up, I emailed them the trusted certification or put it on a memory card and when they launch it says do you want to install this and it’s like yeah and then it trusts our local server. Public computer seems to work fine.
Jason
We went the go-daddy route and we used latte so we didn’t have to push anything to anybody. Take a phone, turn it on, rock n roll.
Sp
For all our public facing stuff, we used go-daddy also for SSL.
Jason
Go-daddy stuff is cheap, not free but cheap enough. I can’t remember the price.
Sp
$100.
Jason
Anything else? What state are you in now Justin? In Kentucky? He’s not listening.
Sp
Have you guys seen IE7 Pro, I know, not everybody is an IE fan but I’m still a Microsoft guy. It adds a lot of neat little things to your browser and the other thing I threw up there was Xobni, that’s inbox spelled backwards for Outlook, like a cool analytics engine for your email, it tells you all kinds of useful information, who emails you the most, what hours of the day you get email from people the most, it is kinda cool.
Jason
Be careful, it will suck the life out of your computer, depending on your profile.
Sp
I keep it lean so it is not a big deal.
Jason
I had to uninstall it. What I loved about it is you click on an email from somebody and any prior attachments they sent you is right there. That helps me but it wasn’t enough, the slowness I was experience wasn’t worth it, I just do a search and filter by that person.
Sp
I think others are using Synergy?
Jason
Remote control stuff?
Sp
We are starting to use Synergy a lot where you can have like three computers at your desk and it moves the mouse across your screens, you can copy and paste between machines, anybody using that?
Jason
Yes.
Sp
We’ve got a guy with us here who has it between his Lenux box, Vista XP and Mac mini and he is able to play across all of them.
Jason
Is Andrew still on, he is doing the same thing?
Andrew
Yes, Synergy rocks!
Sp
Do you notice many problems with it?
Andrew
A few from time to time with the copy and paste but it is not terrible.
Sp
This is probably a good thing, you are on a secure site trying to do a log in not on the host machine and you type in the password, it has never taken it. Y’all ever seen that?
Andrew
I haven’t but mine’s pretty simple though.
Sp
I’ve seen that often. Annoying.
Jason
I think the only thing I’m using is another XP box, just to an XP on another Vista. Synergy, great tool. Xobni, great tool. We used to do the Kool Tools thread every episode but nobody ever had a cool tool, which forced me to come up with something, so I chopped it off the list, we need to get it back on the list.
Sp
There’s another one out there, any of you guys ever played with Mindmapping software? It hasn’t worked for me yet but somebody introduced me to it. Like Freemind, that’s the one we’ve been playing with.
Sp
I’ve played with it a little bit.
Sp
It’s not the way my brain works, I’m still a lists man or a links list man, for some reason my brain goes into lists and logical conclusion mode.
Sp
My pastor has Mindjet, I think that’s the same thing you are talking about.
Jason
Mindjet is the company, I use it.
Sp
We are playing with it, I’m having trouble adjusting to it, I just don’t think that way.
Jason
For brainstorming, it is a great tool. You can rapid brainstorm, then after the brainstorming, start linking stuff together and I don’t know if Freemind does, but the Mindmanager is actually fully Outlook aware so you can do stuff in Mindmanger and create an Outlook task or email or calendar right off of Mindmanager, pretty sweet.
Mindjet, they do non-profit pricing too, they don’t list it but if you get in touch with them, they have non-profit pricing. Same way with David Allen products, Getting Things Done stuff, non-profit pricing, again not listed but if you ask. Anytime you are going out to buy something, ask for the non-profit discount. I just bought engineers tool kit for a pretty significant discount.
Sp
Do you like it?
Jason
I’m not using it, I bought it for my network administrator. He asked for it a year ago, the guy that called me, I told him I wasn’t interested because I can’t afford this ridiculous price, he said what can we do for you, he kept coming down until I was sold.
Sp
I looked at that, I’m curious how he is liking it.
Jason
He is on vacation this week, but we’ll try to get him on the next podcast. Somebody else in the IRC channel is big on it.
Derek
We are using Solarwinds also.
Jason
Did you post something on your blog?
Derek
Yes, we are using Orion, we are not currently using any of the other tools, but I’ve got my eye on a couple of things.
Jason
We looked at Orion and again, the price was ugh. We didn’t know anybody using it.
Derek
You need to hit them up at the end of their fiscal year, they will give you like a 50% discount.
Jason
Another good point, find out when, remember that January 31st is Dell’s fiscal year end, so buy your Dell stuff in January to get great pricing. If you are interested in Orion, hit Derek’s blog or the IRC Channel and ask him. It’s good to know somebody using Orion and likes it. It might be fun to do some sort of a screen-sharing sometime.
Derek
I’ll post a link in the talkshoe chat and I can put it in IRC too.
Jason
Good stuff. Watch the blog.
The next scheduled time is July 3rd, which is a bad day, so we will cancel July 3. The next podcast is currently scheduled for July 17, we may change stuff around based on the July 1st week being kinda bad. Just watch my blog. Thanks everybody. The phone and chat room stays open. I invite everybody to go to the church IT roundtable, the IRC channel, if you don’t know how to get to it, hit my blog and Google my blog for mibbit I’ve got a little post about an easy way to attach.
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