Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 13, August 2, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Thursday, August 2nd. This is episode 13 of the Church IT podcast. Today is one of those complete open forum. We do have Jeff Byrd from Ministry Centered Technology. Jeff, we’ll have you give us a little background on how you came about developing your product and what it does, then we’ll do some Q&A. And as normal we’ll start off with our Kool Tools thread. So what kind of things, tools whatever, are you guys discovering lately that’s helping you do your jobs bigger, better, faster, more efficiently?
JT
What about Backpack? Anybody using that? If so, any creative ways you’re using it for ministry collaboration?
Jason
We do have a couple of ministries using Base-camp. Our mission department is a pretty heavy Base-camp. They’ve gotten to the point where Base-camp is not able to facilitate all their needs, so we’re still trying to figure out if we can facilitate that better with Sharepoint.
Sp
I know that for my company, I tried out Base-camp and Backpack, I love them, I modeled my product after them, but for like tech support and stuff I didn’t find it useful enough for tracking and stuff like that so I had to find an application more specific to my needs.
Jason
Who asked that? Ok, J.T.
They got some sweet stuff, can’t knock ‘em.
Sp
I had signed up a while back but I’m trying to, being on the Eastern panhandle in Western Virginia here, to bring my folks into 2.0, the first challenge is to get them not to be scared of a computer, anyway, we’re working on some stuff and it gets frustrating when you’re emailing a document, you got somebody that starts a document and sends it out on email and now you’ve got 8 copies [Time Stamp00:03:33] of that document. Somebody makes an edit, there’s one revision, then somebody else in the meantime. Ugh! Let’s do something else here that would be smarter not harder.
Sp
Where are you? I’m in between Clarksburg and Fairmont.
Sp
I’m over in Charleston.
Jason
I might suggest looking also at Google Aps, they’re pretty sweet.
Sp
Yeah, the problem with that is for some reason when I send, I saw a blog the other day about the for non-profit, but when I called our ministry group about 501C3, we didn’t have to file for that, so we never did, so I put in the information and they tried to verify us but denied us.
Sp
You should still be able to use Google Aps for your domain, just not the plus version. I use it for my company and it’s free but I’m not a non-profit.
Jason
You can go onto the family or group plan. We’re toying with it, we’ve got a small group going to experiment with Google Aps with some Excel spreadsheet type stuff they want to share.
Sp
It’s all cool stuff. I’m in the process of evaluating what’s gonna work for us. It’s hard because I’m not there when they have their meetings.
Jason
I’ll throw out a tool that I’ve found pretty helpful this past week or so, the Getting Things Done Outlook plug-in. Works with Outlook 2003 and the new 2007. If you’re a fan of Dave Allen’s getting things done methodology, I definitely suggest checking out the plug-in, it’s around $60 and it allows you to create projects inside of Outlook, attach notes to tasks and emails, allows you to take the functionality that Outlook has built in that requires custom program to do, so two thumbs up for the Getting Things Done Outlook plug-in. Just go to www.davidco.com [Time Stamp00:07:24] and there’s a link on the front of the website.
Other Kool Tools?
Jeff, go ahead and give us the history behind Planning Center, where you were before, where you are now.
Jeff
Ok, a long time I started working at Southwest Community Church in California near Palm Springs and I was hired as the Director of Creative Technology, which means I oversaw all our graphics, website and developed house applications, we built our own check-in system. We have Shelby church management software but we didn’t think their check-in system met our needs, so we developed our own in house, we developed some other applications and as I was doing this, I also worked closely with our Celebration Arts Dept planning out our weekend services and stuff, and we found it very hard to communicate with all of our volunteers. We have volunteer worship leader, stuff like that, to have a centralized [Time Stamp00:09:08] place where all of our worship information could be stored and easily accessed everywhere. So I sat down with one of our music pastors and we developed a Windows-based application that did a little bit of what we needed in the organizational part and that’s about when Web 2.0 was getting a lot of attention, so I said, I’ll just scrap the whole thing and re-program it in movie-on-rails with Ajax and see what I can do. So over the next 6 to 9 months, I did that and launched Planning Center Online at the Saddleback worship conference last year, and since then I’ve done a lot of different upgrades and just continually improving the product. Basically where it is now is it’s a centralized place for all of your applications and for all your information about your weekend services, so your order of service, you can schedule out your volunteers through it and it will email them with a notification and a place for them to click to accept or decline and it emails you back. They can see what songs they’re singing, they can listen to the MP3 you’ve uploaded into the system online, they can download any tech lay-outs or whatever. So we’ve had a good reaction from it, lots of tech directors are really liking it.
Jason
How many approximate number of churches do you have using it?
Jeff
We’ve had almost 2,500 churches sign up, that’s free and paying customers, I say not all of those are actively using it. The last I checked we had around 800-900 active churches using it.
Jason
You got some big churches on your list too.
Jeff,
Yes, Northpoint has jumped on about 6 months ago and they’ve been really working it; and Saddleback joined on and they just went live and are using Planning Center only as of yesterday. And Willow Creek is in the process of getting ready to get going on this. They have a very complicated order of [Time Stamp00:12:55] service, before they even mentioned that, I was in the process of creating a scripting language so you can customize your service reports, so they will be excited to get that.
Jason
I’m sure you’ve got some sort of a feedback loop on requests for improvements or changes, what’s that look like?
Jeff
You guys might be interested in this as tech directors, there’s a product out there called Fogbugs, they have Fogbugs On Demand, they have a free version for up to 2 users and it will, we have support@ministrycenter.com , I have it check that email address every 30 seconds and it will bring them in and make cases out of each one and manage all your support cases. So we do that, all our support emails come in there and we get tons of feedback about what they’d like, what they don’t like, and we’ve changed, I try to update the site every two months is what I’m looking at with major releases. Minor releases could be daily or weekly, depending on what someone found. If it’s a bug, I update it right away, other things within the week.
Jason
One of the reasons we are Fellowship One users because there is nothing to install and the updates occur.
Jeff
It’s nice to not have to worry about that.
Jason
I assume that you’ve got some data center that you’re working with.
Jeff
Yes, in the desert here we have a company called Digital Internet Services and they have a Tier 1 hosting place out here so we have two servers there and I just added a third server and the 4th is on its way from Dell, getting ready to get some redundancy and stuff like that going. I have chosen the growing the business instead of throwing a bunch of money at a business and trying to get it up and running as fast as possible.
Jason
Have you completely [Time Stamp00:16:19] left you position at Southwest or are you still involved?
Jeff
About 2 or 3 months ago, I’m not employee but I go in there a couple times a week to help out and do whatever they need. We’ve transitioned pretty well. There were some great people underneath me who were able to pick up where I left off and are continually moving the parts of my job forward. Our IT Director is supposed to be on here today but I don’t see him on.
Sp
Question about the product, I am just thinking through as your talking, how does the product you’re selling and the making it available to ministry, how does that differ from what Sharepoint is able to facilitate? It sounds like there are some significant differences but some similarities.
Jeff
We focus around the worship service. So we actually tried to use Sharepoint to do this and really found it hard to keep track of our files. The scheduling the people is what a lot of our users really enjoy, where it’s just a one click to schedule and the email does the rest, they don’t need to remember a username or password or anything. I think now that the ease of programming has come down, the market for product that fit exactly how your flow is is going to be, we’ve had a great reaction of people who either have tried to program their own or were using some generic thing but really you save a lot of time when the product is actually designed to do your job task rather than being a generic “we-do-everything” type application.
Jason
Do you still have the like 11-12 minute overview demo on the site?
Jeff
Yes, we have about 15 different demos on there now, if you go onto the main page, there is a link under more information that says video turtorials, something like that, they’re all there. Watch our quick introduction video.
Jason
Having checked those out, I would strongly recommend checking those out. That’s what got my interested in the Planning Center product since we are still trying to figure out what to do, Sharepoint, what not, and how does that impact the projects happening across what ministry departments and after I watched that 11 minute overview of what Planning Center can do, I though it looked pretty sweet. A lot of stuff that Sharepoint could do but would require some crazy custom development plus you’ve got to buy Sharepoint and ya-da, ya-da.
Sp
And I tried to program for Sharepoint and it is not fun. The make it really complex. The newer version might be better.
Jason
When I was watching the demo, I was like, man this looks like Basecamp but better.
Jeff
I spent a lot of time troubleshooting on getting everything to work well. It helps being able to drag and drop something. It makes the web perform like an application rather than like a website.
Jason
I think too especially because of your target audience, there are creative kind of people and they like it to look good, so there’s something to be said for that too.
Jeff
Even not creative people like their stuff to look nice and easy to use.
Jason
Talk about the storage element behind it. Limitations? I know there is not unlimited storage.
Jeff
We have five different plans and the cheapest one if free, the most expensive one is $99 a month, and what we do it, the storage limits go from about 100 megabytes to 15 gigabyts of space which is a lot of space. We have a pretty large church that’s been on Planning [Time Stamp00:23:09] Center since before we actually launched and they are only to 1.3 gigs of information on line. What we use for storage, we are moving all our streaming videos over to this, is Amazon S3. They provide such great rates for their storage, it’s awesome to be able to use that. I think it will cost us like $10 for all the streaming we do at Southwestern. It is meant for developers so they don’t provide any real interface for it other than an api but there are tons of programmers out there who have created many different programs you can use, store stuff on the server, make stuff public or private and really cheap and easy to use, for me anyway.
Sp
Jeff, can you explain what Planning Center Live is?
Jeff
Yes, there is a tutorial video on it. Basically you have a service going on and you bring up Planning Center Live and you click the NEXT button while you are going through the service and it times out each element, so you can run through, time-out the element and then come back later and say, “ok did we go over or under at this point?” things like that. The real fun part is that if you are controlling the service other people can come and watch the service and in real time, the update is where you are in the service. What we do is we have a producer for our service who sits in the back and she times out each element, then in our green rooms, we have two monitors at each of the stage entrances that have the live on it so they can view how many minutes until they have to be on stage, or if they are running 5 minutes behind they can cut a song or whatever. So that the people who make the decisions can get it accurately. That is also a chat feature that allows your tech people to chat back and forth without having to talk.
Jason
I hadn’t seen that.
Jeff
It’s a bit more hidden feature, it’s only in our higher-paying {Time Stamp00:26:22] plans, but I haven’t had that many smaller churches say they need it.
Jason
So one person is in control but other people can view how the elements are ticking by right?
Jeff
Yes, there is a report at the end that tells about each element. We had an issue where our pastor went for 50 minutes and someone had to say, go for 35.
Jason
I can see our producer being the guy driving and then our media operators and monitor operates all watching the cue sheet in real time, interesting.
Sp
Have you had any smaller churches ask you to bump up the number of people allowed in the free version?
Jeff
Not yet, we just bumped up our light plan, it was $9, now it is $14, but it has 35 users instead of 20. That was a request. But we have over 200 churches using the free one on a regular basis.
Sp
My wife is the worship leader at our church so I just looked back at one of her emails at the list of people that would be involved in using it and we are slightly over 10.
Jason
Other questions for Jeff?
Sp
Where do you see your next big enhancement? What’s your vision for the next generation of it?
Jeff
I have an update coming out at the end of this month which will have the custom reporting feature, so you will be able to write a little bit of html and little bit of Planning Center scripting language and create your own reports of practically all the data within Planning Center, so you can get it exactly how you want it. That has been requested from smaller churches and larger churches, they want to see their plan or their people lists or their songs list how they normally see it. It shouldn’t take much work for them to get that going. We’re working on some general enhancements everywhere, multiple scheduling out and sending one request for five different services. [Time Stamp00:30:15] Right now if you schedule someone for 5 services, it sends out 5 different emails, but in the next update it will be just one email. Beyond that, I’m looking into more integrations into partners, getting some more contents on there so people don’t have to go out and find it and upload. It would be nice to find some way to link back to the church management, I have some good ideas on how that could happen, we’ll see.
Jason
What’s your team look like? How many people are working with you on this?
Jeff
You are talking to the team. I didn’t have any capital, I invested very little amount of money in the beginning, just a lot of my time and basic stuff, I see in the next couple months needing to hire either a programmer or a business person, I haven’t decided which. I want to expand out and hit other areas of the market.
Jason
Thanks Jeff. We appreciate your information.
Jeff
The url is www.planningcenteronline.com
Jason
I’m still trying to convince our Creative Arts people to take a serious look at it.
Jeff
The biggest hurdle I’ve hit is people don’t really realize that they need a worship-planning tool until they get. I get emails from people almost every day saying they don’t know how they ever did their job without it.
It’s a new market and people are getting interested in it.
Jason
The floor is wide open. Questions? Anything?
Sp
Since no one else is jumping in, I will. I’m thinking through the Planning Center software and it fits into some of the dialogues we’ve been having here and I guess one question is, obviously they are uploading and taking down the data for specifically the MP3s they are using to distribute, that doesn’t become your library right?
Jeff
It actually does become your library, because we only want you to upload a song [Time Stamp00:35:18] once and never have to worry about it again. For the users, by default they actually only stream the MP3s from the site, they don’t download them although each church has the option to allow them to download them, but we want it to become your library so that whenever you use a song, you don’t have to re-upload or re-create that song.
Sp
So the limitation on that library is 15 gigs.
Jeff
Yes, but that will take you a long time to fill up and by that time I might be able to increase the amount of space or have another plan. That’s the highest priced plan. But even the $29 plan has 1 gig, which most of our churches haven’t hit that yet.
Sp
Are the songs that get uploaded, those are considered files as well?
Jeff
Yes, MP3, pdf, stuff like that. You are also able to link to your own servers. We’re not stingy about keeping it on our server.
Sp
So I could make my 45 gigs of MP3s that they use right now available from my server through the application?
Jeff
Yes and that would not count against your storage space, you just need to have your files publicly available basically, so they’d have to be on a website or something that we can link too.
Sp
Are you using Flash to stream that?
Jeff
Yes, it uses Flash, and since we are doing that, even if it is on your server, it’ll still just stream the MP3.
Sp
If it is stored locally on our server, and publishing to yours, is it then updating dynamically or do we have to have it run a process, how does it find the new music?
Jeff
You would create a song in our system and then we have an attachment area and you just click link to attachment and paste in the URL for your attachment.
Sp
I’m thinking how our creative team works, and right now we are hosting a storage of almost 45-50 gigs for them for that, but to have that ability to link out to it, that’s huge. From the cost perspective, [Time Stamp00:38:33] we could go with a smaller plan.
They load an entire CD at a time.
Sp
So how does it work with each user? You have somebody actually managing the weekly service, do all your musicians and vocalists constitute as a user.
Jeff
Yes, everyone is a user, all your people are all users, they can all long in and have a username and password, but what we do is have restrictions, we have 5 different levels of permission. You have a schedule viewer who can only view plans for which they’ve been schedule; a viewer that can view everything; editors can edit everything; and an administrator can do a little bit more than an editor.
Sp
I would just ask for a bump up to 15 users on the free version. If we could do the linking, we could start getting our feet wet with your product.
Jeff
The free one doesn’t have any linking ability.
Sp
To clarify the linking of the files, is that a manual per file or entire directory?
Jeff
You have to do a per file deal, I don’t know how I would do a whole directory because I can’t see your whole directory from the web. Over ftp, maybe, but I don’t use ftp. I wonder if Flash will use ftp to stream? I haven’t tested that. Every itme had to be uploaded individually.
Jason
Same way with Basecamp, we’re not using Basecamp’s ftp storage, we are storing it on a hosting site offsite, you can’t just link to the whole thing, you have to individually link items, then leave them be.
Sp
One product we’re looking at is Ampatchy [?] MP3 streaming server and if you can set up a job, it continues [Time Stamp00:43:31] to monitor directory and it’s still doing the streaming through Flash over the web pages, the over head of getting stuff into what’s available to the users is a lot less of a manual process. How can you make that initial surge easier?
Jeff
We recommend doing it service by service. And then after a couple of months, you’re not uploading all that many each week. If you have 45 gigs of files, don’t do them all at once. You only really upload the songs you use.
Sam
This is Sam Barrett from [?] church in Seattle, Washington, there’s a third component that we’ve mixed into our Sunday planning. Maybe it will be helpful to someone. Let’s say a band is going to perform, it’s all planned out, they’ve got the music but they want to listen to the service mix from the previous week, to see if the mix sounds right, timing, or whatever, being able to listen to the previous mix of that song to adjust and tune, that’s example of gobbling up space.
Jeff
We have churches that do that and they still have enough space. If we do get to the issue of not enough storage is providing a way to get rid of old files or a cheap way to extend file storage space.
Sam
Thank you
Jason
Is anybody playing with OSX server Quicktime streaming? Just the built-in streaming server?
Sp
You need a Mac for that.
Sp
Who’s running a Mac server?
Jason
I mean server software on a Mac mini.
Sp
We started dialogue the full-blown server only because we are trying to tackle this digital asset management beast and how do we do that? It’s not just video or streaming media, it’s more of an archive. Most recent look has been Google Cheesebox. An appliance you can buy that does the indexing for you.
Sp
Are you wanting to use it to stream your services?
Jason
I’d [Time Stamp00:48:58] need out tech arts guys, but basically we capture each service currently, they want a way to allow/convert that down to 264 so it’s a much smaller file size, have that viewable by anybody in the church for whatever, as long as it is from the same original file, the index points will be the same, then the video editing guys and go in and chop or whatever. Also we are doing a live stream for internal training, running on Windows media encoder. And if we could do everything out of one box, plus figure out how to tie that into iTunes so that you are viewing those files in an iTunes playlist inside the church.
Sp
So you’re talking more from a playback perspective than an editing functionality.
Jason
Yes. All the different services and media elements available inside the church.
Sp
That sounds like a perfect case for Final cut server.
Sp
Is anyone using the Final cut server right now? The whole product was bought from another company. The demo video sound exactly like what you are describing Jason.
I can get the link.
Jason
We are getting ready to have a grand-pooba storage meeting, all the main players in the church that are tied to large storage pools, gonna get all this together, video, photographers, IT, tech arts, sit down and try to figure out if it makes sense, what does a centralized storage solution look like in 3-5? So we can maintain growth, how to back all that up. Should be interesting, and then come up with a dollar figure, throw it up the chain, so here’s what we can do for this much, etc.
Sp
We just had the same dialogue and it was amazing to see how many devices that don’t have a back-up or raided hard drives and that’s a 100% needed device so I think we are on the same page you are Jason. It’s amazing when you asked how much storage space they are populating and what is that with and it was a significant [Time Stamp00:55:01] amount of space, and it’s live projects. And then how do you make an environment work for them, is it on archive, or how do you facilitate a san, multiple facts to that.
Jason
The san melody [? Not sure what he is saying] is supposed to facilitate all that behind the scenes so the end user doesn’t really know where the file goes. Part of me wonders if it makes more sense to contract this out to a storage expert specialist. It could make more sense to find somebody in Chicago that that’s what they do. I’m anticipating crazy sticker cost, but what is the data worth? I want to know from our Senior management what is an acceptable downtime before it becomes problematic.
Sp
We asked that question and the answer was shocking how tolerable we are. When it came down to it, where we landed we could have a day or two or even four days of downtime as long as there is a backup of data. I took a dose of my own medicine; I was shocked to hear that they could go without this or that for four days. A refreshing reminder that no we aren’t a business with a mission critical; obviously we don’t want to lose the data, but ministry isn’t data and that was a good reminder, put it in a good perspective. What I sensed as the need was not where we landed with the leadership.
Jason
Has anybody else taken that up the chain?
Sam
I always ask how important do you see this being? And don’t answer in words, answer in budget, and I’ll do what you need done. The next question is what is the potential risk. It’s more of a risk discussion. I came from a corporate world where downtime in seconds translated to tens of thousands of dollars in loss. So I’ve been more aggressive than was necessary. Identify what’s most [Time Stamp01:01:58] important to the management.
Jason
The dollar speaks.
Part of me wonders, if Senior Management says that 4 days is tolerable, but when it really occurs, it’s too late to say 2 days is all. You have to plan ahead.
Sp
We have experience the pain of what a week feels like. I trust the fact that they know how long that is. Our plan is 4 days, we must make 4 days, now realistically if it’s gonna cost 2% more to do 2 days, that’s a no-brainer. So I’ve scaled it. It’s all driven by cost, but it is an extreme marginal cost to improve that and I think the leaders and our IT need to be a little less tolerable because when that actually happens, there is going to be some element that caused this, and this probably isn’t gonna something that we want it to absorb everybody’s time, so how can we make it the least painful and still be in that window and not make our cost skyrocket.
Sam
The other thing is, we’ve got several building and campuses now, if we have an earthquake and our building crumbles to the ground, we’ve got much bigger problems than back-up. Families to call, people to help, etc, not worrying about what happened to the data. So if you are in a flood plain or tornado alley or earthquake zone, there’s a temperament you have to apply, how important is too important? Many of us have a fire case, a steel case somewhere that’s an actual fireproof, indestructible safe. If they level the street, you’re not gonna get that stuff back. This applies to anybody listening in San Fransisco, but you have to temper that stuff with what’s really important.
Sp
That’s a great point. I think we as IT professional lose the perspective sometimes, the ministry is not IT, ministry is the people, so maybe their phone number is important, but if they’ve had a tornado, that phone number is useless information. That is enlightening to me, [Time Stamp01:07:02] I need to be reminded. If we are in that kind of a crisis, it won’t matter if 2007 is running on a box somewhere, that’s not realistic. We sit down and decide if a crisis happened, what information would we need and what could we live without.
Jason
That’s one reason I’m a big fan of software as a service, I like the fact that if our church burns to the ground, all of membership data is not inside the church, it is off in multiple data warehouses with Fellowship One. That makes me sleep better. And most people have some outside email, so they can still do email if we are down. I’ve even signed up for the Google Aps not-for-profit version so if our exchange server died, how hard would it be to fire up email for our people. I’ve looked into it, it wouldn’t be that complicated.
Benjamin had mentioned downtime, you have to look at the different services you provide. What’s acceptable downtime for the phone service? That could be different than email.
Sp
Different subject, where are we on Fall Roundtable?
Jason
I have not heard anything from Church of the Resurrection. I need to see what the status is. We are doing ours on the 26th, register on the website. We have maybe 7 signed up. They’ve not done any advertising yet. Once the Leadership Summit is done, we’ll start hammering on the other conference.
Sp
Is this an IT Roundtable?
Jason
Yes, last Sept, we did a church IT Roundtable, people came from all over the country, we talked IT stuff. In the spring, we did one in Houston, a 3-day event, very well attended. This fall, we are doing one here at Granger, and Cliff Guy is doing what I call the official IT Roundtable in Kansas City, info on all of those should be right [Time Stamp01:13:05] on the top of my blog, just look for the church IT Roundtable link, and I’ve got a link to Cliff’s website, a link to register. The thought is spring and fall of every year to have this official IT Roundtable that moves around the country but we are also encouraging churches to facilitate smaller localized Roundtables. I’m going to do a Roundtable every year, we will cap registration at 25-30 for what our facility will accommodate. Just a great opportunity to meet, and talk shop, like these podcasts. It’s also cool to be able to learn from small churches to large. Encourage people to check that out. www.citrt.org
If you decide to do a local roundtable, send me an email, I’ll publicize that on my blog. The Kingdom wins. I got an email from Southeast Christian in Louisville, the IT guy there stumbled upon my blog, said he loved what we’re doing. Daryl Hunter. I’m thinking a road trip to Louisville. Power of the blog. I also got an email from Ministry Com and we’re looking at doing something with Ministry Com for the spring IT Roundtable and facilitating it out to 100-150 people maybe.
Jason Lee, you need to get a blog going! You can do it in Facebook. I’m just “encouraging” you. Daryl just sent an email and said he is lurking here now. We are now hitting right at 600 downloads of this podcast per episode. Crazy! In a good way.
Jason
I’m thinking what if we did a Google document for each podcast, we could all be in the same Google document adding and creating the show notes on the fly.
Jason Lee
Didn’t Tony talk about using One Note for that?
Jason
He said that didn’t work. Like right now I’m using Mac and it doesn’t have One Note.
Jason Lee
The frustrating with the chat window is you can’t click [Time Stamp01:21:35] on the link.
Jason
I know.
Daryl is here lurking in the chat window. He says zoho writer.
I will get the Church IT survey info out there, I’ll put that in my Getting Things Done list. I need to add a disclaimer, your email address is NOT hidden, so do whatever. I have not figured out a way for you to update your record.
Anyway, some way to capture the notes and put here in the chat window.
How’s your Gallery 2 going?
Jason Lee
That wasn’t us. That was Chris. Or Justin. We were looking at the Ampatchy stuff, just about ready to make that jump.
Jason
I finally got my batch of new Dells, got ready to open those, and they sent XP instead of Vista. Long story short, I suggested they send us hard drives, we’ll put them in these boxes and we’ll send these back. They said no, they are coming to pick up the 40 machines and bringing us 40 machines with Vista.
Jason Lee
Friends don’t let friends buy Dells.
Jason
We are having major vendor issues, our tech arts guys are having major vendor issues. They say one thing but when it arrives, it is not what they said it would be. Can I vent on getting a fiber run?
You know that giant screen we have in the middle, it’s not the right one we ordered.
So I’m scared to order anything.
Jason Lee
One thought I’ve had about vendor relationships, I’ve wondered if and how our IT Roundtable and podcast group of people, organizations, groups, etc would officially somehow collaborate and be able to negotiate better rates with vendors. I think we could win by collaborating. I’m not sure how we would do that or would it be worth our time?
Jason
I think there could be some definite benefits from that. When I was in the school systems, a couple school systems got together and went to Dell for leverage. [Time Stamp01:31:14] I think there is some power in that. If together we are going to get a bunch of machines or whatever, we could get some leverage. I think we need to be a bigger group.
Sp (Sam I think)
We tried setting something like that up for our [?] churches, basically all it took was for our Dell rep to create a log in and they set the account to cash only, so basically you have to have some kind of payment system that’s got more guarantee to it than terms, and that way the liability is relieved from everybody else, and then you can buy whatever whenever and you get the benefit of a much bigger account.
Jason Lee
Specifically with Dell, the advantage with the purchase of church equipment but it would also give benefit to the EPP program, the Employee Purchase Program, to facilitate, that number still counts in that number too. Any computers that your employees are purchasing through that group would count toward that number.
Jason
You can always get better pricing from Dell at the end of the quarter and submit a bigger load. This is something interest, could be a Roundtable discussion. Especially if the larger churches lead the charge. Dell reps would drool. I get tired of the pricing game, just give me your price out of the gate. I’m getting tired of the over-promising and under-deliverying.
If you have topic ideas or a vender, let me know and we’ll schedule it.
Sp
Anybody using video conferencing? We want to distribute out some of our services and video conference with remote churches or remote teams and potentially satellite locations as well.
Jason
Good question. We currently don’t have any information on that since we are a single campus. Come on multi-site guys, anything?
Daryl mentions [? something like sanberg or hanburg??]
Anything else?
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