Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 11, July 5, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, July 5, 2007, this is Episode 11. I’m broadcasting from Auburn, Indiana outside my in-laws’ garage using a neighbor’s graciously-given wireless access, we’ll see how it goes.
We are picking up from last week, we went in a bunch of different directions, this week we’ll do the same thing. If you are in the chat room, but your name, email address, your church and title. I try to take screen shots of this each week. I haven’t done anything with the shots yet, but I take them.
We’ve got 13 people on the phone. Let’s kick it off with Kool Tools. How about the iPhone? Somebody in here has to have the iPhone.
Sp
If it doesn’t run Windows, I’m not touching it. I’ve been reading a lot of negatives about it.
Jason
I’m surprised about the negative stuff. The email piece surprised me the most. One of our prior volunteers who moved to Chicago has it and he says the email stuff works fine, not necessarily with Exchange yet, but he loves the iPhone.
Sp
Transformers made me smile. We saw it last night, like being 7 years ago again.
Jason
Cool!
I’ll give another plug to pda. I looked at it a long time ago before I had an active sync cable for my trio, and knew this thing was coming up today and I was going to be out of town so I downloaded pda net and of course pda net will sync with your Windows mobile and your pc. Well I’ve got the Mac, and making that connection work through [Time Stamp00:05:20] USB was a challenge so I spent about 2 hours last night figuring this out, so finally I was able to get it working on the Windows side, I can get a modem signal through my trio. Pda net
Jeremy
This is my first time on here, I have one cool tool for screen shots called Screen Hunter, it’s free and it/you kinda outline things and save them or copy them to clipboard, it works pretty good.
Jason
Excellent. I’ve used it in the past.
Jeremy
What is anyone’s thought on the built-in Windows one now with Vista?
Jason
I didn’t know there was one?
Jeremy
Yeah, there’s some kind of screenshot utility in there too where you can outline and take a clip of something.
When you go to the start menu and Programs and that pop-up that lists the programs, it’s in there, I can’t remember exactly what it’s called.
Sp
Snipping Tool?
Jeremy
Yes, that’s it. I think Screen Hunter has more functionality.
Jason
I’m still bummed that I haven't seen the Win internal defrag utility inside any Windows product yet. Maybe they’ll still make the server 2008 release. Have you guys played with any global defrag utilities but I did a side-by-side comparison with Disk-keeper and I can’t remember the name of the other one. It would look at your active directory and you could select machines right out of active directory and force them to defrag on a particular schedule.
Does anybody have the Sys-internal’s defrag for the page file as part of your image?
Sp
Yes
Jason
Is that working well?
Sp
Yes I’ve watched these machines boot up and the registry files get a little fragmented but the page file doesn’t seem to fragment too bad. We just set our images up to run, they do a 3 second countdown and run on every boot up, it only adds about 10 seconds to the boot-up.
Jason
We’ve started putting it on [Time Stamp00:09:39] all laptops we get in because typically they have slower hard-drives anyway, but we are thinking about putting them into desktops, the whole nine yards. It takes hardly any time and keeps it clean.
Sp
We’ve been playing with something new, there’s a program called Gallery out there for doing image management and we are in the process of putting it together because we’ve got several hundred gig of photos scattered around and no good way of searching them and this read all the Nikon and high-end camera data right out of the photo and show it in a web page and allows our photography ministry to add/edit data. Called Gallery Too and it’s totally free. I just did a checklist for building it because you gotta do all the stuff to run it on Windows, thp and Apache.
Sp
The other option would be to run on a virtual machine plus virtual appliances server or something.
Sp
If you go to VM ware, they have a virtual appliance for it, but we’re taking an old box, I put 2 terabyte of room in it, I noticed the Lenox virtual machine, on VM ware ESX anyway, they seem to run a little slow, I don’t know why.
It stores the images raw on the disk, but when you are looking at the pages, it is building thumbnail on the fly of all the stuff you’re looking at. It works ok on a VM, but I don’t have several hundred gig of room on my VM to store all this.
Sp
With a virtual server, you can set up additional disks if you need storage space.
Sp
I know it will integrate with Word press. There are some plug-ins out there.
Sp
It does integrate with Japaul [? Don’t know what he said], I’ve test that, but it also runs stand-alone, it’s got its own php my SQL authentication. [Time Stamp00:13:41] Pretty cool.
Jason
Does it integrate with Sharepoint?
Sp
You could integrate it in an I-frame. Make a generic log-in or something.
Jason
We’ve talked about how do you manage all this digital media that is on your file servers or people want to have on your file server. Tony’s got Google Mini, which is sweet but it won’t do anything with digital media. I’d buy the Google Mini if you could put data with your pictures.
Sp
We were gonna use Sharepoint to do our image storage, because you can create custom lists and fields for your uploads, but Sharepoint stores every file into SQL database. We are putting 2 terabytes to this server because we realistically have that much, or at least half and growing.
Jason Lee
Are you guys trying to achieve the same thing Portfolio does just free? Portfolio is expensive but their product is designed for cataloguing digital media, photos, videos, you can tag it, like I want a picture of two people in the upper left-hand corner, however you want to put the tagging on it, it allows you to do that, but it’s pricey. I think we got into it under 1 grand. [static, couldn’t hear for a minute]
We were turned on to that from our communications team, it must be fairly well-known in the communications realm.
Jason
This would be a great thing for you to put on your blog Jason.
I’d be curious what it does that the open source one does not.
Jason Lee
Another option we are looking into that is free that only does music audio file type things, called Ampache, it’s basically an MP3 server that runs on an Apache server. You dump a file in there and it uses Flash to encode on the fly the MP3 and then stream it for you, so you can have a wave, a wma, an [Time Stamp00:18:23] MP3, saved on the server and dynamically it is encoding it into MP3 then streaming it. Bandwidth is small, we streamed it across DSL connection from a workstation at one of our interns house to see how it plays back and it is very, very seamless. So we are looking at that as is it an option to facilitate the streaming of our teaching media on our website, but it will archive, it will pull in artist, don’t know how it works with iTunes, how will the user-interface look? I believe it is Ampache [?]. It does have to run on a lining box.
Sp
Do any of you out there with these pictures coming in from your ministries have any adjustments, standardization? I can have the college group come back from a ministry with a gig and a half and all pictures are full megs because none of them know how to use their cameras or they are taking at the highest level? I’ve seen some of these galleries that you can tell it to configure it at 300 and adjust it as it goes into it, but do you just take whatever comes or do you try to monitor that to keep the size down?
Jason Lee
It might have to do with what you ultimately want to use it for. If it’s a photo that you are gonna want to use for print, you can’t squash it down, so you’re holy grail has to be the highest res you can keep it, so from our perspective that question has to be asked and answered before we put it on the server. We don’t want to dump it down if it’s gonna be a billboard. So what is the end result? You may have two ways of bringing those files in. It’s great to have pictures off somebody’s camera phone but it does nothing for the print.
Sp
I get pictures of the back of a chair and they just dump them all under a file and I see a gig of storage, I’m trying how to keep it at high enough resolution [Time Stamp00:21:40] that I can use it, I have some professional photographers that always give me [?] files, obviously I don’t need those if j-pegs will work, but I’m just trying to work with my ministries. You never know, on our 50th anniversary, someone will want all the pictures for a publication, and if I’ve packed them down, they can’t use them.
Jason Lee
Sounds like you have a ministry opportunity for a volunteer there.
Sp
We’ve got a professional photographer who runs our photography ministry. She is just waiting for me to finish this because it will be nice to have it all in one place.
Sp
Our college groups are sorting all photos are sorting all photos by directory name and I’m getting directory names that I have to go about 3 pages across to get to where they are located. It could be simple, they create a folder, maybe 32 character long description of a folder, dump the pictures, and I gotta get someone from each ministry because someone has to know what the college is doing, what each ministry is doing, someone to oversee all the photos I need to get organized.
Jason Lee
Hey Chris you said you have a volunteer that does that, can you describe what the ministry capacity is or maybe the ramifications of the ministry description for that person so we have an idea of how you are doing it?
Chris
We’ve got a staff person who is in charge of our video production and she’s got a volunteer person, her job is photography, so she pretty much runs that whole ministry, we’ve got about 10-15 photographers who are all volunteers, several of them are professional photographers and they report to her. Right now she has put everything on smug-mug, she gets a little bit [Time Stamp00:24:42] of oversight from someone on staff but from a capacity thing, I’ve never seen an event that the photography team couldn’t cover, they’ll send them everywhere. We are fortunate.
Jason Lee
You said she reports to another staff person, how does that work with IT? How much freedom do you give to that “volunteer leader” how much latitude do you give that person, talking about bringing that Gallery software application online. Will that person be an admin over that and how much rope are you letting them have?
Chris
With her, she works in a partial IT capacity in her career so I’m giving her full realm on that one. Plenty of rope.
Jason Lee
We just launched our photography ministry and haven’t even started thinking about going down some of these roads so it’s great to hear that you’re blazing the trail for us.
Chris
Well think about it now because you don’t want to have to go back and re-load all the data.
Jason
We’ve got a photography ministry, I know they do this kind of stuff, but where it goes, I don’t know. I need to check up on that.
Chris
We started finding out that, this is collaborative between our production gal and myself, she started telling that she was getting these DVDs and she has 100 CDs and DVDs of photos and can’t find anything, and we are also going through this website redesign thing right now, so I’m constantly looking for photos and stuff to use, and it just kinda evolved.
Jason
There are some sweet demo sites off the Gallery site too.
Sp
One thing I was intrigued with when I played with it, if you want to play with it, load the VM up cause it takes no time to set up, just download their little VM image, drop it on a virtual server and you can play with it and it is really easy, we set it up and let everybody play with it, they all loved it, now we’re gonna set a production system up. It is neat. If you’ve got a bunch of photos you want to just tag, you can bulk.
Jason
We’re in a situation, this may change, probably when you run your nightly back-ups, you exclude audio, video, all those from your back-up, so one of things in my head is why don’t we just build a server with just a bunch of disks, make it really cheap and just map everybody’s (music blares into the background) (Laughter). We thought about making a media server, this is where all audio, video, pictures, everything just gets dumped on here, redirects everybody’s iTunes folder that typically goes into their My Documents over to this, create an M drive for all media, and make it redundant disks, not necessarily getting backed-up all the time. Ya know, they’re taking all these pictures of baptisms, is that IT’s responsibility to back up or the media department?
Jason Lee
Let me jump in from the perspective of a Communications Director, I would say it is IT’s responsibility, and I would say at very minimum once-a-month back-up, retained for a while. From a communications perspective if that’s where we are encouraging them to store that stuff, I think it’s wrong of us to say, “Well, it’s there but we’re never gonna back it up, and if it’s lost, sorry.” So I think that’s an unacceptable solution. In the same sense, how do you make a back-up strategy for something that could potentially be multiple terabytes [Time Stamp00:30:22] of data that isn’t mission critical? Or is it?
Sp
I would go differential on that one, make it a separate job, do differential over the course of a month, maybe just do one master back-up at the beginning of each month and then do differentials weekly. Then if you had to restore, you’re only down a week at the most.
Jason Lee
I wouldn’t be opposed to saying here’s the offline media, whether it’s a DVD or tape or whatever and putting that in the custody of the communications department and telling them they are responsible for it because it’s not something that’s in the typical back-up strategy, it is different, but as IT we can’t say we don’t have to worry about backing it up.
Jason
So whose responsibility is it to buy more disk space?
We’ve got 5 terabytes of just video stuff that our guys have done.
Jason Lee
We’re at that point where our drives are starting to get full and it’s starting time get budget time for next year, so we sat down with the Creative Arts team and the Communications team and said this is what the cost is, I have to be able to justify it to the Executive team for an IT budget, that’s where the dollars are coming from, but I need their weigh-in and buy-in so that when I say we need x numbers of dollars for additional drives or an additional san, it’s not just IT saying we need it, it is a legitimate need by a ministry saying they need it in order to do their ministry, it is facilitating a ministry need.
Jason
The whole storage thing is hard to figure out. Do you really need those MP3s, do you really need those pictures, have you sorted through them and picked out what’s best. My wife and I just bought this new, sweet digital camera, she loves it but hates it because now we’ve got thousands of pictures, some of them the same shot, just clipped at a different [Time Stamp00:33:33] second, so now she is trying to go back and figure out which ones are keepers? Which ones don’t matter anymore? It’s a process.
Jason Lee
One thing we’ve recently done partly because of questions that came up during our disaster recovery; we went to our Executive Leadership and said, “Here’s our potential cost for x number of gigabytes or terabytes of hard drive space and is this the best use of ministry dollars?” I think at some point it becomes no longer an IT question, it becomes a ministry question more on the global level. For the departments that are populating that media, you have to have some sort of retention policy created in order to identify how many years we are going to keep photos, then once we get to that level, then we will do something or find the dollars to keep them.
Sp
I’m gonna second that one, from our churches perspective, if it can be construed as IT, it is, the media department doesn’t have their own server or infastructure, no area does, it is all IT, if there is an issue, I’m right there. I go to the senior staff and say here is what we have to do.
Nancy
What about taking some of these materials, whether they are pdf or pictures or whatever and archiving them offline? Do you really need to have access to everything, I’m reluctant to obliterate stuff that might be useful decades down the road?
Jason Lee
Good point, at some point, you’ve got to take your back-up strategy and be relying on your back-up strategy and knowing that that photo from 10 years ago is in our back-up vault somewhere and we could get to it if had to, but it doesn’t need to be accessible 34/7/365 in the present. I think as long as we as IT are able to facilitate that is it there, it may take 5 minutes to go it, I think that is an acceptable solution. I think the catch is, we have to work with [Time Stamp00:37:42] those ministries to determine that acceptable solution. How far back do you have to go? If you want to go back 15 years, this is the price tag. If you only want to go back 10 years, here’s the price tag, and so on. Two months, here’s the price tag. Now how do we give you access to something that’s two years old that we don’t have active media to? I think that’s part of the ministry team utilizing that data has to own that and be willing to fund what they need and be able to deal with the strategy you come up with. Recently we were talking with a vendor that was gonna look at doing back-ups for us, the comment came that we will have data two years old but it will be off in a vault somewhere that will require time to go get it, that needs to be dialogued about up front.
Sp
Getting those pictures tagged and identified is vital or otherwise, you’re never gonna find it in a vault, even if you know the date.
Jason
Great point.
Matt (or Mike?)
One of the approaches we are taking to help alleviate this problem, is when we offline media elements, we are off-lining two copies, one directly to the ministry responsible, for example, we offline everything at nine months, and at nine months, the video production team is going to get DVDs or some other offline media for their content and they become responsible for it if they need it outside of a normal retrieval process.
Jason Lee
And a nine month window works for your team; I’m thinking for the video editing folks, not having that video raw but in its production format is different to edit and your team weighed in on that and found that to be acceptable?
Matt/Mike
We actually archive off the raw files, we went tapeless on all our video production about a year ago so we’ve got straight CD compressed QuickTime movies that they use as their source material [Time Stamp00:40:29] and those have been off-lined as well with the project files. We set up a bizarre structure where they tag and apply meta-data to stuff so for all practical purposes, each project ends up on a separate DVD, then they are able to restore all their raw footage plus the final cut as they need them.
Jason
It changes the game when you get into video storage. We’re still in the x san research phase, it won’t be this year, probably next year we will have the next san in place so that our video guys are editing out of one storage pool, but even then, how long do you hang onto these giant videos files that won’t fit on a DVD?
Jason Lee
I was very intrigued to hear that Matt does a nine-month window, that is encouraging, at least for a starting point to take to the team, then we can go from there. I hadn’t thought about it yet to identify what that window would be for us. But establishing those principles would be the hardest part, then we could go from there.
Matt
I will say for our team that the nine-month window is bizarrely applied, we hadn’t budgeted to increase storage when we set that guideline, the video team decided that’s how much they needed to actually keep when the budget dollars came to more storage now, we said how much do you really need and at what point does this data really have to be accessible?
Jason Lee
And all nine months of that video content is the responsibility of IT to back-up on a regular basis?
Matt
We have a system like Jason’s that is in the media department’s main office, then we have a second one on the other side of the building and those just mirror each other on a nightly back-up, not a true back-up but a functional duplicate. We hope that if the building burns down, it’s large enough that one-half of it wouldn’t be impacted.
Chris
I’m back now, we lost our phone system twice, [Time Stamp00:44:11] I don’t know what happened.
Jason Lee
You better talk to IT about that.
Chris
There’s lightening all around us, tropical swell here today.
Jason Lee
I would be interested to know how many people, their organizations are doing the type of video we’re describing and then how many have a back-up strategy in place right now to do that. That’s one thing we recognized as a gigantic hole, that’s where we are. What solutions are the next steps you guys have taken.
Chris
I’ve just gotten spots of what you guys have been saying but, we’re only keeping two or three months of video active at any given time, everything else, they are archiving to their own tape medium. We also keep asking the question about a fire too. One of the things I previously did, in the non-church world, we bought a rather large media safe, it’s different than a normal safe, media safes are designed to keep the internal temperature of the safe below the damaging the tape medium point which is about 115 degree so that are usually more expensive but they are really thick, heavy, waterproof, the one I had was fireproof and it keeps your tape media safe. That’s something we’ve talked about investing in to put all our video and whatever they use in.
Jason
Another interesting part is that a lot of your video media is probably stored on Macs that may or may not have adequate network connections, that’s one of the reasons we are looking at the x san solution because so much of what our media looks like is being produced on Mac, it just makes sense to look at Apple’s products to see if that is a viable solution.
Jason Lee
Even a solution like that off campus gets to be very expensive very quick, if you are figuring a gig per minute of video, I think that is the compression rate, it becomes exponentially expensive really quick.
Jason
Northpoint [Time Stamp00:48:00] just keeps adding storage to their x san and they are still trying to figure out how to do back-up of their 40-some terabytes of data.
Jason Lee
The dialogue we had with Dean at ACS and their storage solution, can they build a product that even starts to think about this? I’ll toss that to Dean.
Jason
Dave Webber just put in www.daviddomain.com I’m assuming that is some sort of a storage solution.
Storing files…once somebody figures this out, let the rest of us know.
Jason Lee
About the question of making offline copies, Nancy are you doing that right now?
Nancy
I’m just asking the question. I’m an Accountant at heart, so I can remember the pre-digital when you had all your stuff in boxes and you went and found it, I’m just using that mentality.
Jason
For now, when our main file server starts to get full or is full, we send an all-staff email telling everyone to take their pictures and move them to a DVD so we can get some more space back. I’d like a better solution, but all we’ve got at this point.
Chris
Is anyone setting quotas for users or groups in your church?
Sp
I started to on a couple people, our youth pastor. I started by sending warnings, then I did set it. I’m trying to be careful, I don’t want to mess with the ministry, but then I had to check his computer the other day because it was running slow and he’s got 37 gigs of stuff dumped on his C drive, so I’m not sure I’ve accomplished anything at this point.
Sp
I was just curios what everybody was doing about people storing their iTunes on servers and MP3s and everything else.
Jason Lee
We have a clear-cut solution to that one, you can have iTunes, you can have MP3s that are your own which only can live on your C Drive and it is not our responsibility to back them up, if they get lost, that’s [Time Stamp00:53:18] your problem. Now for ministry MP3s, we have a network drive where all that gets saved. If it is not ministry related, you can have but it is not our responsibility, but once it takes up 35 gigs of your 40-gig hard-drive, then we have an issue.
Sp
That’s like what we’re doing too, we have the worship and media iTunes on a network drive, they save them, they are purchased, they are very carefully about following copyright licenses, so I let them handle that.
Sp
Cool, thanks. I just wanted to make user I wasn’t being a jerk because we recently made everyone remove their iTunes from the server.
Jason Lee
One thing I learned a lesson on is don’t redirect your my Documents folder to a network drive because that doesn’t play well with iTunes, you suddenly have multi-gigs of MP3s on your server that you didn’t expect to have there. Learn from that.
Jason
How are people redirecting the iTunes default folder? Are you doing that through a log-in script or going into iTunes and changing that or doing a registry hack?
Jason Lee
We are not using My Docs for documents other than their personal information that is not organization-related. We use their home directory on the network for that, so there is actually 3 spaces for them to save things, a group drive, a home directory, or personal documents go into My Documents, so that doesn’t effect us with iTunes, we can it as is.
Sp
We are redirecting ours individually in iTunes when we are setting it up.
Jason
I’m wondering if there is a registry hack or something. We are getting ready to re-image every machine in the building.
Jason Lee
Can you re-direct? There’s no group policy that’s going to manipulate iTunes, you’re gonna have to do it as a script right?
Jason
Yes, maybe something inside Script Logic you can use?
Jason Lee
No [Time Stamp00:55:50] the only setting in Script Logic are going to be things that are editable by gpo, so it’s gonna have to be a script you are writing to do that.
Chris
It looks like you could write a vbs [?] script to change it. It looks like iTunes is using by default the Win 2K My Music folder, so it looks like if you were to change the default My Music folder, iTunes would follow.
Jason Lee
If you didn’t want to do it from the script and you didn’t want to do it from the domain level, which I’m not gonna recommend, but if you change the default user profile and over-wrote that, I think you could achieve it that way. The settings are gonna be saved in the profile, it’s gonna be user-dependent.
That’s one of the reasons we are looking at this AmPache, it will theoretically let us get away from iTunes and all of its lovely updates it wants to do every two days.
Sp
What about Exchange servers, Exchange mailbox stuff, do you guys make any of your guys go to pft?
Jason
If they get to a certain size we do.
Sp
Then where do the pft’s end up?
Jason
Typically they leave them in their My Documents folder, on the network.
Sp
I read an article from Microsoft a couple weeks ago, there are several reasons why you don’t want them to do that as far as file server performance goes. It’s one of those Catch 22’s, if you stick it on C, it is not going to get backed-up.
Jason
If you do go the pft route, if you’ve got a significant number of laptop users and you are using Windows offline synchronization, it won’t sync a pft either, so our approach is to put a 300 meg limit on Exchange and we’ve got a couple warnings in place, it’s pretty locked down but that’s what we arrived at.
Sp
Are you guys enforcing [Time Stamp01:00:09] with gpo the archiving from Outlook?
Jason Lee
No, we thought about looking into it, but it’s not a hot topic for us right now. Are you using that?
Sp
Yes, I have some issues, it seems to want to archive everything but their Inbox by default. I haven’t found a way to manual set it.
Jason Lee
Is that in the Office adm templates or is that in the native templates that come with 2003.
Sp
I believe it is in the Office. Because we have the same problem where it was like our Exchange server was running out of room so we’re making people archive stuff but then it’s like what do you do with that archive stuff? Do you create a policy? We set it for three months back, archive, do you keep it locally or what?
Sp
I’m also looking at doing an automatic archiving system for the entire email system to, that way you wouldn’t have to worry about it as much and I could go back and trace older emails that way.
Sp
Are you running Exchange Standard or Enterprise?
Sp
Just Standard.
Sp
We increased our with Service Pack 2 on that also instead of going to Enterprise, I just had to make sure I kept them both under the size of our database storage size.
Jason Lee
At some point I have to ask is it our responsibility to train our users to think critically about that data they are saving rather than, I sometimes feel like we are putting the cart before the horse, we were able to achieve the storage limits we have on our mailboxes because we went through and starting training people on how we wanted them to save it, if we don’t want them to use their Inbox as their filing cabinet for the next six months, we went and addressed and trained those individuals, so part of it is training.
Jason
Why not leave Exchange [Time Stamp01:03:50] open? Ed and I argue about this. He wants to put quotas in place, I’m like why shouldn’t we make the servers be able to handle the volume of email until we can put something better in place? Outlook is great, it’s where everybody lives and breathes. The new version of Exchange will have a 2-gig mailbox right out the door, so obviously Microsoft sees that people are using email for data-storage.
Jason
Google storage just upped their size to a couple of gigs. So I look at it from the standpoint, unless you’ve got some better solution that is easy, can be accessed from anywhere around the world, which is why I’m looking at Sharepoint, Outlook, people use it, so we currently have no limits in place on email.
Jason Lee
I totally can understand that but my push-back is where do I have the best resources on staffing for recovery or for getting data back if it is lost and there is much more granularity on a file server than on the Exchange server at the file level, so the way we are staffed, we are much better equipped to facilitate that than we are a behemoth of a mailbox store, and having been in the trenches of a complete loss of our Exchange server and having to recover the entire thing from scratch or trying to recover a back-up that didn’t exist from scratch, this personal experience has pushed me a different. I would say there is much more granularity by saving things at the file level than inside a mailbox store, but that’s just my experience talking, it may not be the best solution.
Jason
That depends on your back-up software too. I give applause to Comvault, we can go in and retrieve a specific email, a specific email attachment, a specific task, as granular as you want it. Then I look at Sharepoint. So let’s suppose that we can figure out a great way for people to use Sharepoint for [Time Stamp01:06:31] all the stuff they are doing with Outlook. What’s Sharepoint – a giant database… You run into the same problem.
Jason Lee
That’s why I’m nice and comfy with our SSLVPN solution. That’s the thing that really startled me and puts the fear in me is the Sharepoint database going away from a group drive on the network is all that is in a database, which is great and bad.
Jason
And probably not many of us are SQL experts, I am the opposite of an expert in Sharepoint, I can start and stop the service and from there, I’m about done.
Sp
I think though, if you look at what Microsoft’s new strategies are across the board, everything they are proposing in their 2008 stuff, they are pushing 64-bit computing, more and more single instant storage, I think the Microsoft model is going to be hard-core Sharepoint and Exchange server computing. Even if you look at Google’s back-end, it is all large-scale databases. Even in the Sharepoint world, they have new tools coming out where you can split large databases so you can continue to grow them. Just for grins one day, I downloaded a tool to do duplicate file checking on our server and I found that 40% of our server was duplicate files!
Jason Lee
That’s not hard to believe.
Sp
That’s the beautiful thing between the Exchange and the Sharepoint world is you get that single instant storage. At one of my previous companies, Microsoft had a file system based single instant storage engine, I fired it up and ran it and space was cut down a ton, I don’t know if you guys have used the Windows deployment service, it has a single instance storage engine in it, that way when you load Exchange, Windows XP, 2003, all those different version, it only single instant stores all [Time Stamp01:09:38] that stuff.
Jason Lee
What we need is to write volunteer ministry descriptions for our volunteers so that we can find a SQL administrator. There are major benefits to SQL admins. There are going to bring more to the table, there may be some learning curve for us. It’s gonna be on my next list.
Sp
Remote Install is what I was talking about. When you load Remote Installer, that drive gets single instant storage.
Jason
I heard that the next version of SQL will have, the next version of SQL will be specifically written to handle these large video files very well and everything I’ve read from Microsoft sounds like Sharepoint is going to be the hub of Microsoft in the next coming years. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out.
Sp
If you think about trends, I just started reading through some of the latest information on like mash ups and everything. That’s where they are trying painstakingly to introduce the corporate IT world to mash ups because it allows you to take all this data, you can report on it and pull it all together. I’m trying to learn it how to program it and it’s not html, that’s for sure.
Jason
So we need SQL volunteers and Sharepoint volunteers.
Jason Lee
I have a question, changing gears, we are a week away from on Office 2007 launch, and we’re doing staff training all next week and launch it at the desktop the following week. How well has anyone had this transition go, or are we the guinea pig?
Sp
Guinea pig! Let us know how [Time Stamp01:13:15] it goes.
Jason
We got some great training, we’re thinking about using Script Logic.
Sp
I’m contracted to work for a government that’s over 50,000 strong and they’ve chosen not to go with it yet.
Jason
We are using it too but we’re just putting it inside the new image.
Jason Lee
Are you using Ghost to switch that image out?
Jason
We are trying to figure out a better way. Somebody mentioned Clonezilla.
Jason Lee
We just used Ghost last week to push out our 35 machines and the charity price made it pretty appealing, basically paid about $15 per machine. The thing we are intrigued about is that it can actually pull your profile locally off for you while it is re-imaging the machine and then put the profile back in place. Haven’t tried that yet but that’s the clain. We looked at Desktop Authority but didn’t see them as robust. So far we’ve had no problem using Ghost.
Sp
We started rolling out Office 2007, but we are doing it departmentally, we did tech, then worship, then college, then youth, then our leadership college, then rolling it out. I’ve also pushed out the update for compatibility cause that’s the first issue you hit, somebody emailing the new document format so they have to have that compatibility, but I’m trying to it do a little bit slower because training’s great but there are a lot of little questions.
Jason
Yeah, everybody we’ve given it to is loving it, and that’s spreading like a small virus, so the upper level management is asking for it.
Jason Lee
Are you utilizing the customization tool and also utilizing the Save As PDF add-on?
Jason
We’re only got it deployed to 10 people and it was just a hand install, but when we put it in the image, we will for sure put the PDF piece inside.
Jason Lee
We’ve got it to where it kicks off the PDF [Time Stamp01:16:29] installer after the Office install is complete, that works well.
Jason
Do you have to go out and get new ADMs?
Jason Lee
Yes! You need to know about that. The ADM template for Office, you have to go in and edit the code because it is wrong. The Outlook ADM template, you have to edit the source code, there are three lines of code inverted, you have to go in and re-code them, otherwise group policy frizzes out on you and the way we found that out is we wanted to push cash mode to our workstations for Office 2007 and when we went to put that template in, it wouldn’t run, did a little digging and that was as of May, it may be fixed now.
Jason
Are you willing to share your training materials?
Jason Lee
I like my steak medium! Ha-ha!
Yes, give me a call.
Sp
Did you guys have Software Assurance on your Office implementation or did you buy all new?
Jason Lee
We have Software Assurance and we did SA for budgeting reasons primarily, there are other benefits but we did it for budgeting to make our software budgeting more even than totally out of whack.
Jason
Now aside from the home use, licensing, what are the other benefits of Software Assurance?
Jason Lee
There is unlimited email and web support and depending on your contract, some phone support, and obviously the home use was big for us, basically for the cost of shipping and handling, that’s what Microsoft charges, your staff and individuals get their own CD and own license key from Microsoft, so that was a big thing. There are probably a few more benefits, but those are the primary ones.
Sp
Jason, do you run Software Assurance?
Jason
We haven’t bought it yet, I’m still trying to figure out if I’m going to do SA or not. I’ve never bought anything [Time Stamp01:20:01] with it yet, at GCC.
The reason why is because I knew when we bought 2003, it had just come out, so it wasn’t gonna do any good to buy it then, to get it now, it will not save you when the next version comes out 5 years from now or whatever.
Jason Lee
But the renewal of SA was cheaper for us than buying the upgrade later. The renewals of SA is cheaper than 2 of the cost of the upgrade without it. And the way Microsoft is changing their licensing, there were some things that if you didn’t have SA, then you couldn’t use that license after that product term was up.
Sp
The other thing they are starting to do if you don’t have SA is you have to re-buy the product completely.
Jason Lee
I think the SA will be cheaper.
Jason
This might be bending the license a bit, but I told our end-users if they wanted to use it at home, to give me the $70-80 bucks and I just got them another license.
Jason Lee
I hope you didn’t have that on record! That’s definitely bending the use because for your open license, it has to be a license governed by your organization so off-loading that to them would go into infringing on the tax exempt status too. I’d caution you on that. It’s no different than buying 15 computers and selling one to a staff member, because they should have to pay tax on that machine, so technically the organization would be in a infringment of the tax exempt status and the charity license.
How much are you going to follow the letter of the law!
Jason
It’s so hard to figure out the letter of the law.
Sp
You need a PhD in Microsoft lingo to understand that.
Jason
And you talk to 3 different Microsoft guys and you’ll get 3 different answers as to what is acceptable.
Jason Lee
I would argue that charity licensing is not eligible for home use. [Time Stamp01:24:18] There are ways you can argue around it. Just buy SA and get them their home copy and we don’t have to worry about it. I budget for it every two years.
Jason
What about Vista? I’m looking at buying new machines. In the past, I’ve bought from Dell with whatever they had on them. Now maybe I should get them naked from Dell, and get charity pricing on Vista and put it on them ourselves. Can I get Vista with Software Assurance?
Sp
Our rep is trying to get our charity licensing through them. They told us that we can now get a D620 or something with Vista on our open license program.
Jason Lee
We just did this and from my perspective I’ll do on strong recommendation, get them without the OS, whether you buy the OS from them or not, have the box shipped with nothing on it. That was the best thing we’ve ever done, we did that last month. Now if you want to buy your e-open licensing from Dell, that’s another story, if you can get them to ship it without anything on it, you are winning big-time because it was so much easier to deploy those machines. Now whether you buy Vista with SA or now, it goes back to the whole concept of SA before you can make that decision. Because we have SA, we have the ability to move to Vista at any point, we had enough e-open licenses for all the 30 machines we bought, so we didn’t have to buy a single operating license from Dell, which you can have them knock about $150 off the bottom price, and would wait and tell them that you are not ordering the OS until the very end. I would encourage you to get it naked.
Sp
We were paying $38 for two years of SA on Office Plus, we’re not that large, there not that large, there might be better discounts, so for 4 years, we’re looking at about $76.
Jason Lee
One nice thing by having SA on that, if you were [Time Stamp01:27:24] coming from Office 2003 to 2007, you got a free bump-up to Office Professional Plus version 2007 from Office Pro, so that’s another nice benefit of SA, a free upgrade.
Sp
I just bought the Enterprise version for a couple people. The children’s ministry uses it heavily.
Jason Lee
The other thing about buying licensing from Dell, I’ve just done the comparison with them, CDW is still beating, almost every single time cheaper than Dell.
Sp
I have a Dell sales rep we work with and he usually gets us a pretty good deal and he said if we do licensing with them, they will cut off even more per unit.
Sp
We are having the same experience. On Microsoft licensing, Dell has beat CDW each time we’ve gone after them.
Jason Lee
There is a lot of flexibility in the quotes they’ll give you, up to $600-700 per unit.
Jason
I gotta check into Software Assurance.
Jason Lee
Is anybody else using the EPP program, Employee Purchase Program?
Sp
We tried setting it up but we haven’t used it yet.
Jason Lee
That facilitate whatever cost you are buying your machines at, your employees can buy those from Dell directly through a channel that isn’t going to infringe on your tax exempt status and doesn’t have to go through your books. They just log in, order the machine and it charges it to them but they can the organizational pricing and it also counts in your quota of machines, so if you buy x number of machines and add on x number of EPP machines, that gives you more buying power the next round.
Sp
One of the things we are running into with Office 2007 is I’d really like to put Enterprise everywhere, but from what I’ve been told is that if you buy Office 2007 with Enterprise, which we are buying with SA, you have downgrade rights normally to the previous version because we don’t want to upgrade everywhere except for One Note [Time Stamp01:31:11] yet, so we’re running 2003 but the problem is supposedly with the Enterprise license, there is no previous version so you don’t have the right to downgrade because there wasn’t a previous version.
Sp
I think that’s correct.
Jason Lee
I never said licensing was easy.
Charity licensing for e-open should facilitate a download of everything from Exchange server to SQL server to Office, so everything you can license through e-open should be downloadable now.
Sp
I’m gonna take a step back, I just got onto e-open and opened my last license that had the Enterprise license on it, it does give me those Office 2003 and 2007 and XP Suite license keys, so I may stand corrected on that.
Jason Lee
You’re right, all the keys are the same for us.
Sp
So we should be able to downgrade.
Jason
You talk to 5 different people, get 5 different options. It can be very frustrating.
Sp
I wish they’d just switch everything to concurrent licensing.
Jason
Speaking of Vista, don’t you have to have a licensing server in place if you’re gonna be rolling out Vista everywhere?
Sp
You gotta put the KMS in, I just did it.
Sp
Is KMS better than Microsoft licensing service?
Sp
No, it’s a real pain, it’s only command line, the whole thing is set up and managed through the command line. I don’t have Powershell loaded on our server.
Sp
If you go back in the last couple of months the www.4sysops.com has had some discussion reviews on different Vista installation, KMS, stuff like that.
Sp
If you follow the instructions, it works, but it’s just another thing you have to deal with.
Jason
Probably a number of us that are dual or triple platform shops, running Vista, we’re getting ready to buy new machines and we’ll make them Vista, they [Time Stamp01:37:28] come in brand new, let’s just make them Vista, we’ll upgrade our old GX 270s and 280s to Vista yet?
Jason Lee
Are you ready to support cross-platform like that?
Jason
I think. Our helpdesk guy is pretty Vista savvy. One approach is that if you get a new machine, it comes with Vista, the old machines maybe by this fall, we’ll give you the option.
Chris
I want to see what other people think, I moved to Vista early, even on my laptop and I gotta tell ya, 1 gig of ram didn’t cut it. I’m running 2 gig now and it’s nice, but I’m just throwing that out, 1 gig doesn’t feel like a gig.
Jason Lee
Are you running Office 2007 on that Chris?
Chris
Yes. 2 gig feels good but 1 gig didn’t.
Sp
What are people’s thoughts on upgrading to Vista and Office 2007 as a whole, it’s not adding anymore functionality, that’s why I’m delaying on it.
Jason
You can get a lot more productivity out of Outlook, you’ll need to train them. A cost breakdown proved that it didn’t take much to make it worth it. something like 10 minutes a month and you’ve paid for 2007.
Jason Lee
If you have SA, you’ve already paid for it.
Sp
One of the features that’s really cool is being able to pull up multiple calendars side by side and color-coded.
Jason
If your people are doing lots of PowerPoint, you’re new version of PP is a lot closer to Keynote. So far everybody loves it. PowerPoint looks so much better. But they are producing sweet diagrams.
Jason Lee
Office 2007 in the XP are totally different, we are not thinking about moving to Vista but we’re moving next week to Office 2007, seemed to be a hug win in productivity. Vista doesn’t come close in productivity yet. Two completely different things.
Sp
On the Vista side, there are a lot of things that you just have to be patient with. [Time Stamp01:42:39] One of our pastors is pretty tech savvy, but I’m thankful he is patient because one of our ministry tools, our pastor has all these Bible programs and stuff, some of them you have to kill user account control and give them full admin rights for some of the stuff to work correctly. You have to think about these things first.
Sp
I ran it for a month and went back to XP
Sp
I’m running Office 2007 at home and it runs slow. XP
Jason
There is a way to speedup Outlook 2007, it’s on Trace Humpke’s blog somewhere, there are some tweaks you can so, I don’t know if they’ve made that into an update yet? The whole Vista thing is harder to sell. What are people using the desktop for? Just clicking start and opening Office, or going to look for a document, they are not actually getting inside it and doing anything with it. Now the integrated search feature, I love that, but you can download Google or Windows desktop search and slap it on XP and it’ll do the same thing. So we’re debating that.
The other thing I love about Vista is the reliability reporting so you can see what was installed or the last thing that happened. I want to get to the point where we’re calling somebody because we know that they’re machine just hung up on Word. From a service standpoint, if we’re pro-active. Instead of them waiting two months to tell us about a problem they’ve been having because they didn’t want to “bother” us! Ugh, so any tool I can get to help me know what’s going on with those machines.
And if I know when somebody installs a piece of software on the machine, why would I not perhaps allow them to be a local administrator without worrying about it, what’s your fear? I think giving them the local admin, I see some benefits to that.
[Fuzzy [Time Stamp01:48:39] connection]
Jason
It’s a training tool. All of our laptops users are local admins, so they can go home and install printers or who knows what. So part of me says it’s unfair to give admin rights to some and not others.
Jason Lee
I’ll dialogue with Trace to see if we can find that on the slow speed.
Jason
Great dialogue today! I’m a fan of the open topic. We’ll do a couple more that are focused.
Jason Lee
I’ll do a post-mortem on the Office 2007 training and launch next time. If I’m still alive!
Jason
We were successful in getting Vista and Office 2007 to run on an older 280 with a gig of ram, but with no arrow [?] stuff on.
Sp
I’ve done it on my laptop and it runs a ton better without all that arrow [?] stuff turned on.
Jason Lee
Of course, that’s like saying you’re gonna drive your car without the air conditioner to get better fuel economy.
Jason
I’m loving VFG technology cards! If you run Media Shout or something that needs lots of video horsepower, lifetime warranty on the card, they look cool, they use the Invidea [?] driver and the cards are reasonably priced. If you’re building a gaming rig, get yourself a card, get cranking.
Also, we’ve been pushing the limit with free VM ware server products, so we’ve got a 64-bit box now that has 16 gig of ram, 2 51T1 processors, and we are running 14 or 15 VM inside and moving right along, you can throw a lot of stuff at it.
Sp
I got one to throw out, I’m going to build and test a Zen [?] box. I read an article recently that open source or even for purchase Zen product now has a V-motion type and [Time Stamp01:56:54] that the latest tests are showing the Zen virtualization software out-performing the VM ware ESX server.
Jason
Wow, that’s a strong statement.
Sp
They’ve gone total 64-bit on the back-end where VM ware stuff is not running true 64-bit. I’m not totally up on all of it, but I thought it was worth a try.
Jason
I wish I understood the layer levels better.
Sp
I was just looking at Bryson Medlock’s blog, he had a thing about building his own homemade Iscuzzy san with Lenox. I don’t know enough about Lenox but I don’t know if I could get anything like that in production.
Jason
We had looked at a couple build your own san stuff too, but we wanted to go with tested, tried, and true, already certified, but now we’re thinking, what do we do with media storage? It if it’s just pictures, it doesn’t need high-fi.
Sp
That media server I’m building for Gallery, it is 8 500 gig drives, raid 5 or raid 6 controllers. When I get it up and running if you want a tour, let me know.
Jason
Yes, I’d love the ability to take, Jeffrey Thompson was trying to figure out a way we could all look at the same screen at the same time or take control of a terminal service. I think that would be beneficial. A window where everybody sees the same thing.
We’ve just gone over the 2 hours mark. Let’s shut this down. This has been great!
Chris, get that Gallery box up and running. And we hope to get good reports from Jason on 2007. Next time, two weeks, put it on your calendar.
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