Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 12, July , 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, July 19, 2007, this is Episode 12. Wow! I can’t believe we’ve done 12 of these already. We are a bi- monthly IT podcast for church IT workers and volunteers and really anybody interested in discussing church IT. We discuss technology tools, tips, news, best practices as they relate to church organization and doing what we can for God’s Kingdom. We meet live every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month, 2:00 EST. Check out www.churchitpodcast.com My name is Jason Powell, I’m the IT Director at Granger Community Church, I’ll be your host.
To get things rolling, if you are in the chat window, if you wouldn’t mind, type in your name and church organization and your position, and if you have a blog, that would be great.
Today is going to have no real agenda, just talking.
I know one of the things you want to get into today is the Ministry Technology Institute, with Nick and Steve, maybe they can give us some info on that.
Nick
This is Nick, I’d be glad to give you some info on that. We were excited last week to announce the brand new company.
Jason
Let’s wait for a few more people to get here while we talk about Kool Tools.
And at some point, Jason Lee wants to talk about their Office 2007.
First, Kool Tools, anybody?
Jason Lee
One Kool Tool I use is Notepad Plus Plus, it does Syntax highlighting for different programming languages. I’ll put the link on. It does cool stuff. It’s free.
Andrew
I came across Active Directory storage just got released and it lets you go through all the raw Active Directory data. I’ll put the link in the chat box.
Jason
Nice, that’s new. How’d you find out?
Andrew
It hit downloadblogs.com
Jason
The BG Info tool, upon login, it’s a small ap that puts text onto the persons wallpaper with great info like log in info, how much space, the IP address, domain, on and on. We are putting that in our new image so that when somebody calls the helpdesk and you want to know what server they came up from and they can look at their desktop and tell you what you need to know. I got that from Tony Dye.
Travis
Travis from New Community, I just found the My San ISCSI product [?], it’s a free product, I haven’t used it yet but it looks promising.
Dave
We’ve tried that here, not much but it’s cool so far.
Travis
Are you running it in production?
Dave
Not yet. I’m trying out different storage options for our video editing, we haven’t landed on anything yet.
Jason
Anything else before we go to Nick and Steve?
Doug
I would love to get some insight from everybody in terms of [Time Stamp00:12:26] offsite hosting, vendors coming in. We’ve got about 20 machines, staff of 20, running one server, voice over IP running through a different box. Our set up is we have 100% volunteer IT team and we had one guy who built the system from the ground up, he is no longer here, he took knowledge with him. So we are in the middle of trying to determine what we need to do to run forward. We run Fellowship technology which is not hosted by us. We have a copy of ACS running, that is the only application. All our email is posted through a different service, no exchange service. The only thing we use the server for is as a domain controller and print server and a file server. Where to go from here. Do we need a server on site, or can we pay to have hosted off site.
Jason
One question, what would you anticipate how many computers you’ll have in three years? Growth? Double staff size.
Doug
We’ll grow some, maybe from 20 to 30.
Jason
I’d probably recommend keeping a domain controller on site, it makes the management of all your machines and permissions and back-ups and software pushes and your future IT support, it makes things easier. You don’t have email on site, that makes things a lot easier.
Sp
We are running about the same here, about 25 clients, we have an Active Directory server on site, we didn’t have it before I got here. We put in a domain controller and it is so much easier to have that on site. WE have a file server and a media server. We run all three servers. The file server and media servers are old, our main resource is in the domain server.
Jason
What about your storage Doug? Where are your people storing to?
Doug
Good question, probably most of the critical data is probably stored on the local machine. There is a central repository, we call it the common drive. I don’t know how [Time Stamp00:18:41] critical that data is anymore.
Jason
What about back-ups?
Doug
I don’t’ think the system has been backed up in a while. Six months ago, we know we gottta get that done right away.
Jason
I’d say you need a server on site. Doesn’t have to be top of the line. Where you are hurting, this happens a lot with heavy volunteer IT, with documentation. Even here at GCC we are not where I want us to be documentation wise, but it’s harder with volunteers who are giving time when they can just to make things work and the amount of time it takes after that to document what was done, whew, it can eat up a lot of time. Put documentation on your radar. When I came to Granger, I found a lot of missing document on stuff like what service is running on what machine and where and how and why this and that was set up, so when I came on staff, documentation and standardization were like my two main first things to do. We need to document and get everything on the same platform. The other question is who is going to do that for you.
Doug
We have volunteers willing to do it, we are trying to prioritize. How do you handle if the server crashes. We had a huge lightening storm a couple weeks ago, knocked out power, battery back-up kicked up for a while but the power was out long enough the back-up didn’t hold, which then shut everything down. It was 2 days before we got it back up. What support models are people using for that?
Jason
Is there an;ybody else on here that’s an all volunteer IT driven church?
Sp
I can speak from past experience, when we first started out as a church, we had some rented office space and didn’t have a network or domain. I was a volunteer, it was hard getting funding and tools. We tried to automate.
Sp
And the routine maintenance was done by volunteers.
Sp
I was a volunteer then they hired [Time Stamp00:23:19] me and it took on a different look after getting someone hired to manage it. Early on it was a mix of different computers, and hardware and software. Try and get two domain controls.
Jason
It doesn’t have to be fancy, just some old PC.
I would recommend Doug, trying to find a local IT consulting firm that will maybe give you a discounted rate to come in and do the heavy lifting as far as doing documentation for you, create a foundation to work from. Get them to come in and baseline, they might could even propose things to improve. At least you’ve got the documentation so your volunteers know what you have and a good foundation to work from. Even here at Granger we hire in consultants periodically for stuff that we don’t have the expertise in, then we can maintain it. That’s the outsourcing model.
Doug
This may be crazy but are there any churches in your area that you are partnered with or who has a large IT that we might even work something out with them?
Jason
There might be. Good idea.
There are consulting firms, like Nick’s. So Nick, you hop in.
Nick
MBS, which stands for Ministry Business Services, supports a lot of church and ministry networks nationwide and one of the benefits we bring is continuity over time, which you don’t often have when you are relying on volunteers and well researched standards is how we approach networking so that we can climb to a higher level of reliability and stability for a lot less money. And we are ministry specific so we know the software and the environment.
Jason
One of our volunteers here does IT consulting. He’d like to get rid of all his non-church clients and do all church stuff. That all requires money. So how important is the IT structure in your church. Is it to where we need to spend some bucks to get it where it needs to be. Sometimes [Time Stamp00:28:25] depends on your Senior management team.
Doug
It’s a tough sell because of resources but one of the blessings of having the server go down for two days is that they realized everybody has to go home for two days.
That kinda got their attention.
Nick
Something else to consider is whether or not you really need a server or can you rely on local drives. Local hard drives tend to crash more often. So if you are using a server that’s built with server specs in mind, that becomes your data warehouse, you’ll have better stability and it won’t cost much.
Jason
And you’ve got a central place to back-up data. Look at Dave’s blog about his data loss mess. I’ve been there in a prior job situation.
Sp
The amount of time you spend trying to back up mission critical stuff will go down if you have a server set up, if your church and staff isn’t growing immensely, you could set it up and let it go.
Jason
And if it’s not a ton of data, you can use something like Mosey Pro to do an online back-up if you have a decent Internet pike, I’d still recommend doing a tape or disk-to-disk back-up local though at least on file-based stuff, you could send that up to Mosey, so if your server puked, you could still get your stuff online.
Nick
I did some consulting for a smaller church a while ago, same situation, one guy doing server maintenance. We took one of the staff in the building who was semi-tech savvy and taught her some basic level troubleshooting. Maybe you could consider that.
Sp
Another though along those lines, if you’ve got a firm that you are able to turn to that’s responsibility for your engineering, design, and support, the good thing about that is, at least that way, you know exactly who to call.
Jason
Another nice thing about using an outside contractor is you [Time Stamp00:32:38] can come with up a monthly reoccurring cost versus lump sum. I recommend setting aside x amount of money per month, obviously have a list of things you and your outside consultant are gonna check, back-up, basic updates. You may have to shop around for a consultant, you should interview. I’ve ran into some bad one.
Doug
This is all very helpful, I appreciate it. Good place to start.
Jason
I think it would be really helpful, is Tony on? We keep talking about this idea of church IT best practices. The joke is we should have a book on it, maybe you’ve got some info on your website Nick, for this exact situation, I get a lot of calls from small churches trying to use the best of the resources… We almost need to create documentation as a starting resource. Like interview questions to ask a vendor coming in, that sort of stuff would be so helpful
Sp
I agree with that, I’ve looked all over for that kind of stuff. I’ve got a question, when is the best time for, how much bandwidth do we need, we are just now getting a T1. Do you guys have a chart in there for how much bandwidth per number of people? What do you do along that line?
Jason
That’s a lot of case by case depending on what your church is doing, but we just watch graphs and if we see lots of graph going up to the right then flat-lining, we look at where people are going, we are just using 3 T1s here but we are to the case where we will cap our 3 meg pipe no problem when we have conferences and stuff.
Sp
We are in a rural area and our DSL lines come in the 384 variety, we have two of those and they are pegged all the time. To download the Talkshoe I had to start 30 minutes early than I needed it because it’s slow. Our cable company here is pretty pathetic. There’s really nothing here. [Time Stamp00:37:44] I think we are gonna make the T1 plunge. The company we are looking at, Citynet [?], they’ve got a two-hour response time, but trying to win my case with the upper team on the cost…
Has anyone started using with cable or phone companies where they are running Ethernet direct?
Nick
We have fiber with Verizon and I think we pay $60 a month, we get 15 megs download, 3 or 7 megs up and 5 static IP. It is nice.
Sp
We’re looking at running cable, there is no cable ran to us yet. No cable or fiber, so to drill it under the 6 lane road to our property was about 5 grand. Now if I sign a 3-year agreement, they will write that down. Right now our only option is through the phone lines. I’m sitting with two DSL lines with about 100 users, looks like fiber direct might be our solution.
Nick
There are a couple of solutions we’ve looked for for some of our clients in rural areas, one is to talk with your local power company because they communicate over their power line, and see if they might be willing to share some bandwidth with you. You certainly have electrical power, that might be a possibility. Or see if there is somebody who might have a fast cable who lives not too far away and then put an omni-directional antenna pointing out your direction if you can get a line of sight.
Sp
We are just now building a new facility. We are laying lines and conduit. What are some concerns I need to have? What about phone conduit?
Sp
We just finished our addition and we pulled it the wrong direction, the phone company and power company both laid it in but as they value-engineered the project down to save money, they took out the conduit we had running out under the parking lot. If you are laying concrete, [Time Stamp00:42:44] lay an extra piece of conduit at least a 2 or 4 inch empty for expansion.
Sp
You want to go in each direction and make sure your bends are gentle. And however much conduit you think you might require, at least double it!
Sp
The Senior network engineer from Verizon goes to church here, so he’s been giving me some pointers.
Nick
Go to www.mbsinc.com this is not a commercial, we’ve got about 100 articles we’ve written and there’s one up there called Strategies for new building or something like that to give you some pointers and help save money down the road.
Jason
Does that help Doug?
Doug
Yes, great!
Jason
Check out Nick’s site. Let’s switch to Nick and Steve.
Steve
As I listen to this talkshoe, I’m humbled by the fact that as we announce our institution to help train IT people to serve in churches, I don’t think we have any intent that we are going to come out with some of the expertise of some of the people on this talkshoe. What we are trying to do, we have 50,000 readers that read the magazine, we reach a lot of people and a lot of volunteers, we’ve dealt with a lot of church with IT Directors and some with volunteers, so we felt there was a need for some sort of certification program where we can say this person has a good understanding of different software packages, web resources, networking, legal issues. There is no end to this. We are trying to provide some sort of structure, equipping and training men and women who do want to serve churches particularly a new trend that we are seeing is even church with 300 to 1,000 members are looking to [Time Stamp00:47:22] staff an IT person. So how are we going to do that? Basically, a lot of this stuff is already out there, we don’t have to create a ton of curriculum, we are creating some, there is all kinds of demos of programs, most church software companies have something already set up. So we have students look at the demo, take a test, and check that off, and from there go to something like this talkshoe and then following that, there would be an essay question, then they could check that off as a unit. 24 units would be the certification program. We’re developing the curriculum as we go, we hope to start launching something by this fall, at least having 36 units, 12 required and 12 electives. We hope to have all sorts of areas, we want to be inventive give people different directions. The one thing we believe is that this position is not nearly as established in churches as other directors. It’s a catch-all for people who want to get started. Primetime America did not mention the website, you can’t find us on Google, we at least put a big banner directing them to us. We have 32 people who have said they want to enroll. We asked them basic contact info and we asked if they are presently a church staff member, it’s running about one-third are church staff already, and two-thirds are lay people.
Nick
One of the things that excites us so much is in addition to helping folks who are already serving churches, it’s gonna help people who want to serve churches. And one of the things we want to do is provide a placement program and continuing education program to keep their certification current.
Steve
There are several reasons we are doing some things we are doing, we are going to have the conference call talkshoe on every unit no matter what the subject because we want to have these men and women develop these relationships [Time Stamp00:51:52] like what Jason started here, I think it is awesome, so you can get live questions asked and answered, and also you get to know people even though you don’t really meet them face to face. Secondly, we’ve got to teach them that this whole technology is a wave, we want to get them on the surfboard, paddling with the direction of the wave, how to learn, how to look ahead, how to take advantage of all the training opportunities out there. One of the things I learned many years ago, Vicki with Shepherd Staff said one of the most discouraging things is to run across a church that says we switched from you to another church management software because we wanted to now start doing broadcast emails and what they didn’t realize the product they had would have accomplished that purpose, they just weren’t trained to use it. So we want to help them understand what’s available. How does this sound to you guys? Are we hitting the target?
Sp
I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been looking for some validation on what I do here and that looks like some thing great I can take to the pastor and validate what we’re doing. I’ve always wanted to learn more specific about what churches are doing.
Nick/Steve
The church computing environment is different than other industries. I’ve seen some crazy things.
As we get started, we know we are just going to have to get the basics up there, but we have already been talking about developing a class unit of how to get IT people to make their point to ministry people. This is a very unsophisticated survey, I don’t claim this to be good data, but most churches have not seen a single addition as a result of a conversion experience. One of the things we did a couple years ago was grab a couple thousand names of readers of Christian [?] magazine and we did a separate private survey, [Time Stamp00:57:22] we made it anonymous, we wanted to know honestly had they seen a single addition to their church as a result of conversion. The percent that came back was 97%. I believe that churches that are seeking to use technology are the churches that are reaching people.
Nick
Steve and I are definitely passionate about these topics. I’ve been seeking how to help IT people communicate better with their leadership. We want to help.
Steve
And seeing as how you guys are already in the field, Nick is in the field more than I am, he works with churches directly, I work with the solution providers. We both understand that other areas but we come with our own expertise. We had both been getting the same vision. We are excited about this partnership and where this is going to go.
Jason
I just threw a link into the chat window for the ITL certification stuff, which might make a good springboard for Best Practices. Benjamin noted that it only tells you the what and not the how, so that’s a great place for us to pick up the slack.
Sp
A lot of the arguments I hear against it the pie-in-the-sky, a lot of standardization, speaking the same language. I think you’ve got the right idea. It brings the pie-in-the-sky to reality and practice not just theory.
Jason
I’d suggest too, Nick, just the whole idea of communicating well to other people, almost a communications workshop. A lot of times, IT people have very geeky, nerdy, and don’t have great social skills. Calling it like it is.
Sp
We talked about this last week, that’s one of the concerns about bridging the gap between IT and the other people in ministry. That’s one of the things we want to approach. There is something to that. We are going to require units on how [Time Stamp01:03:16] to evaluate church management software and each student will have looked at at least 6 packages. They need to have the ability to make their case.
Sp
I think making a case, how to present, I think that is super! I get the name “Checkbook” around here because IT and media are so expensive, high budget. There needs to be an understanding of how important IT is and the IT person needs to see that here are many other things important too.
Jason
Part of that is the mission/vision of your church, you can’t put your head in the sand, you’ve got to know what’s going on with our vision, our target, stuff like that.
Nick/Steve
For years I’ve taught a session on just your website, just your Internet presence. One of the things I encourage people to do is to take out your Constitution or whatever your church calls it, look at your mission statement, most mission statements have about 5 or 6 major points, there are always normally the same, fellowship, discipleship, those things are actually accomplished using IT, technical tools, the web Internet, so it is not about wires and plugs, there really is something to taking that and saying every area of the mission statement of the church has areas that IT can help accomplish.
Jason
We have this ripple effect, there in nothing in the church that don’t effect. IT makes a change, that’s a ripple. Something happens in IT, good or bad, it goes out and impacts Children’s Ministry, everything. Sometimes we sit in out little IT hole but we have to think outside, the impact that IT makes on the church, staff, volunteers, visitors, neighbors. That’s a large burden, humbling. So how are we making the best use of our resources? This podcast is part of that.
Nick or Steve
I think this podcast is super!
It is interesting in the industry that the person who is over IT is now part of their leadership team or even part of their Board of Directors. I don’t know if there would be a quick way for us to do a poll on talkshoe on how many people actually sit in the church’s leadership meeting where they are talking about the direction that will be touched by technology.
I saw a yes and no.
Sp
It really is both for me, sometimes I am, sometimes we go in separate groups. Sometimes I get called into Board of Directors meeting.
Sp
I moved across town last year and changed churches, I was attending Church of the Resurrection, now I’m attending Lee Summit [?] Community Church and I love the way they are doing stuff. My wife and I are starting [Time Stamp01:10:02] a single’s ministry, so I’m meeting with the Communications Director who also oversees the web, I thought that was awesome, they said that was the next step. I think that is another direct connection between ministry and technology, it’s good to see churches doing that.
Steve
Well Nick there’s your survey.
Nick
4 yes and 4 no and one who is both. That’s better than most groups, maybe that’s why you are part of this group. By and large, IT is rarely involved in leadership.
Mark
I’m having to step in, at the last Roundtable after talking to people over lunch, I just realized I’d been sitting in my little room doing my job and not presenting my case to my Administrative Pastor, so since April I’ve been presenting things so that he has a better idea, now I’m having some input with our directional team by informing him of what we can do and what we can’t and the reasons, and they are coming to me more. That’s something I learned at the first one I went to.
Nick or Steve
And you have to learn how to communicate with them. Don’t talk geek. That’s a key.
Jason Lee
My soapbox, the idea that we have to keep in perspective that technology is not the ministry, it is only facilitating, we have to understand the peers we work with that are in other ministry roles and understand their needs and be able to enable them. I think the approach has to be not pushing our agenda on leadership but help our leadership understand the benefits of the tools that we are proposing. Look at where the leadership is going and how can I equip that.
Nick/Steve
You share our passion. That’s what Ministry Tech is all about, we want to help people who are in the field working with technology to be able to better assist the leadership roles.
Thanks Jason for letting us share. www.ministry-tech.com [Time Stamp01:15:47]
We are thinking about 25 student per quarter at first. And we would like your input. Look at our FQA on the site, we’d love to hear from you.
Jason
Thanks guys! We’ll be watching how it unfolds and how we can help.
Hey, Jason Lee, you want to talk Office 2007?
Jason Lee
Sure. We are on the back side of it now, we successfully launched. We had a week of training for our staff, every staff member went through an hour of training, introduction to Office 2007, and that was taught and basically our part-time staff member Linda who is our software trainer wrote the curriculum. We could probably get her on the phone if there are questions related to our class. 98% of our staff went through it. Then we did the launch. Haven’t really had many comments or complaints since then. How we did the training session, we harnessed VM ware for that, we built a VM for the training and copied it to non-network attached work stations and then just create a snapshot so that at the end of every class we could have fresh image. That worked well for us. We did a log on script that created an installer for the desktop search application and then the log off script pushed out our customized version of 2007 and then later on through log on scripts we pushed out a new normal template because we didn’t like the default set and we also pushed out the pdf plug-in so the users could save to pdf. That’s how we did it, were game for questions.
Sp
I would like to know if that training material is up in a blog somewhere or something?
Jason Lee
Don’t go there! No I don’t have a blog yet! Gee!
Yes we will make the training material available. Maybe the other Jason might post in on his blog. We will make it available. It isn’t rocket science. Some [Time Stamp01:21:24] of it is basic.
Sp
We would be interested in seeing what you guys wrote up. I think most of ours would be one-on-one. We don’t have a large staff, I think we would role it out slowly, start with our secretary and our business administrator. I already have it on my machine, testing it out.
Jason
I’ll put that on my blog here in a few minutes.
Jason Lee
The training session was one hour, we could have used an hour and half, we pushed through it quick and could have covered more if we had more time. We had a lab of only 12 per class, we wanted a small environment, we had 7 or 8 offerings of it, be did that because we wanted the ability to ask questions. We had all our IT staff in the room those days. The biggest thing we hit early on was the flow of how we did the orientation was Microsoft Outlook, Word, then Excel. Jeremie talk, a little bit about the training.
Jeremie
We started off with the programs people use the most around here, Outlook being the most prominent. It was our goal to show them what had changed. The biggest change is the look. With Outlook, there was just some added functionality with the To Do bar, so it was more when we got into Word that we saw some ohhhs and ahhhs. One of the big things we covered was the ribbon [?] and how things were divided up since they had gotten rid of the traditional menus. Handling things different, the concepts menus and different options, we also covered the compatibility mode and the difference between Office 2003 and 2007 and the issue of dealing with people off campus who didn’t have the upgrade yet, so we covered that. A lot of basics other than that, program usage, finding hidden symbols, format painting, that’s how we broke it down.
Nick
Have you gotten any feedback from your team regarding PowerPoint?
Are folks liking it? Are they able to do what they want to do?
Jason
We’ve [Time Stamp01:26:19] got a number of users using it here at Granger and they love the new version of PowerPoint. I’ve played with it some too and some of the cool stuff, it’s not of Keynote quality yet, but you get some sweet looking, nice, much improvement.
Jason Lee
I have Linda on the line now, she did the training so if you have any questions for her. One of the reasons we did everybody together as nasty as it may sound as one gigantic group, we didn’t want to have the incompatibility internally with Office 2003 and 2007, we decided it was easier to make the one giant jump. So what we did for several months, we had it in our department, from that experience, we decided to make the jump for everybody.
Any specific training questions for Linda?
Sp
What were the big compatibility issues? Big jumps for people to make? What were some of your people’s questions?
Linda
They needed to know where stuff was. We just needed to show them the differences in the interface, where everything was, I told them some special things to make it more like what they were used to with customizing the quick access tool bar and whatever.
Jason Lee
Most of our users are comfortable with the Office Suite, but when you got to the new interface, a lot of them went, “where is this and where is that?” That was the big question.
Linda
Just where was everything. They were excited about some of the new features. We do a lot of the graphic stuff so some of them started playing with all the neat stuff you can do with pictures and the live preview everybody thought was pretty cool. The live preview in Word, where you have the galleries and you can point without even selecting and see the way it’s going to look before you even click. People thought [Time Stamp01:31:04] that was cool.
Jason
What’s the oldest hardware that you’re running Office on?
Jim (our hardware guy)
I’d say a gig with 384 RAM. That’s about the smallest I run it on. That doesn’t run efficiently but we are just using it for some presentation screens. I’d say typically I wouldn’t want to run it on anything less than a 1.3 but definitely with more RAM. I made sure the training machines had at least one gig of RAM. I think it’s more RAM issue than processor issue.
Jason Lee
We noticed in the VM for our training machines, we first allocated only 512 of the system RAM to the VM and it was pretty klunky, so we bumped that up to 7 and that was better. Most of our machines in the building are at the at least one gig processor standard. Some machines take a little longer to open, PowerPoint takes a little longer because it has a lot more to it.
Jason
A hidden thing about Office 2007 that I think is cool is when you save files and the file size is way smaller than the old Office version.
Jason Lee
Yes, we’ve noticed that. One little gotcha that we noticed on one of our machines we had customized it so much that the convert utility that’s built in is supposed to get rid of the old file and create the new, it was on that particular machine, keeping both files, we’re not sure how it did that.
Linda
I think I have come up with why that is happening. I think it was because I was testing it, I was using the same file, I opened it in compatibility mode, I’d save it and go back and forth, and I think when you do a save as, the old version, and then go to convert it, I think it gets confused.
Jason Lee
We have not yet as an organization decided when we’re gonna convert all our doc and Excel files, etc to the new format, there is the utility out there to do that [Time Stamp01:34:24] to your file server, at some point we probably will. Because there are several gotchas, if you create a template and make it a locked template so only certain fields are available to the user in 2003, if you just open that in 2007, good luck trying to get it converted, you can’t unlock it. So we haven’t pushed everybody’s documents over yet because of a few hit and miss things like that.
Thanks Linda!
Linda
You’re welcome, have a great day.
Jason Lee
About the push out of the application, the major difference, it used to be an mft transform file, it now uses an mfp, so group policy doesn’t utilize that file. At one point we had bundled the desktop search and the pdf maker all as part of the install, works great if you are not installing on a machine that’s being upgraded.
One nice thing we are hopeful for is the complete or more integration into Sharepoint and we have not released Sharepoint yet to our users and decided to wait until after 2007 was out because it integrates so much better, so I think that’s gonna be a benefit for us in the long run.
Jason
Do you want to talk about software assurance and the Mac thing you found.
Jason Lee
For our employees, the software assurance provisions out the home use license. The one little interesting thing we found during our training, we said to our staff, hey this is a benefit for you, use it, some have forgotten, others have used it. A couple Mac users came back and said one of the options to choose in there is Office for Mac. They asked is they could download it. We contacted Microsoft, they said yes, the home-use license provisions either version, so all our Mac users are able to get Mac Office 2004 with the caveat that there is no plug-in or download available to make it compatible with 2007 yet, [Time Stamp01:39:08] so we’ve had to explain to those users. We allow people to use their home-use program at their own risk.
Jason
You went with Pro Plus?
Jason Lee
Yes, we went with Pro Plus because that’s what our 2003 license was upgraded to with software assurance, the only thing I think we are going to miss is not having One Note but the interesting thing is when you do the E-open licensing you have the key that works on Enterprise and Enterprise is downloadable on E-open site, but we stuck with what we have licensed.
Jason
Does the phone licensing agreement and Office 2007 still stipulate that you can use it at home but for work-related purposes only?
Jason Lee
Uh, I guess, yes and no. What the home-use program is written for and how we understand it is it’s to facilitate your staff to do things at home but we’ve kinda taken the approach that this equips the staff person so that in a pinch they could do it at home, so that’s within the home-use parameters. I think it’s just a benefit they get of being an employee.
Jason
That’s the way we’ve handled it too. They sign a piece of paper that says what Microsoft states, and we suggest it needs to be mainly for church use, but if you need to write up a recipe on it, I don’t Microsoft will get all uptight.
Sp
How does that work when someone goes off staff?
Jason Lee
According to Microsoft, technically that license is void. And that’s what our agreement is with our staff. For the terms of your employment, the license is valid. Obviously we are not policing that. The license they issue is to the employee. From our perspective that’s on their conscience, not ours. If you decide to let Software Assurance lapse, technically supposed to uninstall it.
Sp
How much does Software Assurance run on Pro Plus? I’d like to get it through Dell anyway.
Jason
Usually SA is around [Time Stamp01:44:34] 30-40% of the total.
Jason Lee
It makes the cost of the licensing standardized, so I don’t know how much it costs because we are still using our SA from last year that we renewed in October, so I’m not sure. I think when we ran the numbers, over the 2 year span, it was going to be cheaper for us than waiting.
Sp
I’m looking at our Dell quote, it was $64.95 each, for a small quantity.
Jason Lee
For Pro Plus, I’m looking at the full license is $72 and with SA $115, that’s if you’re not upgrading, the upgrade price is less. So the difference of including SA is roughly$30-40.
Jason
I just got a quote from Dell for the Enterprise version with SA under $117, so you can apply pressure.
Jason Lee
Yeah, these are just list prices. But once you are in the SA program, the renewal is small. I don’t think I can speak to other situations, because the cost of get into the SA program is going to be more than where we are now. There will continue to be more benefits for those in the SA program.
Sp
Talk to your Dell rep about operating systems, I do the office ones but I’ve been kinda flaky on the OS, I have a bunch of licenses on SA for XP for machines I’ve upgraded but I’ve been letting the OEMs come through and buying XP and not getting, you’ve got 90 days to do it. You can even add SA in the OEM.
Jason Lee
That 90 day period is even more gracious. We pushed it some last fall when we did our SA upgrade and we picked up about 15 licenses that were almost 6 months out, so they are a little more flexible. That’s with CDW, just tell Dell that CDW did it. I’d say give it a whirl.
Jim says when you’re getting it from Dell, you’re almost better off not to get the free install, we got the base machine and put the OS on ourselves [Time Stamp01:49:59] and just used our E-open licensing, saved a lot of hassle from the junk that comes from them.
Sp
If you get SA on OEM, you can upgrade that machine but when you get rid of it, you don’t get to take that license?
Jason Le
No because if you’re doing it through E-open you actually get an E-open license with SA on it. You loose the OEM but you gain an open license.
Jason
Now if you don’t have SA currently on XP, you cannot buy open charity Microsoft Vista you can only buy upgrades. No full license. So if you are buying new machines, I don’t have SA on any of our SP stuff, we’re just gonna buy it with Vista coming down the pike on the machines already.
Jason Lee
You can order the license and not have it installed on them. You can order them naked and still get the license from them.
Jason
Here’s where Dell could not answer me yet. Let’s say I’m gonna buy 40 new Dell machines with Vista business, OEM. Now we do ghosting here, I want to be able to have a single key to use when we re-ghost. Dell says no problem, you just need one, you can use that key. How does the key server know how many seats OEM I’ve got? Nobody has gotten back to me on that.
Somebody asked what are we ghosting with?
Right now we are using the Symantex Ghost Enterprise version but we’re looking at switching to Clonezilla which is Open Source, free.
Chris from Melbourne, Calvary Chapel, they are using Clonezilla to do all their ghosting, says he loves it.
Good stuff. We are at two hours. Great talk cast. Thanks everybody!
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