Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 32, August 21, 2008
Jason Powell
Hello and welcome everyone. Today is Thursday, August 21, 2008, it is 10:00 pm. Welcome to the Church IT podcast. This is Episode 32. Tonight is an open forum. We’ve chatted a little in the pre-show and we’ve got a few things to discuss. We want to also drop a few of the Church IT resources. Our main resource is www.citrt.org which stands for the Church IT Roundtable website where you’ll find links to all sorts of cool stuff. We’ve got an aggregate blog of a bunch of Church IT guys, we’ve got links to upcoming events that are focused around what we are doing with the Roundtable, so if you are interested in engaging with the Church IT world, www.citrt.org is the place to go. You’ll find the Facebook group, you’ll find a link to the IRC chat, this podcast, the Church IT survey, there’s an IT discuss email list, so if you’re not involved in that, get over to www.citrt.org and sign yourself in there and get involved.
A couple of things to note, we’ve got two IT Roundtables coming up. One is coming up at Granger Community Church September 16th, that’s coming up fast, less than a month away. And our big IT Roundtable is at Seacoast Church October 8-10 in lovely Charleston. It probably is not quite a lovely right now as it will be in October, given tropical storm Faye. Is Trace in? I don’t see him. I know they were having power issues today, they lost power for an hour, came back for five minutes, went out again, he may join us later. Somebody give him a ping, get his attention, see if he has updates on the upcoming Roundtable. Registration is still open. You can find the link at www.citrt.org, it is www.citrt2008.com. Early bird registration is still going, it’s only $50 bucks for several days of food and companionship. You’ll build some unique relationship with other IT people. We’ve got some sweet vendors coming to talk about and demonstrate their products and their software. The schedule is on the site, so Tuesday, October 7th is a pre-roundtable, tours happening at Seacoast, so if you’re flying in Tuesday, make a note of that so you can come to our dinner on Tuesday. Wednesday is Roundtable Day One, break-outs throughout the day, lunch is on site, we’ve got dinner on site, then we’ve got worship at Seacoast. At 8:00, hanging out, a potential rock band competition, maybe wii sports going on. Thursday, 9th, Roundtable Day Two, more chatting, topics, vendor bizarres going on throughout the day, it’s going to be a great time. Friday is an optional day. We’re still working out what that’s going to look like, but it will be a good time too. And if you can stay until weekend services at Seacoast, that would be cool too. Anything else? There are links for air travel, hotel reservations. I haven’t made mine yet, too much going on.
Any other updates? There are activities for significant others, my wife is coming. She is not going to be hanging out with us geeks much of the time because her college roommate is in Charleston, but we’re still trying to figure out how we want to have wives interact, meals, that stuff. Good.
If you can’t make the Fall Roundtable in Charleston and you are in the Midwest, within driving distance of Granger, come to our Roundtable, not big and fancy, a single day event, there is a link on my blog which is www.jasonpowell.net. September 17th.
Sp
If anyone is in the Texas or Dallas area, we are doing a Roundtable on September 19th for folks in Dallas or Austin, so anyone is welcome to attend there. We are putting together a wedsite, www.texasministrytech.com that will have all the information about that coming soon.
Glen Kelly
I’m all the way up here in the northeast, outside Phildelphia, and I’m interested in getting churches involved in creating like a little citrt up this way, the biggest thing is, I’m not sure where to start. I know some topics we’d like to discuss. But I’d like to see what it is you guys do. Do you have a list of what you’ve done in the past, or any suggestions of getting other churches involved, things of that nature?
Jason
Absolutely. There is a wealth of information about prior topics we’ve discussed and even just how we’ve ran roundtables in the past. I know there is stuff on my blog, let me check the citrt site.
Glen
I looked in there and didn’t find a lot. One of the things I do is documentation and putting together all those fun things, so part of me was thinking that if you guys had something to share, I could put it together and maybe a packet for when somebody wants to start citrt in your neighborhood, here’s how to, what to start with, how to market to churches, how to find the right people and go from there.
Sp
From my experience, the best thing you can do is whenever you ask somebody who meets, ask them to invite somebody and just go word of mouth, that seems to double.
Jason
And we are still moving towards this, we want to re-do the citrt site to have a calendar and places where you can go and add your event, a way to publicize that on the front page, like upcoming roundtable events. We are trying to funnel everybody to this one landing place. Right now it is distributed across all these different blogs.
Sp
Didn’t Jason Lee have a good letter on his blog about inviting people to Church IT?
Jason Lee
Yes, I did a template for when we hosted the Central Illinois Roundtable, and I think it is on my blog, I can send it to whoever needs it. It is time-consuming, at least in our area because of the size of the churches in our area, few of them have a full-time IT person, and talking to the Business Administrators or talking to the Executive Pastor or the person over operations is really a great place to make connections, and then we were able to make some good connections with a lot of volunteers in the churches in the area. We are reaching four or five cities within an hour or hour and a half drive from our area. I’ve got a list of probably 100 churches in the area just by going one by one and making connections. Our first roundtable, we had about 12 people from all over the area. We are looking to have our next event probably in October or November. That first initial meeting is time-consuming but it seemed, once you make those connections, that the grass root efforts really spread pretty quick.
Jason
I sent a link into the chat channel.
Glen
Where is the chat?
Jason
Go to talkshoe.com and on the front page, the Church IT podcast is listed on there, click on that, it’ll take you to where you can click on the web browser, that way you can see what’s happening in the chat channel. And for those of you in the chat, go ahead and put your name, job, church, contact, stuff in there, put your twitter name in there, everyone is twittering these days. If you are important. I kid because I love.
As we continue to move toward a centralized site, that’s something that I’d love to get our thinking caps thinking towards. It seems like Google Aps is the best way. Is there anybody IT wise who does not have a gmail account already, so you’re probably already familiar with gmail and document sharing and the calendars, so it seems like a natural progression to move in that direction. Plus a number of you are already looking or already are using Google Aps for your church stuff, so all in due time.
So, great question, how do you start roundtables. Jason Lee’s got that on his site, we should stick that on the main citrt site, templates to send to other churches. I’ve got links to the Roundtable definition and guidelines we’ve used for all the big roundtables. I’ve got a huge list of all the different topics we’ve ever talked about in any of the roundtables. It’s a crazy list, a great brainstorm starter, a way to generate questions. I hope that was helpful.
Glen
Perfect, thanks.
Jason Lee
Do we have any regional contacts that have been involved in the roundtables in his area?
Glen
I’m actually south Jersey. Philadelphia is where our data center is, so Philadelphia, Harrisburg, anywhere in New Jersey, northern Maryland, Delaware, or bottom of New York area, I could feed out of.
Jason
Seems like Jesse Goodwin [?] is somewhere over in that neck of the woods. I don’t see him in the IRC chat either, but that’s another good place to build some relationships and get stuff started. Get involved with that.
Glen
Matt and Cliff told me to get in there, but every time I log in, it pops my voice phones off. I have to figure that out.
Jason
Interesting. I just posted, I don’t post often on my blog anymore, but I think the last post I put out there had a one-click link to get you right into, via the web, a one-click right straight into the IRC channel. So for the people who don’t want to work with clients, head there, and actually and since I’m on a computer, I can just paste that right in here. That link will take you right into the IRC channel, they are probably in there talking right now.
Good, more roundtables. I know every once in a while there are roundtables in DC with David Russell and Andrew Mitre, I think I saw David on here earlier.
I’m not following the chat thread, somebody asked about the zoho wiki page, it is ganked up, I don’t know why. If you go to www.churchitpodcast.com on Firefox, all is well. If you go to it in IE 6 or 7, I’ve tried this on my Vista laptop, my XP desktop sitting here, it won’t even let you load, so if anybody’s got some sweet coding skills and you can figure out why churchitpodcast does not work in IE, I would love to know what the deal is. Help me figure that out, I’ll give you a manly side hug or something like that. Or I’ll give you some bonus points, those are special.
Speaking of blogs, I’ve not read a blog in probably a month, so I’m out of the loop on what’s happening, so if there is something important I need to know about, let me know.
Is anybody in here being affected by tropical storm Faye?
Anything else?
$200 laptops, I checked that out Jason and from what I could read into it, I didn’t see your blog post until just now, but I actually when to the Sony site, this promotion, you need to have the manuals, the power bricks, everything in good working order if you really want that $450 rebate.
Jason Lee
What they were saying is basically you had to have an OS on, it had to boot and stay running for a minute or two on battery and you have to have the power brick with it.
Jason
So you’ve done this already? Done the trade-in, gotten the rebates back?
Jason Lee
We haven’t gotten the rebates yet, we’re sending off the laptops next week. The program ends September 1.
Jason
So what’s the cheapest Sony laptop, you got a $450 rebate, can you really get one for $300 bucks then?
Jason Lee
Yes, we got their BX 760 series, dock, and extended battery, and assuming we get the rebate that we’re supposed to, it’ll be a $300 laptop. We are trading in two IBMs, you one get $300 for those, but you get $450 for any Dell laptops on the list. Certain ones aren’t on the list. The one we are trading in is 4 years old, it still works but it is out of warranty.
Jason
So you purchase them through whoever, then you just get rebate stuff back to offset that.
Jason Lee
Yes, we found the best pricing through New Zones rep [?] and I’ll plug him because he did a pretty good job. Sony support is not the greatest, but once we finally got the tier two who spoke English…
Jason
We were just dorking with a really old Dell laptop today. If I can get $350 for that dude, that’s a cool deal. Not that I want Sony around.
Jason Lee
Yeah, but 3 Sony’s, we can tolerate that.
Jason
I’m thinking about our multi-site use. We’re just looking for some very basic Internet only machines, a really cheap laptop would be sweet. $300 laptops, I’m digging that. And like Jason Lee said, don’t wipe the drive, because all the function keys and part of the keyboard is all part of the system partition and if you blow it away, the buttons on the laptop will no longer function and it is just a nightmare.
Jason Lee
You can blow it away, we got around it. You have to install the drivers in a very specific order and install a couple other application pieces in a specific order, the only thing we were missing was the [?] [? I can’t hear what he is saying] Vista is real easy to put on this particular laptop because all the drivers were with Windows updates.
Jason
We haven’t’ had to do anything with Sony laptops in probably 4 years or so, but we had one, this goes back to my whole beef on standardization, literally, the first week I started at Granger, within a day or two, one of the worship pastors brings me this brand new Sony laptop, said he bought it at BestBuy and wanted me to hook it up for email and everything. I’m like, “Who are you? Why did you buy a Sony laptop at BestBuy? Why are you bringing it to me? And who gave you the money to buy this?” So anyway, it was all nice and good and he’s happy, but then he started running out of room so he went out and bought Partition Magic on his own without talking to anybody, so you can see where this is going. He started re-partitioning his hard drive and it just got, basically he ended up partitioning his drive to nothing but a bunch of nothingness, so he brings it to us, and we say, “Sorry.” We can re-install XP but the volume buttons wouldn’t work and half the keyboard seemed like it was not working. So standardization is huge!
Sp
I hate Sony!
Jason
Perhaps standardization is a topic for another day. I could go on and on and on.
Jason Lee
Standardization is a topic for another day when $300 laptops aren’t an option.
Jason
Standardization if, I’ll let it slide for very particular situations, in very limited cases where it is really stinking cheap to get something and we’re going to set it up so they don’t break it. Basically we would take these laptops and put something like Microsoft steady state on them so nobody can install anything, we wouldn’t put Office on them, nothing but a browser and that’s what you get. We just bought several Dell laptops because they had to have Media Shout for a multi-site. We’ll build these for Media Shout only, not to be used by volunteers for their home, so we stripped every piece of software we could off of these things except for Media Shout, we disabled the wireless cards, because support-wise, these need to be Media Shout only, not doing this, that and the other. Justin was the guy that had to do all that for me and deliver the message to Children’s Ministry. They are going to be a little put off but down the road, they will appreciate the fact that this laptop works well with no issues because people aren’t screwing around with them.
We haven’t done Kool Tools in a while? Anybody want to do a shout out to a tool that you use and love that makes your life easier, better, quicker, faster. I’m really digging Input Director. I take my laptop to work every day, it sits beside my multi-monitor desktop set up but there are some things that are only on my laptop that aren’t running on my desktop, so the other day, I remembered somebody talking about Input Director, so I installed Input Director on laptop desktop, just like Synergy I can move the mouse to the side of the screen and it pops over onto my laptop screen, so the mouse attaches to whatever machines your mouse goes to, beautiful. Windows only. Synergy is a good alternative. I think Ed Buford found it to be flaky. I like Input Director, for what that’s worth.
Sp
[?MS] [? Couldn’t hear, something about managing passwords]
Jason
We are in that same discussion, how to manage passwords. Keypass is on Open Source solution, can somebody slap that in the chat?
Sp
I think it is www.keypass.org, I have that but it is only a single user. I think they have one with multi-levels but some people only have certain level passwords, the next person has a different set, so there are tiered layers of access inside the program.
Jason
I thought I had that. I haven’t played with it in a year. I know it has the ability for multiple people to use it, perhaps not the leveling of permissions. Anybody got any other Keypass info? We’re leaning towards just using Sharepoint and basically limiting access. Password management.
Scott
I’ll just say on the password management side of things, I’m working for a consulting firm these days, recent job switch, and we have dozens of customers and we have our password management is a question that we are asking right now too, so this is one of those things that everybody goes through. At some point, spreadsheets and Outlook notes are not really a good idea.
Jason
We are moving away from spreadsheets. We should just go through and have everybody that has just changed jobs recently give an update. A number of people have hopped around recently.
Sp
I like the new west coast friendly time change.
Sp
We’ve been using Password Space for a long time and it has worked fine, but Keypass may be better.
Jason
David Russell is asking if we are using Google Analytics on the zoho wiki page, I don’t think we are. Is it on there? Yes, hm. Well, then it is on there, somehow. Can you tell me where it is? There are several chunks of code in here. Cool!
Sp
I’ve seen somebody asking about Spiceworks, we started using that groundwork open source, some monitoring, what is everybody else starting to do to monitor work stations and fun stuff like that and servers across their network?
Jason
We’re [TimeStamp00:39:31] using Op Manager, System Center Essentials, HP Manager Plus.
Sp
Do you have the paid version of it?
Jason
We are using Cacti. And we’ve not landed on the one we like out of all of them. We are using ERTG, and probably something else. You kinda have to find what stinks the least and go with it for your environment.
Sp
I had a lot of issues with Spiceworks and Mac stuff. Somebody else put that in. You almost have to tell it it is there, and Spiceworks doesn’t work well with any Lenox stuff either, at least not to my satisfaction. Somebody asked about the WMI, you have to purchase some of that if you really want it, the open source isn’t really that much.
Jason
We are also using Advent Net inside service desk, it does network scanning. I don’t think it goes a good job of it, but we’re hoping that System Center Essentials will be our at least server client side monitoring tool and Procurve [?] Manager Plus will be our switch, once we get everything Procurved [?] that’s the hope, we’ll see.
Spiceworks. MRTG doesn’t pull if you’re looking for system specific data. Nogeos [?]
Sp
Do any of you guys use Snort or Packet [?] [he was breaking up, couldn’t hear what he said].
Sp
We use Snort here within the combined network within the church stuff now.
Sp
Still Secure has a nice little, depending upon what your connection is, Key One, you can get a really nice Snort gooey interface that you can load on any X86 box for free. It is at www.stillsecure.com but that’s like if somebody wants to start looking at network intrusions, that type of stuff, you can get a real nice tool for basically free. They give you up to 3 megs for free, I believe anything past that you have to pay for. It’s called Strategor and it’s pretty decent.
Sp
If you guys are VM ware junkies, I ended up having to make an image, converting VM ware over to zen but it is easy to plug in and use. I had a guy real quick found out who was killing their network bandwidth. Using the voice phone that keeps cutting out, they found out somebody was using [?] all day.
Jason
On the last podcast, we had Derek Schwab talk about Solarwinds network monitoring tool, Orion. It’s not free, far from free but looks really sweet.
Sp
Can citrt can get a mass group licensing fee for that one?
Jason
That would be awesome.
Sp
I put myself out there as a Solarwinds reseller now so that’s what we are putting in in a lot of places. It’s not cheap but man is it slick!
Sp
Way back in my days, we used all Solarwinds tool when the cable modem industry was first being born and the stuff kicked then and it’s only gotten better so I agree.
Sp
There is another system or monitoring tool, not free, but we are testing it out, it does the same thing for switches and routers that Solarwinds does for your servers. Solarwinds is a little weak on switch configuration. And the company is called Dari networks, I had never heard of them until about a month ago. For those who have lots of switches and routers to deal with.
Jason
If you are a reseller, let’s say if five of us are interested in purchasing, we should talk about what kind of a crazy deal can we get, I don’t know what the possibilities are but it would be worth looking in to.
Sp
I have no idea, I’ve only been with the company about 3 months and I’m on the engineering side of things but I will make it a point to have a chat, we’ve got one sales guy that focuses on non-profit, schools, churches, hospitals in our area, but we’ve got clients all over the country, so we are not just California based anymore.
Sp
On the Solarwinds deal, hit them at the end of their year, which is the end of June and they double the discounts at the end of that period compared to what they normally do.
Jason
That’s true with pretty much any vendor, if you want until end of fiscal year. That’s when I hit up Dell, January, I go make them bleed, and I don’t feel bad about it.
Sp
It would be great for somebody to compile a master list of what we know end of quarters to be or the best times to get deals with certain vendors. It really would be good to have that in one master list so we’d know when to do our ordering.
Jason
Good stuff. I’ll throw out there, shameful plug, before you go to Dell to [TimeStamp00:49:39 talk to them about Equal Logic, let me know because I have hook ups. Before you talk to Dell, let me know and I can help you.
Yes, we need a giant vendor list, what vendors have you worked with that are church-friendly? You can’t always use them depending on how big your church is, but that would be good.
I’ve just found out recently that Dean can get you Sonic Wall stuff. It was on his twitter the other day. Most of us know Dean, ACS. There’s a way to get a good deal on Sonic Wall. Competition is a good thing
Sp
Anybody else playing with PF Sense. [?] [I couldn’t hear all of what he said] I challenged Cliff to put that up and they ended up using it in their data center versus the Sonic Wall. It’s open source and does everything Sonic Wall does at zero cost. Take a look at it before you spend money.
Dave Mast
I’ve been very happy with PF Sense. One of our local ISP guys turned me onto it and it has been great to use, you just need a PC with a couple nicks in it with vlan and you can actually set up as many interfaces as you want. Our network doesn’t get the traffic like yours gets but it works for us.
Sp
We are pushing gigabytes through it. We put Viata and PF Sense next to each other, awesome. …pushes everything through an open source for firewall and all.
Jason
David asked early what are you using as your home firewall/router? What do you like, what have you found for your home that sucks the least when it comes to a home firewall router.
Scott
I’ve tried a Buffalo air station and that had a lot of things that I liked, what I used for a long time and went back to was a v-link gamer lounge from a couple years back. It has some kind of a firm ware hardware based QLS chip in it that throttles my outbound traffic all automatically and takes care of all those problems with running this server or that server, that’s what I’m using and I like it.
Jason
People are throwing things in the chat. Somebody explain Tomato to me. Was it you, David Russell?
David
Can you hear me? [?] [breaking in and out]…on my router with Tomato and I think it is tremendous, great firm ware, real simple to set up, love the system, I’m running on it right now.
Jason
I’ve tried different ones, Linksys and D-link, but any router I get, if it lasts a year, I’m lucky, then it’ll [TimeStamp00:57:33] flake out. I’m currently using whatever was on sale at Best Buy. Chris Green for a while was using one of the Proxim at his house. Anybody using anything bigger than a Soho router?
Sp
I know a couple people running low-end Cisco pixes for site to site VPM capabilities, but I’m not doing it myself.
Jason
I’m liking the idea of putting the Sonic Wall at my house and Ed’s house and Justin’s already got one. I think that’s got some benefit for troubleshooting.
Jason Lee
Than you can watch your Tivo at the office.
Sp
Back to that PF Sense, it includes open VPN already right out of the box, I believe it is Stero, that’s decent for the home stuff, I think it includes VPN as well. Any X86 box will run at minimal ram, that’s a way to get around it.
Jason
Is that good Dave?
Dave
That’s what I figured, everybody’s got something different and nobody likes what they’ve got. I’m just at the point where I need a new one, what do I get next?
Mark
Is anybody using Dynamics SL?
Jason
That must be Mark. From your twitters, it sounds like you would like to not be using Dynamics SL
Mark
We are using Dynamics SL, we are trying to find somebody who has experience with SL, it would be too hard to change.
Jason
The people that manage our Great Plains stuff, I don’t know how much Dynamics, they are big Microsoft Dynamics partners, I could send you their contact info.
I can hook you up with somebody internal and get that help for you.
Mark
That would be awesome.
Jason
Austin asked what people are doing with Instant Messaging, how do you set it up, do you set it up for your users, are you managing it? At Granger, we don’t block IM, but we’ve told everybody that live messenger is on your machine, use your GCC email address and set up your own account. We don’t do set up for them. It has worked well, we do lots of internal IM back and stuff and with volunteers outside the church. I’m a big fan to use it as a tool. If it’s costing you time, that’s not cool.
Sp
My new place we are using Yahoo.
Sp
There such a load on your outbound pipe though using the Microsoft IM, that’s where we are leaning because communication servers.
Jason
Like measuring how much bandwidth we’re using. I haven’t looked, I know it is going to be significantly less than Facebook and that sort of stuff. If you want to talk to somebody who is familiar with what that stuff does, I thought I saw TR in here, TR Knight, was telling me about Facebook on the college campus and about how much, not necessarily bandwidth but the number of connections they see with Facebook because I install another plug-in into Facebook and add another application, and you can see people with hundreds of connections when they open up Facebook because of all the applications they’ve added in, so they’ve run into issues on their firewall, not bandwidth, but raw number of connections. Isn’t that crazy. But in a college setting, Facebook is college. So they were looking at how to change things around. More connections. I would have never thought to look at the number of connections. They’ve got a 45-meg pipe, it gets used well but their firewalls were melting down and they couldn’t figure out why until they started looking at the raw number of connections.
We’ve looked at the number of connections on our Sonic Wall and it’s not anything overly crazy but there are a lot of connections for the number of staff we have.
Jason Lee
More and more for organizations our size, even ACS, they are not running an internal IM server, they are using all Windows live messenger, which is nice because you can communicate with anybody in the company that way, but the way we going, we are probably going to role out with the live messenger for everybody and not worry about an internal IM server. Minimal security concerns that there are in my mind, I can justify away with the time that it would spend when the free service is available.
Jason
Right. One of our volunteers works for an accounting firm and they actually run a live communication server and so they’ve got the issue where they connect with outside people easily so they had to buy some ridiculously expensive licensing to be able to use their LCS servers with Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL, what’s cool is no matter where their [TimeStamp01:08:28] laptop users go, they can talk to anybody else’s network, but I all comes back through their servers on site. It was very expensive.
Any other thoughts on IM, some churches block it.
Had a question about the iphone data plan. The big question being when the iphone came out recently, 2.0, was the whole, you need the Enterprise data plan to use Active sync, and as we all know, people not using the Enterprise data plan are currently using Active sync and it is working very well, so I have the question in my mind, was that a ploy by Apple to make people upgrade to a larger data plan or are they just waiting 60 days down the road to flip some switch to force everybody that has gotten used to the loveliness and the greatness of Active sync to upgrade.
Sp
I’d say the latter.
Jason
Flip the switch?
Sp
Yes.
Sp
What kind of speeds are you guys seeing bandwidth wise on there?
Sp
I don’t test my speed often but its not as good as wifi but the 3 g seems to be fast enough to be comfortable, certainly beats Edge out of the water.
Sp
With Sprint, my speed is phenomenal, I don’t want to use that.
Sp
I get 300-400K down on a regular basis the couple of times I’ve checked.
Sp
Sprint blows that out of the water.
Sp
I can stream youtube, it’s fine for usage on the phone, there’s really not much I use that’s terribly bandwidth intensive other than photos or videos. It will stream a youtube video with no problem.
Sp
I don’t think they will change or starting charging. It is an Apple function, the software is built into the Exchange and that’s really not something ATT can block without blocking all, in my opinion. It would have to be Apple to release an upgrade that would block that and one, people would find out about it and word would spread and people wouldn’t upgrade, and two, it is not in Apple’s best interest to do, so ATT would have to force Apple to do that, which would be more difficult. I’m enjoying my $30/month plan, and it works perfectly.
Sp
2.02 seems to have fixed everything except the battery charging, it seems like when I plug it in, my battery goes down, other times it goes up, so if I leave it plugged it, it goes up and down, so I can’t count on it. GPS works again, and I’m doing remote desktop from it now.
Jason
We are at the minute fifteen here. Where does the time go? I’m going to assume neither Apple nor ATT pull the plug on this. I can’t imagine the backlash they would get, but we can never know the mind of Apple.
What else? I think we’ll can the helpdesk talk until next time, that could be a lengthy dialogue.
Sp
We need to have a written up helpdesk thing posted somewhere to link to it. There are some blog entries about helpdesk.
Sp
We need a central place for it because everybody talks about it. David, you should write something that says here’s a link for you.
David
If I get time to write something I will
Jason
What everybody needs to be thinking about is what do we want the citrt site to look like and what functionality and features, some sort of an ability to aggregate out to all these different blog posts just like you said on helpdesk. I know now if you go to citrt.org, if you hit the search engine at the top, it searches through just the blogs that are associated with the feed there. So if you go type helpdesk, I should have several entries on helpdesk stuff.
Sp
It might be nice at the Fall Roundtable, since helpdesk seems to be so popular, if we actually have some people pull up some of their own helpdesk solutions they are using, because most of us have remote access to them, to a web interface at least, and talk about some of the main points. It’s easy to talk about, there are a billion of them out there. I think the interface is the most important part of the helpdesk because you are using it constantly.
Jason
I’d say workflow goes right in there too, because if it looks pretty but functionality is stupid.
Sp
Yes, usability. But it can be demonstrated easier than described.
Jason
Go to the Fall Roundtable site, there’s a place where you can add suggestions. That could even be something we add during one of the evenings. The ability to pull in data would be very helpful. I don’t know if that will be automated, somebody may have to manually go through and find various blog posts.
So helpdesk solutions next time.
The next podcast, we will have the Fellowship Technologies, several guys from their IT team to do what Dean and his IT guys did a year ago, just to talk about the technology that drives Fellowship Technologies, [TimeStamp01:18:43] the behind the scenes look. That will be fun. I recently bumped into their IT Direction on twitter. Twitter is connecting people and it’s pretty sweet.
Sp
I love twitter, I use it when I preach. Taking surveys.
Mark
We all know I love twitter. I’ll type my tweet in the chat.
Sp
Something I saw the other day, same concept, can be used during sermons where you can take Powerpoint and you can have people send text messages to vote on something or to send a comment and it appears live on the screen. Free for 30 users, big plans that are pretty cheap.
Jason
Was in www.polleverywhere.com
Sp
Yes. There are a couple other ones out there too but they are the only ones that tie into Powerpoint right now. You can vote or send a message and it will pop up, I tried it. It’s slick to watch it pop up on the screen.
Jason
Can you screen any of that, like a 5 second delay? I’m thinking some knucklehead in the audience…
Sp
They may screen it for obscenity. You want to make sure to screen it if Dave Mast is in the audience. Those typos.
Jason
It’s amazing what one letter switched will do. Let’s plan next time to do some helpdesk solution dialogue. We’ve got the Fellowship One guys coming, we can listen to them and do some Q&A. If you’ve got any other topics or interesting things to chat about, shoot me an email. If anybody wants to help me troubleshoot this wiki thing, Google Analytics.
When we end the call, the chat window stays open.
Register for the Fall Roundtable, got stuff happening in Texas, here at Granger, get involved. Be thinking about the citrt site.
We will see you next time.
Uploading ....