Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 31, July 17, 2008
Jason Powell
Good evening and welcome everyone. This is Episode 31, I can’t believe we’ve done 31 if these. This is the new Church IT Podcast with the new and improved time slot of 10:00 pm in the Eastern part of the US. It could be different where you are. What time is it California? We’ll see if Steve from Australia makes it into the podcast, that’ll be in the morning for him, but he has shown up before.
We are a bi-monthly podcast, we meet every first and third Thursday, now at 10:00 pm Eastern over on talkshoe.com discussing all things church IT related, news, tips, best practices, you name it, it is fair game. You can check out transcriptions from today and all the prior podcasts at www.churchitpodcast.com
My name is Jason Powell, I’m the IT Director at Granger Community Church and I’ll be your host this evening. I hope you are all dressed appropriately for tonight’s podcast. All the resources church IT related you can find at www.citrt.org That’s where we are trying to funnel everything through, a blog aggregator, news on our Roundtable events, links to the podcasts, church IT surveys, etc.
According to talkshoe, we’ve got 15 people on the call at this moment, two people just streaming it via audio. Welcome to the new time slot. I hope you are all enjoying this late hour. On the docket for today, we’ve got some Roundtable news to share, provided Trace shows up.
My wife is here since I’m doing this from my house, we could play 10 questions with Mrs. Powell if for some reason you wanted to ask my wife something. That might be fun, could be very scary as well.
We’ve got the Orion demo, a sweet network monitoring tool. Derek Schwab has agreed to give us a demo. We’ll be doing that over on zoho.com. I believe it has been pasted into the talkshoe window.
Roundtable, we are coming up rapidly on the end of the early-bird special. August 8th?
Early-bird pricing is $50 per person. After the 8th, it will go up to $75. It will be awesome. Seacoast Church in South Carolina. A number of us are bringing spouses.
Speaker
My wife has no interest in what we’re doing during the day, but I asked Trace about dinners, and he said we would be able to buy, if they weren’t sponsored, we could buy dinners for wives if they wanted to join us at night. I asked if I needed to register her or could we pay for meals if she did not want to totally ditch me, he said yes we could buy dinners if they want to sit with us. She has no interest in our daytime activities.
Jason Les
Imagine that!
Jason
It may be tough to get them to sit with us during the evening too. They may have to have their own table, wives of the Roundtable table.
The Roundtable is Tuesday, October 7th, that’s a pre-roundtable day. Wednesday October 8th is the first official day where we are going to be doing some Roundtable breakouts throughout the day. Then October 9th is the second day where we’ve got some topic and vendor bizarre [some text edited here…]. The October 10th is an optional day, we are looking at doing some tours of local churches or IT vendors in the area.
Tony, do you want to mention, oh he is not on the call, they are going to be doing some stuff in Atlanta the day prior to all this, sounds like there is going to be a church caravan or something, I believe that is Monday October 6th. Anybody have any info on that?
Jason Lee
Last I heard, Tony was backing it down just to Northpoint Church, that’s where the tour is going to be the day before the Roundtable.
Jason
Ok. That’s the official Fall Roundtable. There are other Roundtables here and there. Jason, are you guys doing another Roundtable before the Fall Roundtable?
Jason Lee
Yes, we are going to do another Regional Roundtable in early August, the folks that attended the central Illinois Roundtable requested a Q&A session with a couple different vendors. We are going to look at some information, management stuff. We are kinda working with Dell, CDW, and Zone to see who they will send for free and maybe pick up a meal. We are just waiting to see who is willing to come, probably mid-August. Obviously anybody is welcome but we’re focusing on the folks here in town trying to draw some folks into the roundtable community who may have or have not had any experience with them in the past.
Jason
Good. We are doing a Roundtable at Granger Community Church on September 7th, the day prior to our Innovate Conference. You can get info on Jason Lee’s blog about his upcoming Roundtable. I’m sure that’ll be up there. I’ve got a link to the GCC Roundtable on my blog. You can’t start registering but the dates have been set for Ministry Tech next year, and we are still in talks with Terrill to see whether or not we are going to do a roundtable after or prior to that.
Stuff is happening. There you go. Any other Roundtable news?
If I looked at the chat window, I could see Tony Dye saying yes, just Northpoint on Tuesday.
Colorado Springs is where Ministry Tech will be in 2009.
Justin
I don’t think we’ve had a podcast since the big announcement.
Jason
How did we miss that? So, Justin Moore is joining the Granger Community Church team! Whew! Starting first week of August, we will have the meanest, leanest, sweetest church IT staff on the planet.
Derek, you ready? Give us your info, who you are, what you do, all that stuff.
Derek
I’m at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, GA, just north of Atlanta. I’ve been here just over two years now, my role is everything infrastructure related. I manage the network, the server, storage, etc. One of my roles is managing the network and I’d love to say I’ve found a cool great tool that does everything, but I’m convinced that such a tool doesn’t exist, but I’ve a suite of tools that will do what we need. The heart of that is Solarwinds Array [?MS?] It basically handles monitoring, keeping track of which nodes are up and which nodes are down, sending alerts, that sort of thing, as well as volume and interface. If a router or that sort of thing goes down, Orion buzzes me with an email so I can fix it. This is one of my favorite tools, so I wanted to do a little demo here.
[Couldn’t capture the demo for transcription, obviously couldn’t see it and couldn’t hear much of what he was saying. Sorry]
Jason
Eventually we will get a better citrt.org site and we’ll have like a for sale area and it’ll be good.
Thanks Derek. I’m more interested in Orion now. I was already interested. It almost looks easy enough that I could set it up.
Derek
If anybody wants to play at some point, I’d be willing to have a one on one conversation and let you take over my screen and all that.
Jason
Now we just need Dean to come through with some awesome Orion pricing for us.
Derek
If you get in touch with them at the end of the quarter or end of the year, they tend to be a little flexible with pricing.
Jason
That’s with any vendor, wait until end of Q4 and there is usually stupid stuff going on. Crazy Equal Logic stuff going on! But I can’t say more, this is being recorded live.
Anything else we need to chat about?
Speaker
We were having the conversation in the chat room the other day about managing user passwords. We basically do it the same way Jason does, we’ve got a list, we assign them and maintain a list, which is convenient but I can’t say I like it from a security perspective, so I’m curious how everyone else handles that.
Jason Lee
Are you talking about credentials for your users?
Speaker
Yes, we basically maintain a list because a lot of time we need to get into the user’s machine as them when they are not present, so they are assigned by the IT department and the users can’t change them. But I would love to make them change their passwords every few months and not maintain a list, but there is a big trade off, so I was curious how other people handle that.
Jason Lee
I would ask the question – why not just let them choose their password, then when you need to administrate their account, reset it, leave the paper trail that you’ve done it and there’s some accountability that way, which I like. We don’t know any of our users passwords, if we need to get into their account, they know we can reset it and that way you don’t have to maintain it. If it expires every 90 days, it manages itself. When we first went through that, we had a password list and we gave out passwords and there was weeping and gnashing of teeth when that decision was made but it has really freed us up a lot and even further it has given us some credibility with the staff to know that there is going to be a paper trail if we have logged in as them, within reason, but it has really worked well for us, no problems in two years.
Speaker [Dave or Mark?]
That’s the same thing we do, we have 90-day change over. They change it, if I need to get into a machine at night, I reset the machine, notify them by phone. Generally I try to tell them in advance, but if not, we just reset it and go to work on it and let them know.
Speaker
We do the same thing, 90 days, we reset them if we have to.
Speaker
That’s what I’ve been leaning toward. The current set up, Excel spreadsheet with 200 passwords.
Speaker
Just be careful when you switch it over because all your passwords will expired instantly when you switch to a 90-day change over, it will keep track of how long they’ve been in there and you’ll have everybody not logging on. So either go through and reset them before to give them 90 days before you reset, but if you go through and change that policy…
Jason Lee
With the magic triangle working, the password reset actually has worked really well for us.
Speaker
Jason, that magic triangle sounds like a cult.
Jason
It might be. 3 weeks of my life got sucked into it so I’m excited about it.
Jason
We still continue to hang on to the password list.
It’s 11:30!
Somebody is asking about Google Aps. A good person to talk to would be Andrew Mitry. Scott Ross has their whole church on Google Aps. New Spring is entirely Google Aps. Northpoint is using Google Aps.
Amanda, on the www.citrt.org there is a link to our IRC channel, if you come in there during the day, you can ask that question and we’ll be able to get you to somebody.
I’ll paste a link in for you to hit. If you right click on that balloon, copy and paste that, it’ll take you to where you can join the IRC Channel. A great place to ask questions. North Carolina! You should come to the South Carolina Roundtable.
Cool! Thanks everybody. What do you think about the 10:00 time slot, just keep it to an hour.
We’ve determined zoho meeting works well for a few people but for whatever reason, not so well.
We’re going to have to get together with some church vendors and convince them to help us pay for Go To Meeting or something.
Speaker
We buy it by the number of normal people that we use, and we limit because we use Go To Meeting for a lot of training and other presentations and we want interaction. Above 25 folks, you lose functionality. You might as well record and broadcast out the session.
Jason
Thanks.
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