Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 14, August 16, 2007

JASON

This is Church IT Podcast Episode 14, August 16, 2007.  Hard to believe we’ve done 14 of these already.  Yesterday I finally unveiled the www.ChurchITPodcast.com wiki, it’s up and live, you can listen to all the past recording, check out the vast notes, you can contribute content to it, I encourage you to do that. You don’t have to go to my blog anymore unless you want to.  Now, I’m wondering if anybody would be interested in helping, I’ve got a shared document up on zoho writer that I’d like to see how many of us could work on this document simultaneously.  The goal is to have a place where we can grab show notes live on the fly since the chat window does not log any of this for us.  Drop your email in the chat window or send an email to gccjason@gmail.com   Good.  Now the trick will be how fast can I move these over, please wait a moment.  You should be getting an email. You have to create an account on zoho, then it should work for the wiki and this shared document, so we’ll re-use this same shared document for each podcast.  If you don’t want to contribute to it, you can watch, go to my blog www.jpowell.blog.com the last link on there should take you to the document.   You can all see what each person is typing right?  At least it’s a place we can put down information and it doesn’t go away. We spent a number of minutes on this, let’s move on.

Be thinking about, today is an open forum, what you want to talk about. 

I’ll put a plug in for zoho, the wiki is easy to use, very user-friendly, so if you’re looking for a nice free tool, www.zoho.com

Any other cool tools?

Does it archive the chat on the shared document?  Good question. 

I’ve got everybody added now.

Ok, one of the things I’d like to talk about, and since I’m the host, I get to go first,

I’d like to know what people are doing with daily or weekly reports. Are you doing anything everyday that you’re capturing and compiling, building, etc. For instance, are you daily going through your server logs and checking them over and keeping track of interesting error messages or things you need to look for, or do you do like most people and never look at the logs until there’s an issue?  Just curious.  Tony you have a daily checklist don’t you?

Tony

We do something so ridiculously simple that it may not be terribly useful but on a daily basis, what did I do today that somebody else needs to know or where have I got a problem I need help on?  And we do a couple of different things, no rigid format for it, we send an email to our distribution list and our internal distribution list is named ITD and when you’re breaking in a new machine and you don’t have Outlook autocomplete set up properly and you hit enter, you do stupid things, but I won’t do that again.  We’ve done a couple of different things, I’ve got Scott Ehly sitting here with me who has just changed his life by using one note, he created a template for what his daily report looks like each and every day, and he just fills that in through the day and blasts out a one note at the end of the day, couple of other people have picked that up.  I keep mine in an Outlook task that I update multiple times each day then I blast that out, so that’s been good for us just staying in communication with each other but very different from your question about are we tracking server logs and stuff.  So yes, we do something but not what you asked.

Jason

So that’s something you said everybody on your team has been doing daily?  Keeping their update on a daily list?  Are you having weekly meetings?

Tony

Wouldn’t that be a great idea!?  Yes, we have weekly meetings but we don’t always go back through that same stuff, but similar, we archive it in case I want to search it later.  We’re not putting it into a database, would love some ideas, I want that magic tool that captures it on the fly and if I go visit somebody and work on their computer, it’s automatically plugged in. 

Jason

I’m doing an experiment with Ed Buford, our network administrator, where he is daily trying to get an idea of server help, so each day, he’s got a spreadsheet that he updates, it’s got simple stuff, like how much free space is on each hard drive, so that you’re physically having to look at the hard drive space, which is proactive is you see a potential problem. We’ve got a list of all the different functions that people from the inside and outside need to be able to hit. A quick check of back-ups from last night, any errors, etc.  Then he goes through all the servers, combs through the event logs, he records anything out of the ordinary or things we need to check on.  Also tracking how many hours he’s working on large projects.  What stinks is that it’s all within an Excel spreadsheet.  At some point, we’re going to start to do similar stuff with our helpdesk guy, although the helpdesk software can track some of that.  I just need general overview of what’s happening day to day.  We’ve already uncovered a few things, nothing critical, and we were able to make one of the servers a little bit happier. I know there are software tools out there and suck all the event logs back into one place.

Speaker (Jason Lee I think)

I guess I would ask why are you not putting that data into your helpdesk software as tickets instead of doing it as an Excel document?

Jason

Just easier.  It’s not really an incident or a ticket.  We may just try it for a while then try something different.

Speaker

I just want to throw another plug out for What’s Up Pro (not sure what he said), we don’t really do through that stuff everyday, we’ve got the latest version of What’s Up and it monitors all the server services, disk space, all that stuff, so if we get within 20 or 30% it’ll send up an email, and it’ll track service dates, it’s more real time, we don’t monitor it every day.

Speaker

I’ll throw out a plug for a different tool called Natios.  It shoots me an email every now and then telling me a certain server is out of disk space or whatever problem.

Jason

We are testing still the new Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 and it’s gonna be able to do a lot of this stuff for us as well.  It’ll alert you to what services are failing on the desktop, that sort of stuff.  We’re just doing it old school at the moment.

If you’ve got a team, what information are you collecting from your team?  Daily or weekly?  How do you keep track of how many hours you work on a project?

Speaker

We are doing a hybrid of that here, we’ve just recently tried a new thing.  I’ve asked my staff to write a report on a weekly basis of the big things that took a lot of my time and I meet with them once every other week and that’s a one on one time for me to sit down and help do some problem solving in the specific area that they oversee, so it helps me pay attention to what’s happening.  Almost everything that we do goes through out helpdesk ticketing and we also use Timestamping on that to say how long a service took to resolve, and I use that to gauge how well we are serving our users.

David

This is David Szpunar at Lakeview Church, we’re not actually monitoring logs but I am using our helpdesk to keep track of time, we’re only about a month or two into our helpdesk system right now but I can already see some good information, helpful information.  It’s scary how many hours are logged in the helpdesk. 

Jason

We’re using Service Desk Plus, you can have projects and try to keep track of hours and stuff but it just doesn’t seem to do a very good job of, if you forget.  I need to know how much of that day was spent on the Bookstore server, for example, and unless he is going in and starting the clock and stopping the clock on a Bookstore ticket, or if you forget to stop the clock, so we’re finding the low-tech approach is easier because it’s a piece of paper, look at your watch, mark it down.

Speaker

It’s been a while since I did a Service Desk Plus trial, I didn’t do any time-tracking, but with the Helpspot Helpdesk that I’m using here, the time tracker is just a little field up at the top of each ticket and before the ticket is closed, either enter a number of hours and a note that says what you were doing, hit log and it logs that time, and you can do as many of those as you need on a ticket.  It also has a stopwatch, it’s a very simple.  It does not track things that I don’t have a ticket open for, but I’m trying to change it to open a ticket for each problem.  But so far, the helpdesk system is working as a good time-tracking for actual problems or issues or projects.  It’s easy, that’s why I picked this one.

Speaker

That’s one question that comes to mind for me is, how many conduits are you allowing needs to come in?  Obviously this is a little bit different, what is the vehicle in which you are receiving those requests, is that like for David is all of that coming in to your helpdesk and you are responding that way or are you taking the tickets via email, entering it into the helpdesk and then utilizing it that way.  We’ve said, unless your email is broken, you submit a request to us is via email.  That’s been helpful for us because it forces everything into our helpdesk software. 

David

I will say that coming from the helpdesk side of things, since we just implemented it, a lot of requests still come to me by email directly and I will usually open up a ticket and copy and paste it in.  I also have been slowly training people to use the new helpdesk, there’s a web form they can go to, I’m just trying to feel out the best way to do that.  I will get phone calls and I’ll enter them as a ticket while I’m on the phone or same with a walk-in.

 Speaker

I would encourage you David to still take those requests in those mediums but every time I have an opportunity, I remind people of the preferred method, and remind them that we might respond sooner if you use the preferred method.

David

I’m working on that.  The idea is to say that there are no requests to be submitted verbally, you must submit the request to the department through the helpdesk.  We’re gonna ramp it up for all the departments and make that a requirement.

Jason

 We’re pretty adamant about trying to get people to use the helpdesk, or call Kyle, send an email to support.  It took a while for people to figure out that they didn’t need to CC us, we all see it.  For the most part, people know we need to track stuff, so they are not typically sending requests to one of us.

Speaker

Is anybody using the feature where it automatically sends out a survey to the user after a certain number of tickets?  We’ve just had that at a higher frequency, it’s giving some decent feedback.  Anybody else?

Jason

We’re looking into it.

Speaker

We are using Service Desk but we haven’t done anything with that yet.

Speaker

It’s easy to set up, great for follow-up.  It comes through from the user and ties back to the actual ticket so I can see all correspondence, it’s not anonymous, it’s easy for the user. 

Jason

Can you set it up to be anonymous?

Speaker

I suppose you could but I wanted to know who it was so I could talk to them.

Jason

I just know some of our people might like it better if it’s anonymous.

Speaker

Then just tell them it’s anonymous! Ha-ha!

Jason

I like how you think. There are ways to track everything.

Sean

I couldn’t get the Talkshoe client to work.  My name is Sean.  I have one quick question.  Has anybody else noticed that the price of Service Desk has changed and I’m wondering If you’re using Version 7?

 Jason Lee

The licensing did change.  They have a standard, a pro, and an enterprise, if you’re a current 6.0 customer with their service maintenance, you automatically become a pro customer, an no there is currently no upgrade path from 6 to 7 without blowing away your data.  You can load 7 cleanly but you don’t bring any of your history along. They are supposedly within the next two weeks gonna have that update available.  One the forums it indicated that their engineering is not built in such a way that they can bring a new product on line because they don’t start building the upgrade until the final product is about 80% finished because they say they don’t know what’s going to change.  So they expect by September the 7.0 upgrade will be available.  Fairly typical for them, unfortunately.

Sean

We are using Free bird and when I saw the price difference between standard and pro, I gawked at it. 

Speaker

They do offer some good charity pricing, if you talk to their sales department, we paid a lower premium that what was posted on their website.

Jason

Is there any news of them putting the Asset Explorer?

Speaker

It’s supposed to be in Version 7, I haven’t loaded it yet.  We’ve been on them hard about that.  I’ve given that task to Jim, our hardware support guy, and he’s been diligent about checking in with them, they say it’s coming.  The nice thing is it’s supposed to do an asset management across the network.  Anything that has an IP address will show up in the asset management. If you are looking for someone who speaks fluent English, that company is probably not your choice.

Jason

Agreed. 

Other stuff, questions?

Tony

Well Jason, you showed us zoho writer, why don’t you talk about zoho wiki?

Jason

I can do that.  I haven’t talked about the church IT podcast in detail either.  A long time ago, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to have a collaborative site where people could listen to the episodes and record notes and URLs and stuff, cause I don’t have time to go back and listen to them. It’s gotta be easy, I stumbled across zoho, saw this free wiki application, everyone can use it.  I started playing with it and within 10 minutes I had the skeleton of what I wanted, I was able to easily move text.  With the zoho writer, you can move data from zoho writer to zoho wiki, there’s a zoho spreadsheet, it all works well together.  Somebody just did an article on zoho versus Google Aps and they were giving a big thumbs up to zoho, which was interesting.  So an easy to use wiki for both the administrator and the people using it, I haven’t found anything else as nice and clean and easy. 

Nancy

Are you using wikis at Granger?

Jason

We’re not yet, there is an IT wiki in Sharepoint that we’re starting to dabble with.  How many months have I talked about Sharepoint?  Maybe in the change logs.  That’s something else I wanted to talk about.  We have ministry departments using Basecamp.  Tony were you guys using wikis?

Tony

 All those things you just said, same applies here.  We have tinkered.  It’s a great idea, just instead of being the right place to store stuff, it’s one more place to store stuff.  So until we can get rid of something, we can't get there.

Scott

The most significant factor that has made it difficult, it’s a pretty free-form structure, not terribly user-friendly to create pages and once you’ve created them, there’s no way to change your structure.  It’s the sort of thing where you experiment and then sit back and really plan one out and then do it.

Jason

Anybody else using wikis?  Seems like Chris was using wikis.

It sounds like there are a lot of us looking at Sharepoint and keep trying to do things with it and then get gun-shy or whatever. I see such huge potential, but also see such huge stuff that scares me, like how to back-up well and maintain sequel.  Is it just another place where people dump the same stuff, etc.

Jason Lee

I think that’s the big key for us, we had it up and running, our installation went crazy, we started over, every time I get ready to say lets work on this, I just can’t get my head around how to make the permissions work well and then if we use AD permissions how does the licensing work for that? So we kinda stepped back and said this could be great but it gets back-burnered.  For us the biggest thing is permission.

Jason

Somebody sent me an email, they had talked to somebody at Microsoft and they had copied and pasted me the email and it explained what the licensing structure was for outside entity, I’ll dig that out.

Speaker

I know Mike Gould talked about the way they did it at Willow, it was  separate domain from their primary domain and that completely got them around the licensing. 

Tony

We have been working on this and we are determined to come up with an answer that works.  I’ve got a blog posting I’ve been working on for a month and I’m 5 minutes away from finishing it.  We’ve gone down this Sharepoint path so many different ways, had such good things, we are convinced it is the answer to every question in the world  But it’s like Windows in that there are so many ways to do things and it’s so hard to find the best way.  We had some guys visit us recently who do nothing but Sharepoint, they got us re-excited.  I’m wondering, would it make sense to have a podcast where we had some Sharepoint experts join us?  Have a single-focus podcast on just Sharepoint. 

Speaker

Jason, you had expressed a concern about file back-ups, can you be a little more specific?

Jason

I just mentioned the fact that Sharepoint sequel all in the back end, so when you save a file into Sharepoint, you’re saving that file in the sequel. So now what happens when you put a bunch of pictures in there, how does it enjoy giant files, now I’ve got sequel and what if sequel gets corrupted.  A file server is easy to save and restore files, piece of cake. Sequel, well, it’s not so much cake, it’s not easy thing.  That’s part of my apprehension, we’re not a huge sequel shop here, we’ve got one guy, John, I call him our default sequel guy, but he doesn’t have a whole lot of time.

Speaker

As far as individual files, there’s a restore feature at any given point, so pretty much nothing ever gets deleted, which means the database is going to get huge.

Jason

It’s just so much easier with a file server.  Sharepoint is complex.

Tony

The other piece of this we’re looking at doesn’t completely solve it but at least separates it, Sharepoint can work with multiple back-end SQL databases, so we’re thinking what if we went with 3 completely different databases and had work flows that automatically put documents in the right place?  The thought here is that we’ve got current documents, anything accessed in the last year or 14 months, but if it hasn’t been touched in that time, it automatically gets archived.  Then we can take advantage of the Sharepoint search features, give people a checkbox that says yes I want to search the archives also.  The other thing that hits what you’re asking about what do you do with big files, media files?  The guys we talked with said Sharepoint handles that really well, which surprised us, we didn’t really believe them but we’re believing everything else they’ve said so I’ll take that, but the obvious solution for us is to make that another database, so we got a big file database, an archive database, and an active database and the risk area is all in that active database.  That’s the thinking, we have implemented zero.

Speaker

It’s intriguing that you talk about that Tony because we’ve gone down the same road.  It all started out with the idea of digitizing these drawers and files of papers our pastors have for illustrations and everything where there is one document filed in 10 different places, so we’re trying to figure out how we can index that and allow it to be searchable.  The pie in the sky would be to search not only those illustrations but for any graphics we’ve used, any logos, videos, anything related to that topic.  They are pushing that we think about using Sharepoint for that partially because their solution is 6 figures, we said no way, so they are saying to use Sharepoint.  So it’s interesting that you are hearing that from a third party too.

Tony

Sharepoint seems to be the answer to all the problems but it’s hard to find examples of where it has solved somebody’s problems. 

Speaker

Where is the Sharepoint guru who can help churches?  That’s what I want to know.

Tony

Well we may actually have him here.  He is a vendor but they are very Christian-oriented, they want to give some stuff away to churches and we want to help let them do that.

Speaker

I’m virtually raising my hand.  Like what Tony is suggesting to have someone like a Sharepoint guru present something to us, that intrigues me for a future podcast.

Jason

Tony give me their contact info and we’ll set it up.

Speaker

Can I switch gears a different direction?  Planning center online, our Creative Arts team is keen on it, thinks it’s a good solution.  Has anyone else started that process, is there anything to compare it to.  I have some concerns, but it has good things.  Part of me thinks that if we can do all this in Sharepoint, do we need to pay a service fee for a product that has some duplicated functionality.

Tony

Coming right back to the same thing, Sharepoint can do everything, we just don’t know how.  Scott is also part of our worship team, so he’s on both sides of the equation, so he is determined to look at it and see what he can figure out.

Speaker

We ran into the same thing, we’ve got ministries that are using Basecamp, I’ve found that when you are specializing on one particular function, you have a lot of time and resources and flexibility to be a little bit more user-friendly. What I’ve found with Sharepoint is that it is capable of doing these things, it just becomes expensive if you want to do it intuitively, so that’s where the first drawback comes from.

Jason

 I’d agree.  Sharepoint will absolutely do a decent amount of customization of what Planning Center does but it will not do it anywhere near as slick, easy.  Is there any way to do any cool Ajax stuff with Sharepoint?  Any modules or plug-ins?

Speaker

I heard Ajax come up in our conversation with this other vendor so it’s a possibility.  If nothing else, you can run secondary sights and pages directly through Sharepoint, it doesn’t always have to be on that sight to look like it is.

Speaker

We just started using Planning Center here but I wasn’t involved in the set up, our worship minister tried it and loved it, a volunteer is doing it, they have all this functionality that I don’t have to think about.  I love that.  We’re paying 30 bucks a month, if you can find one external service that can do one thing well, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel yourself.

Speaker

How much of a concern is it to have the Sunday morning everything behind the scenes happening in a host of solutions, what are your teams doing for redundancy in case you lose your data connectivity?

Speaker

I haven’t looked into that but it’s something I need to do, but I think it’s mainly a planning thing, they can listen to tracks MP3, they can respond to emails.

Speaker

One difficulty with specialized applications like this is that it’s one more thing to support and it is not usable anywhere across the organization and I guess that’s where my drawback, but with Sharepoint it’s pretty much the same across the organization.  You may tweak it here and there but the concept is the same across the whole board.  I’m just trying to struggle with those issues myself.  What else is out there?  We don’t know of any right now.

Jason

There might be some on the blog post that I did about Planning Center.

Speaker

If anybody on your team is using it, it would be wise on our part to understand how they are using it so that when it comes to support perspective of what do we need to facilitate on a Sunday morning, do we need a redundant connection, etc.  How are they utilizing the tool, I want to know before something blows up.

Speaker

I’ve talked to a worship pastor and he is trying to see if they want you to use planks to coordinate the volunteers for our frontliners ministry which is ushers and greeter which is our largest volunteer ministry and it does look like they may do something using it in another area.

Jason

Here’s something else you may want to consider is that Willow Creek is pretty heavy Sharepoint users, and they are using Planning Center.

Jason Lee

I’m slowly coming to the solution that yes this might be a good viable solution for us.

Jason

I was in the same shoes you are in now when we were looking at Fellowship One, cause it’s all over the Internet and what if the Internet dies while we’re trying to check in kids or whatever.  We must plan for those things.  Almost 3 years we’ve been using F One, we do 5 services each weekend, I think there has only been one where they had to go to stickers, and that wasn’t an Internet issue. And other contingency, should your ISP die, you can always do a laptop with a broadband card. 

William

This is William, just want to throw out a few ideas, if you want to legally and officially use your wireless wan connection, especially if you have one of those nice Sonic firewall, a lot of the new systems now have the ability to take the wireless PC card and use that as a back-up connection automatically on your lan, of course it will usually be a drop in bandwidth but its better than no connection.  And as an alternative, specifically for worship type things, especially if you are already using Shoutcast, they have a newer product, Shout Music Manager, you might want to look at that.  It’s almost stand alone but you have to have the main product to use it.

Speaker

I have to give a plug for the ACS team, they are working really hard for us and trying to bridge some gaps in their product line right now, they’ve been flexible to work with us.

Jason

Hey Tony, somebody in the chat window is wondering how your CHMS project is going.

Tony

It’s going great of course!  Ha-ha.  We’ve gone through some bumps, it’s not where we want it to be, no surprise.  There’s been a change in the development team underneath it, we’re still working with the ACTS group, still happy with that, but the subcontractor’s on the team have changed, the name is no longer Proclaim, but what’s gonna confuse things is the name Proclaim will continue to be used just not be the ACTS group. So what I’m gonna do is say it’s moving, it’s gonna be really impressive by the time of the Roundtable in Kansas City and let’s talk more as we get closer to that.  I bail out at that point.

I have a silly unrelated question, but there is such brilliance on this call, I know I can get a great answer.  What does it take to take an existing MP3 file and make iTunes believe for yourself not for distribution, that it’s a podcast?  It’s a free download, I get some podcast from somebody but they only keep their current versions, like the last five episodes up there, well I’ve got an old episode that was corrupted in my iTunes podcast directory.  I though I’ll just drop it back in there, well no, then it shows up in my music library.  So I thought, change the genre to podcast and that’ll do it. No, now it’s still in my music library as a podcast.  It’s in the wrong place!  So I moved it into the podcast directory and renamed it and next time I launched iTunes, there it is back in my music library. 

Nancy

You’ve done all that through iTunes? 

Tony

That and others.

Nancy

If that’s your biggest problem Tony!!

Tony

Ok, I’ll go off on another wild path.  Chris and I had a nice call with Cliff Guy yesterday talking about the fall Roundtable, he has got quite a line-up for this, it’s looking sharp.  If you have not signed up, it’s time. 

Jason Lee

I’m looking for a person who is a .net ias guru, we are having an issue with our ias.  I need free advice, 10 minutes.

Tony

Stephen Wareham. Do you remember Stephen?  He would be an excellent resource for that.

Jason

Any new info on the Ministry com IT stuff? 

Tony

Yes, Ministry com is I think the 13^th and 14^th, the evening of the 13^th, we’re gonna get anybody there who is interested to go right up the street to Brentwood Baptist and have a Nashville area CIT gathering plus anybody from Ministry com who wants to come.  Friday, anybody who is there and anybody in Nashville who wants to come join us for lunch.  Anyone who wants to show up.  It sounds like there are a lot of Ministry com who are IT people, very neat overlap between the two.

Jason

I have a question.  Change management, how are people tracking, or are you doing anything to track significant changes to the network?  Are you tracking when you reboot servers and why?  Are you tracking where information is exchanged?  Where is that data being captured or is it?

Speaker

I’ve created a helpdesk category for it but I haven’t used it much yet.

Speaker

I just shoot a note to my network admin saying this is what I did, make sure I didn’t break anything. 

Jason

I’m just thinking as our team gets bigger, as we add more volunteers on the IT side, we’ve needed some sort of change management but it’s becoming more important as we look to the future to have some place where we’re capturing all the changes being made.  Again, something easy to use, very simple to update.  We’re looking at using a Sharepoint wiki to do this.  I don’t need any software, as long as I’ve got Internet access I can just hit the page, type something in and it saves automatically.  That may be a good one for next time.

William

I can tell you that we have a very low-tech solution for any significant changes.  There is a clipboard on the door of the server room and we write an entry in on the next line. 

Jason

I like it.  It’s interesting that I’m finding low-tech things easier, better, and faster to use.  What they aren’t doing is a real nice archive or a seachable way.

Speaker

Speaking of low-tech, I have been experiencing some various communication problems, started at the beginning just dialing in but if my call goes through Quest or level 3, I have issues, but I am manually routed not using those guys and I have a good connection now.

Jason

We are at the hour and a half point, a good stopping point for the day.  So the shared document thing kinda worked.  Looks like everybody was able to add some stuff in.  This page will stay open for editing by anybody.  Also please check out the wiki.  I’ll give the zoho writer 3 stars out of 5. 

I have a phone meeting next week with Sean from UMC techshop to talk about Adobe Connect and how we might be able to leverage that, hopefully for free.  It’s supposed to be a sweet collaborative tool.  We will meet again the first week of September. Maybe we can schedule to get the Sharepoint guru lined up for the next podcast.  Until next  time.

Partial list of attendees:

Kewl Tools mentioned:

• Zoho.com - lots of free online tools

General Discussion Notes:

Daily Tasks and Time Tracking

Jason/Ed Daily Check List:

• Open space on the servers
• Can you Access VPN, OWA, is SQL Running.
• Did the backup run last night, with what errors?
• Things that seem odd, or need later checking in on.
• A time log of the amount of time we are spending on a task.

Church IT Podcast Wiki

Sharepoint

• SQL data backups recovery
• Permissions
• Is it the right tool?

• Current Docs in one DB, and a workflow moves the Data older than X to another DB
• 3rd Database for Media Files.

Planning/Scheduling