Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 17 October 18, 2007
JASON:
Recorded live. Good Afternoon everybody. Today is October 18, 2:00pm here on the Eastern side of the time zone, minus 4 GMT for our friends overseas. This is the Church IT Podcast and we’re coming to you live, of course if you’re looking at the podcast later, you’re not listening to it live. That’s just the way it is. Today we’ve got a couple of things, the first is a SharePoint training opportunity that’s available to church folks and it is occurring, there will be some blogs soon, January 7th-11th, a 5 day SharePoint that’s going to be delivered by the president, and he’s got so many Microsoft certification initials at the end of his name, it’s awesome. Bill English from Mind Sharp, who is a heavy hitter SharePoint training provider. He’s offered a free weeklong training to church IT folks. So that’s incredible, he normally charges $3,000 plus $200 for materials so this is quite the opportunity. We are going to try to host it here at Grange Community Church in Southbend, IN or maybe over at Willow Creek, we’ll let you know. So you’ll have to cough up enough to get yourself here. Hey that’s a $3200 value for a low, low price.
Also, the number of slots we’ll have for this looks like it will be up to 40 people. Bill says he needs each person to bring their own laptop (yeah right, like IT people would go anywhere without their own laptop! – sorry, transcriptions’ comment – couldn’t resist J The requirements of the laptop are 2 Gigs of ram and 20 gigs of free disk space. He will be providing an image to us, so a gig and a half of ram is going to be completely used by whatever image he give to us, so he will also have some laptops available for rent, but I’m assuming most of us have a laptop to bring. We’re going to keep the cost as low as possible, we will provide lunch.
One question obviously is what will the training cover? We’re going to focus it around the free SharePoint services which is a product right inside of Server 2003, we’re also going to throw in some SharePoint Designer in that as well, and then at some point talk about the differences between the free SharePoint and the full-blown server, which is often called MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). So it’s going to be a great week getting some amazing training and you don’t want to miss it.
Are there any questions?
New Speaker:
I threw a comment into the Talkshoe window – is this for church employees of a church ministry and we’re not doing outservice, right Jason?
Jason:
That is correct. It’s only available to employees of a church organization. So if you’re out-sourcing your IT, we can’t do those folks.
The date again is the week of January 7th – Friday the 11th. I’ll get some stuff out on the blog, I’m sure we can talk Tony into getting some stuff out on his blog and I’m hoping that everybody will really promote this thing. There are people that read your blogs that are not reading mine – it’s true, ha ha.
We haven’t determined yet how many from each church might be allowed to come, I know that will be a question, it probably will depend on how many of the 40 slots get filled up, so you may be able to bring more than one person from your church, with the hope that maybe in the future, Bill will be able to offer some more training again. He has offered several SharePoint books, he’s got an amazing resume, if you go to www.Mindsharp.com and click on About Us, you’ll get a little bio on Bill. And the cool thing is that Bill’s a believer as well, so really sweet that he has agreed to offer this.
New Speaker
Have we given any thought to some sort of Adobe Connect if people can’t get there, they can glean from some of it?
Jason:
Ooh, good question! That is certainly something to wonder about.
Speaking of Adobe Connect, there aren’t a whole lot of us in the Church IT Roundtable IRC (?) Channel but I know Andrew, I don’t know who else in here is a frequenter of the IRC Channel, but I talked a little about Adobe Connect and Andrew mentioned this product called dim dim www.dimdim.com and it’s like a free, opensource Adobe Acrobat. It’s currently in Beta so I signed up for the Beta immediately and we’ll see how that may help the future with what we’re doing here, Talkshoe may go away and we might be able to use this free dimdim product to do the chat stuff, it can be logged, wouldn’t that be nice. If you wanted to see a web cam of each of us, that’s possible, I wouldn’t recommend it though, ha.
Justin Moore is also a frequenter of the IRC Channel. Hey Justin, can you tell how people join into the IRC Channel? Or Andrew?
Justin or Andrew:
The server is freenode, and it’s the CIT RT Channel, the exact specs, yeah CIT RT is the channel. So if you download MIRC or a client called Chatzilla or extension for Firefox and put in the freenode server and CITRT. (Transcription note – I have no idea what he’s talking about so I apologize if I didn’t get all those right.)
Jason:
And it runs 24/7. I’m using Xchat as a Windows IRC client. Periodically I’ll see what people are talking about inside there and give my 2 cents worth.
If you’re interested in J San Development, we are working on it in the Church IT Roundtable IRC Channel. Come join us!
Any other questions about the SharePoint stuff?
Speaker:
Will it be starting at entry level or do we need to have a certain level of expertise?
Jason:
You need to be a SharePoint expert to come to it! Ha, no, you just need to be familiar with what SharePoint is, but my assumption based on the information I have right now is that if you’ve never installed it before, that’ll be part of the training. Good question.
Speaker:
One thing that is interesting too is that Bill had talked about the differences of the free services versus the paid server and what are the advantages/disadvantages and then kind of critically think for the church organization which product is best and do we need to make that investment or not? I’ve gathered too that it’ll not only be “how to use SharePoint” but “should you use ShrarePoint” and how to think about implementing it also.
Jason:
So get that on your calendar now, I probably wouldn’t book an air flight until we know the exact location, but get it on your calendar and budget and tell other churches, it’ll be good.
I want to say welcome back to David Russell, it’s good to have him back, he has a new kid, congratulations!!
Alright Chris, I’d like to turn the mic over to you and maybe give a bit of background about yourself and your church and your wireless network and why you chose Aruba, etc.
Chris:
Chris (transcriber’s apology for not being able to understand what he said for his last name) from Calvary Chapel Melbourne. I’m married, no kids yet, pray for us. We are in the process of deploying a campus-wide wireless network. We’re about 7,000 people and we’ve got 6 or 7 buildings on our campus here, so we started looking at deploying a wireless network. Before this we had a hodge-podge of all kinds of stuff that had to be individually figured, so we began looking at a system that would allow us to do centralized configurations and control, and I gotta tell everybody I am blown away by how amazingly easy, fast, and secure Aruba has been. To kinda give you the low-down on the way it works, it’s got a central AP controller that sits in our server rack right off of our core of our network and what’s sweet about the whole system is you only configure this controller. It took about 30 minutes to get it up and running using WPA and basic stuff. We’re working on setting it up to be a full certificate-based TKI network so we don’t have to worry about a key getting lost or somebody leaving. You don’t have to configure anything at all on the individual AP. You plug them into your network anywhere, and they do a look-up for Aruba Master and at that point they TSTP(?) down all their firmware, their updates, their configurations, everything. The slick part is that we have public wifi as well, we don’t have to extend our V-Lans and stuff all the way out, you only have to deal with your V-Lans right at the controller because everything is handled right through your controller.
Jason:
Which other system did you look at besides Aruba?
Chris:
We were going to go with Calubra (?) and I didn’t like them as much because they didn’t have the same central controller idea. They have a controller for doing configurations but not a controller for doing all the network traffic. The way Aruba works, it doesn’t actually have any of the AP, doesn’t have any kind of an encryption engine or anything on it, it can antenna, so it tunnels everything back to the controller and then the controller handles everything.
But we’ve just been so impressed by how fast it rolls out. Somebody asked about pricing. To start, it is pricey, because you’ve got to pay for that controller, but after that, each AP is pretty inexpensive. I pulled the quote up because I knew somebody would ask. The base station, and again, we kind of felt really blessed, I have a really cool sales guy that I’ve worked with for years, we were seriously a day away from pulling the trigger on Calubra and he called me and said, “Aruba just called and said they will match the price of Calubra.” Normally that controller is like nine grand for the back-end base controller but they shaved it down quite a bit for us. And then your AP’s are around the $250 mark, which sounds like a lot but for us, the integrated system, we had all these AP’s all over the place that we were trying to manage and take care of, it was a nightmare so we have really enjoyed this system. It’s probably a little pricey if you’re not looking at a large deployment.
Jason:
How many access points are you guys managing?
Chris:
At the moment, we’ve deployed ten, but this controller will handle 48, so we’re going to be coating the whole campus over the next 6 months or so. There are a lot of other options out there, but we’ve been really thrilled with this one. The staff can’t say enough because these things get a lot better coverage than anything we’ve used to date, so now we’re down to one AP per floor of our school building.
Jason:
Are the radios, can you get them in ABG or are they G only? N?
Chris:
They do ABG. I’m not sure if they’re doing N yet. You could google Aruba network and find out.
I think they are fabulous.
Speaker:
What was the number of access points, Jason, do you remember?
They had one per section and I think there are 10 sections on the main floor and each section has it’s own, and then there are other in other parts, I think it was around 15-20 just to the auditorium, and those were directional and uni-directional.
Chris:
The other really cool thing I wanted to tell everybody about is that it does something called Rogue (?) AP detection, the day we lit this system up, from the controller, it will show you everything that it’s listening on. I guess the AP’s at a certain interval when they are not busy will shut down and go into a listen-mode; it’s just totally cool. It spits a report out for you that shows you all the AP’s in its listening range. When I worked at DOD, we were looking at these guys because they have an option you can purchase where it will actually attack any rogue AP and take it out.
Speaker:
Two things I’d like to throw out there from the SharePoint side of things. I recently had to recover from a full SharePoint. We had our BM meltdown, thanks to Dell, it ate all of our BMs but all the data was backed up, but I can attest that it is possible to recover, we were able to bring everything back up on line from our SharePoint environment pretty easily.
Tony had a SharePoint meltdown not too long ago, and it took him a while to get back up and running.
Chris: (I think)
We have just went production with SharePoint, last week we finally unveiled it and got the production and development side, so we’re actually starting to use it. As expected, we released it to the general staff during budget time, and sure enough I’m getting support help tickets asking how they can do stuff with SharePoint, etc.
Our administrative assistant has also become our SharePoint queen here in IT and she can tell you she loves and hates it, because we have 18 active sites. We have two different SharePoints right now, an intranet, the internal one that only staff uses, and we have a form space authentication that we deal with our ministries on.
Mark:
I just installed SharePoint last night for the first time.
Speaker:
Two questions about both topics. One, Jason, what are you doing if anything to “lead your users to water” with SharePoint to help them have success? And for Chris, what tool if any did you use to identify placements of the AP’s on campus? We have one area in a basement that’s a significant space and obviously multiple AP’s are not going to cover it, so we’re looking for a tool to do that.
Chris:
We brought one of their AP’s in, the vendor I work with is really cool, they came in and we used a free software that will give you a flat read-out of what the signal to noise ratio is and we walked around with that, I don’t remember the name of it, one of the wifi tools. We walked about and did signal to noise ratio and it converted that to what we expected to be our output. One of the slicker features, we haven’t started using it yet, but if you plug in the dimensions of your building, and put approximately where you put your base station at, it will show you the coverage map. They’ve got a lot of neat little things; it will track wifi handsets as they walk across campus. So if you’ve got voice wifi phones and you know what a person’s phone mac is, you can actually watch them hop from AP to AP.
Jason: (I think)
I just saw a product, we’ve got 16 access points and they are not centrally managed and it doesn’t make me happy if we ever need to change anything on it. But Airwaves is a large company that manages just about anybody’s access point, and it was the same thing, he was showing me a live demo of their facilities and you could see laptop users moving around the building. So that’s all part of that controller unit for Aruba then?
Chris:
Yes.
Speaker:
We looked at the Cisco wireless management that does, I guess, what Aruba does. Did you look at the Cisco one as well?
Chris:
We looked at Cisco a couple of years ago and I just hadn’t seen a whole lot that had changed, and I know their price tag is usually a lot higher.
Aruba’s pricing, like I said, it steep up front, I got my AP’s for like $230 each.
If anybody out there wants a demo or a run-through of the system, I’d be more than willing to set up some sort of screencast or something to walk you through some of the features.
Jason:
We will have screen capturing at some point on this talk cast, we’re gonna get something in place to be able to do that because I think that will have huge value.
Does the Aruba have any hotel or airport type guests page built it?
Chris:
It actually has captive portal. I’m totally unprepared to talk about this at a high level but it has just about everything you can think of. All the AP’s support multi SSID so you can set up multi SSIDs, target each at a difference V-lan, you could even tunnel one of those SSIDs or V-Lans out to your gateway, like for our public access, we tunnel them out of our network so they don’t have access to any of our internal stuff which keeps us from having to have a second Internet connection. It’ll do captive portal, you can choose which SSIDs are subjected to captive portal and which ones aren’t. It’s pretty comprehensive. And you can tweak the captive portal pages yourself, so you can put your own graphics and whatever else you want on there.
Speaker:
Right now we’ve got a nomadics Gateway device that handles all that for us but it doesn’t manage any of the access points so if you’ve got separate systems, and if one thing will do it, those are the types of products that I’m looking at.
Speaker:
I’m assuming the AP’s have to be Aruba brands, they can’t be any other enterprise?
Chris:
Absolutely. Although if you think about how the design is, I don’t know why you would want to use anybody else’s, the AP’s are really just dumb radios with an Ethernet cord hooked up to them.
Scott:
We use Blue Socket and I think the prices are about the same as you’ve mentioned for Aruba and similar features. You can use other vendors AP’s with it but you lose a lot of the cool management tools.
Speaker:
Andrew, you guys are using Cisco, are you using any of the Cisco management stuff?
Andrew:
No, we are pushing out TFTP right now, that’s why when you mentioned that Airwaves looks interesting, but no, we just have one config that we push out to it, not centrally managed.
Speaker:
Definitely check out Airwaves. He showed me a list of compatible access points. I haven’t got final pricing from them yet, but the list price was like $5,000 to manage up to 25 access points. I don’t know what kind of a discount, there is a non-profit discount, don’t know how much.
Going back to what you had said about SharePoint, we’re just kinda playing it by ear to see who comes to us with interest. I don’t know who is going to manage the beast. I’d like to push management off to each department so that could turn into a train-the-trainer model where IT would train super-users in each department. Right now we’re just waiting to see who comes to us.
Speaker: (sorry, I’ve lost track of which speaker is which)
I can tell you what we did, I actually got our finance people and HR people heavily engaged, we moved all of our forms and things people were used to finding in the file server, we moved up to our SharePoint and that got people used to going there and it just grew from there, different people got interested. I think the fact that you can quickly search it makes it really nice as well.
Speaker:
So can you give us guest access to see the structure of your SharePoint site?
Chris:
Sure!
Speaker:
When you’re describing Aruba, it sounds like you’re describing the next level up from what we have which is Sonic Wall. Did you look there? What did you gain with Aruba over Sonic Wall.
Chris:
I didn’t even explore Sonic Wall.
Speaker:
Chris do you know how many simultaneous users Aruba radios will handle?
Chris:
I don’t know that there is a system limit. You would probably hit bandwidth limit before you hit user limit. I don’t know.
Speaker:
As we’ve been reconfiguring our wireless network that has become a very important piece of the puzzle, how many people can you get on a radio so you don’t have to stick lots of radios in the same location. Which brings to mind the company Meru. www.meru.com Supposedly all the access points run on exactly the same channel. I wish Tony was in Chat live so he could tell us more about it, I think he has talked to them. Supposedly it is designed to handle large amounts of people all in the same location.
Chris:
One of the things they so is dual radio, which will help cause it gives you 2 54-meg channels that you can run on in the same area. Everything we’ve done so far has been single radio.
Tony is posting in the window that he will have more on Meru later, he is only in initial conversations with them so far.
There are a lot of people in the IRC channel now!
Speaker:
Chris since you have SharePoint up and running, can you move a site up or down tier level relatively easy?
Chris:
I have no idea! I haven’t tried to do that yet, but I bet there’s a way, probably by doing an export then import movement.
Speaker:
It would be helpful for the rest of us to see what other people are structuring SharePoint for staff and also for volunteer access, even if that’s a simple screen capture, but maybe next time we could do a screen sharing thing to see how you’ve got it created.
Chris:
Sure, what we’re starting to do, we have our own IT SharePoint site and we keep all of our volume licenses there, log of back-up tapes. We are looking at ways we can do some different inventory type things using SharePoint, so lots of possibilities.
Speaker:
We’ve discussed doing a wiki and server change log and network change log and then that wiki alerts the staff involved with that and it actually sends you a screen shot of the wiki so you can see what that recent change was.
Jason:
The more we play with wiki, it’s cool!
Well, lots of people want to do something with SharePoint, I think it’ll be good.
Speaker:
We used our Intranet home page, the announcement block, you can override the alerts as an administrator but we force an alert to all staff for the announcement. So when we post an announcement on the homepage of the Intranet, it simultaneously goes out as an email to everybody. We found it to be really useful.
Jason:
Can it almost replace all staff emails, where the announcement section on the homepage of SharePoint bam goes out to all staff? It seems to make a lot of sense.
Jason:
Somebody in the chat window is asking about the SharePoint server. It’s not that much money for the full-blown server, we are budgeting for it right now to go for the full-blown thing, the real cost is the client access licensing. If you want the Enterprise Client Access license, the non-profit price is $30-some bucks per user but it opens up a whole world of possibilities where you can have your own personal SharePoint site with all my information, it’s got Excel built in. I’m sure we’ll talk about all that during the training.
Chris:
One of the things that I discovered, you can deploy the same data multiple ways. Like with our ministry site, we deployed it and there are 2 way to get to it, an internal way which uses Windows authentication and we have the extranet view of it which is form space, which gets around some of the licensing hiccups.
Jason:
Now we are envisioning have a landing page so everybody outside would go to this page, have a link for volunteer that will shoot them over to the form-space authentication site to log in or if they are staff it’ll route them through that way.
Jason:
Someone is asking how much server power do you need for SharePoint?
Chris:
It’s gonna depend, if you split up the load between a box and sequel server, you won’t need too much.
Use the SharePoint backup! Don’t rely on sequel backup! I’m using SharePoint services, we’re not actually using the office SharePoint server, so I wrote a batch job that dumps my entire server every night. It’s an easy command, I’ll drop it on my blog right now. You just create a batch job and schedule it through Windows scheduler and I have it dump it to another server every night.
Speaker:
We are noticing some extremely long initial load times on some of our ASP sites, usually just the first time its loaded and from what I’m reading it has to do with having to reload the entire site, is there anyway to stop this.
Speaker:
There’s no real good way to get around it. Every time you start your server, it’s going to repopulate the cache. I notice it first thing in the morning, our website does the same thing. There might be a way to force it not to clean the cache up as often, I bet there’s a way for us to override its clean-up routine.
Jason:
Thanks so much to Chris! Appreciate your input!
Chris:
Over and out.
Jason:
What else, we’ve still got some time.
Speaker:
On your blog, you were talking about your X-san (???), I’m just curious why you’re looking at Apple products?
Jason:
One of the things I’m trying to do, we’ve got lots of storage and nothing is being backed-up, a lot of it is being created on Mac’s, huge final-cut projects, so the Apple Xsan has the ability to allow multiple editing stations to read from the same blocks of data at the exact same time. You can have a recording of one service that you want to create media from, several gigs in size, you don’t have to copy that file, they can all see the exact same file on the san, each editing station has a fiber channel connection into the san and they can edit off that same file at the same time. That’s the power of the Apple, you can’t really do that with any other storage solution.
Speaker:
I was the demo for the EqualLogic system, those are impressive. I see what Apple is doing and that’s something I haven’t’ seen anywhere else.
Jason:
I was thinking why not put all of our eggs in our Xsan basket so all storage lives in a huge Xsan… But Jennifer, their sales rep said it will NOT do all those things. You can’t run VM’s on an X-san. It is not designed for small files. That’s how it’s tuned. So that was an eye-opener.
We had the same issue when we were talking on the phone with Apple guys, they actually recommended to send somebody on site because we were asking questions that they didn’t know. So Jennifer was here and did an awesome job.
Speaker:
For what it’s worth, we did get project quote numbers from Apple and their ballpark to get into the solution to do video editing and be able to use the same source files in multiple sessions, you’re looking at mid $50’s. I think you can do it a little less, it was a more costly solution than I thought it would be.
Jason:
You need fibre channel controllers, you need fibre channel switches, you need at least one meta-data controller, a back-up controller, and additional file server, and so on, it adds up. You need a private Ethernet network for the devices on the X-san.
Speaker:
What are we going to back this stuff up on when it’s such an isolated appliance on your network.
Jason:
Apple’s recommendation is that you put an xobyte (???) tape library into the X-san.
Speaker:
If they are recommending you put in a dedicated Ethernet network anyway, but it’s fibre channel.
Jason:
The files get shuttled around on the fibre channel, but all the devices talk to each other over Ethernet. It’s complicated, but you know, show me another storage area network that will allow multiple editing machines on the same giant large files. I’ve heard that EditShare will do a similar thing.
Speaker:
There is a product out there that we’ve looked at that is software based but runs on the xrade that gives some of the sharing ability, it’s called FibreShare and one of our guys is looking at it. www.fibreshare.com
Jason:
The no-brainer is we go with EqualLogic for our giant storage pool. The downfall is the price. We’re looking at Data Core, Intel, IBM, still a number of people in the mix.
Speaker:
Can you use the EqualLogic for video production?
Jason:
They said there are 3rd party tools that you can install on a Mac or Windows that gives you very close to what the X-san will do.
That still doesn’t talk about disaster recovery.
Anything else?
Our next meeting will be November 1st.
Speaker:
Quick question for you Jason, what version of Service Desk do you use?
Jason:
We are using a version that doesn’t exist anymore now that they’ve gone to Version 7.
Speaker:
If you were Pro in Version 6, you automatically get Enterprise in 7. Less than $1,000.
Remember that you are calling India, literally, for support and they are difficult to understand. And it’s 3 months into the new version release and we haven’t received it yet, but it’s a great product other than that.
Jason:
They have changed the pricing structure in Version 7. Charity pricing is still under $1,000.
Speaker:
This is something we’ve been looking at at NCP for sometime for how, we just needed to handle the influx of requests from our people, so we had a volunteer approach us about building us an application, it’s in the middle of development, he’s going to release it as a monthly service. We are trying to respond to some of the things we thought were lacking across the board in helpdesk. I can keep you posted on that development.
Jason:
We’ll probably put the SharePoint training on the blogs, spread the word. We need to nail down location, then we’ll start registration, hopefully within a week or two. The training itself will be around 9:00-5:00 each day, then we can coordinate evening activities or what not.
See you next time. I will continue to do the blog reminder.
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