Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 3, January 5, 2007

JASON

Hello everybody and Happy New Year. Today is Friday, January 5, 2007, this is Episode 3. We are a bimonthly live interactive podcast with Church IT staff and volunteers, just to get together and discuss news, tips, tools, technology, best practices as they related to church organizations and what we can do to further God’s Kingdom. We meet live every first and third Friday of the month at 2:00 pm EST on www.talkshoe.com. Check out www.churchitpodcast.com  We will be putting the pre and post show notes there.  My name is Jason Powell, I’m the IT Director at Granger Community Church and I’ll be your host today. Let me hit the unmute button for everyone.  Alright. We are live.

Jeffrey Thompson wanted to talk about some anti-virus stuff, such as are people testing the new anti-virus products, what are people using, what about home vs. office?  Are there any low-cost or free products that people would recommend? Are there products for both Mac and Windows?

I had a couple questions about small office, home office, back-up solutions, in addition to NT back-up that are maybe free.

Maybe we could talk about goals for 2007. Then I’d like to discuss this that we are doing. What do we call this?  A logo now that we are on iTunes.  Also thinking about having a wiki for this podcast so that many of us can add to the notes and such instead of just on blogs. We need one place to put it all on one spot, so we can edit and so forth.

Let’s use Kool Tools as the kicker for each episode.

Jason Ferguson

That is something that I can offer some services on. I mentioned before having the IT Roundtable website and wanting that to be a resource for us. It runs on dot net and it does have a wiki module available to it as well as blog and other items that might be of benefit. I think I could get a wiki up by the next meeting.

Jason

I’ve got a wiki running but I’m not ready to give the url yet.  We could come back to that  at the end of this discussion. Is anybody taking notes?

David

I’m taking notes. If anybody else wants to take notes, we’ll combine them at the end.

Jason

Great, thanks David.

Jeffrey Thompson

I jumped into that Katharion and that is working out pretty well. I put 30 users on it and it’s got a nice interface for managing multiple domains, and it so far has done a great job. It was considerably less than Postini, I have been pleased. Where we were at, the Baracuda was just [Time Stamp00:05:27] not getting the job done for us and this seems to be doing better.

Jason

Cool.

Andrew

We just got on the trial for Katharion last week and it has been really good with us too. We’re having a problem with the digest coming through but other than that, everything is running real well

Jason

What were you using prior?

Andrew

Just a built-in intelligent mission filter in Exchange, so it’s been a big improvement.

Jeffrey

Another nice thing in the set up of it is that you can pick and choose which mailboxes get filtered. You don’t have to filter everything, so you can have a gradual implementation.

Andrew

And they don’t charge for aliases, which is good for us because we have a lot of aliases.

Jeffrey

I think if you have a domain that receives email from, so you get 3 domains pointing the same mailboxes, if they have like an alias for a domain.

Andrew

You have to ask them for it.

Jason

Cool, good.  It seems to be quite a few churches are using it. I also heard that one of our volunteers is a Sonic Wall reseller and Sonic Wall bought somebody’s spam filtering solution and it’s where you buy the box and slap it in front of your network. He’s got it running at two different churches and they seem to be running great.

And some people were asking about Postini, it had been a while since I had logged into the Postini  Administrator interface and now they’ve got all these tools, and active directory [sound interference] tool set inside there that will synchronize with new users, so that if you add a new user into Active Directory, they automatically get added into Postini, and if you remove somebody, they get automatically removed.  We will use that at some point.

Good spam. Is that an oxymoron?

Jeffrey, let’s switch over to anti-virus. [Time Stamp00:10:08]  You had asked about new products, I am curious about Microsoft new product. It is in beta, we are thinking about trying it. Anybody played with anything new?

Sp

I found out about the ABG, free for home users, it has worked out well. 

Jason

I moonlight and on a home user, I put on ABG free, I’ve been using it at home for 3 years. I’m pleased with it.

Church-wise, we are using Semantic Corporate Edition, although we have looked at switching over to the Enterprise version of ABG.

Jeffrey

What would be a good one for the Mac and is there a free one, or does the Mac even need anti-virus? I don’t believe their commercials.

Jason

Tony will be on in a little bit. Tony requires all their Macs to have anti-virus if they are going to be on church network, I can’t remember what product. I asked our Mac guru volunteer and there are a few free ones, I want to say Clam AV open source. 

Sp

We were having a problem with Norton and are running Clam AV for free, seems to be working great.

Jason

I often get asked by Mac using, the perception from them is that we spend a lot of time fighting viruses and spyware, but for us that is not the case. We have anti-virus software and anti-spyware software on all the machines, and we don’t spent time fighting viruses or spyware. Are people actually seeing viruses on your network?

No?

Andrew

We were seeing them before we got Katharion put in, it would be highlighted in the Norton but it would get caught.

Sp

What spyware software are you using?

Jason

At Granger Community Church, we are using Webroots Enterprise version, however we are considering switching over to Microsoft Windows Defender.

Sp

Have you had problems with spyware before you did Webroots?

Jason

Oh yes.

Sp

We had problems [Time Stamp00:14:51] here as well and we are not running any spyware problems because in group policy, I made some changes and basically if you do the right changes in group policy and I’m not even running any spyware programs. There are several things you can do, with XP Service Pack 2, it allows more functionality but we haven’t done that network, but one of the big clinchers depending on what program you are running, you can prevent the users from [feedback and interference, couldn’t hear]

Jason

That’s good, here’s the other piece of the puzzle, we had nasty spyware also because everybody was a local administrator of their machine, so I think that in itself, once you take away the local admin rights, it should be hard for a virus or spyware to do anything.

Sp

The only problems I’ve had with that, iTunes just did it to us, by the way there is a fix to iTunes, they don’t have to be local admins to burn software. I found out through Quickbooks you can do a registry key-change and give them admin privileges on the program file folder, but they’ve fixed that, and iTunes came up with a patch.

Jason

That’s great to know. I hadn’t looked to see if Apple had done anything.

What’s your name and where are you from?

Stephen

Stephen Millendy from Meadowbrook Church in Okala, Florida. We are logged in under our pastor here.

David

Please take a second to type in your name, church, location, title, etc in the chat for the notes.

Jason

Try updating the java client.

Chad

This is Chad in Washington State First Baptist of Kennewick. I had to figure out the time change, it is 11:22, I’m getting hungry.

Jason

Cool.

Chad

We switched to MS Logic [Time Stamp00:19:08] for our spam filtering and we haven’t had any spyware or viruses since then. It has been easy to use and the price is good.

Jason

One of our volunteer’s company switched from Postini to MS Logic and they are happy with it, they switched because of the cost difference. I’m getting ready to do research and pricing when my Postini contract runs out in February.

I heard that McAfee does have a Mac client but the person I heard it from said not to tell anybody.

Sam

It might be incredibly unpopular and seem unprofessional to even suggest this, but we’ve been not running any virus for Apple for over 5 years and haven’t had a problem.  I’m not saying it will always be that way.

Jason

Cool.  I forgot, when I had a conversation with Northpoint guys, to ask them but I will ask them next time.

Is there anybody on the line here that is all or mostly Mac?

Sp

We are 50/50 here at Marcail.

Doug

This is Doug Hart from Saddleback. We’ve got a large Mac population and even though we’ve never had any problems with viruses, we run Semantic on them, and we are a Semantic shop for anti-virus on Windows also.

Jason

Great, thanks for joining us.

I talked with Eric, 2 or 3 years ago, we came out and he talked to the Internet Visionaries Roundtable.

Doug

I remember that.

Jason

Could you give us a little breakdown of your network and clients and stuff like that.

Doug

It’s has grown. We went through integrating the Purpose Driven organization into the church, so that has caused us to grow. Approximate, server-wise we are around 165, clients probably pushing 700, we can locate probably 65 of 70 Macs, and a few thin-clients [?] that we are getting rid of.  It keeps us busy.

Sp

Why are you getting rid of thin-clients?

Doug

We’ve had so many problems trying [Time Stamp00:24:56] to keep the citrix end working right, it’s just not worth it.

We use terminal services all the time but not for clients that actively run production.

2003 domain.

Jason

That’s kinda big.  The client count doesn’t scare me, the server count, whew! In my prior life, I was IT Director for a school system and we have 800 client but only 10 or 12 Novell servers.

Doug

The big advantage we have is that we are not a distributed environment, so that helps a bunch, we can get our hands on them

Jason

Are you running any Script Logic or other tools that run on top to help you manage stuff?

Doug

I’m not the network guy, so I plead ignorance on that. I just say, “Is it working or not?”

Jason

Cool

Let’s see Jeffrey, did we get most of your anti-virus questions answered? A number of people seem to be using the ABG free for home use.

Sp

We are using Computer Associates Enterprise, it’s working pretty well.

Jason

Any McAfee?

Sam

We are McAfee and we’ve been pleased. It is not without its faults but we’ve been mostly satisfied.

Sp

We are taking a look at Pccillin, the school system here, some of our volunteers work there and they are getting pricing for us on spyware and anti-virus.

Sp

We are using Office Trend.

Jason

When I last talked to our Webroot  guy about our licensing, Webroot now has partnered with SoFo and you can now buy an all-in-one where the Webroot client not only manages your spy sweeper install but it manages your SoFo as well, and the price for Sofo was very reasonable compared to getting it stand alone.  I’ve not played with Sofo but I know a ton of schools that are using and they swear by it, and in the educational market, if your school purchased it, you can give licensing to your teachers [Time Stamp00:29:13] and students for free. That may be of interest. They might do that for the church world.

William

Something to add, have used the Computer Associates and Trend Micro products, I can tell you that the technology in both of those is excellent, and Computer Associates is used to specifically support Macs, one thing about Trend Micro is although they have some of the best technology and fasted updates, they have very bad customer support. And they are different departments within the company.  Engineers and customer support are in totally different locations.

Jason

Good to note.

Speaking of support, one of the things I’ve found interesting, we have been slowly migrating our laptops from Dell to IBM and the one I’ve got the fan makes annoying noise, so I went on their support website and entered a support ticket online and I got a call the next day, got an American, all here in the states, the lady asked me to describe the problem, I told her how annoying it was and she said somebody will be there the next day to put a new fan in. So I was surprised that I was talking to somebody in the States.

The thing that IBM has to do is make their stuff look cool, so the Lenova laptop, I can stand on it and it’s fine, all the other bells and whistles, the thing looks like a huge spreadsheet.  It doesn’t look cool.

Sp

But think about the world we live in, phenomenal products are the iPod, the snazzy looking laptop, you have to expect that. It has to look cool. 

Jason

I was dumping Dell and going thinkpads, but I’ve stopped because I’ve had more than one user asking about the appearance of the thing. So I started looking at it, and I agree, the logo looks like it is from 1970, it is just not cool looking. When you compare, I’ve got a brand new widescreen thinkpad sitting here and I bring [Time Stamp00:35:03] in one of those widescreen Macbook Pros and sit them side by side, and I guarantee everybody will pick the Macbook Pros because of the look.

Sp

You’ve described the experience we had at Marcail Church where we only had a few Mac users when I came in and I made that an alternative to use an Apple, my research discovered support costs for Apple are lower than PCs, so we had a lot of PC users making a switch.  We had a lot of people convert over, now we are evening out.

Jason

Are you using terminal services so that they can do aps that aren’t running on OS.

Sp

Where that is the case, if they need an application that they can’t get to, they’ve been running parallels, and now we are switching everybody over to the VM ware on the beta, and they are totally psyched about it, now their laptop has become not only aesthetically pleasing but functional in both computing worlds. It has become a Swiss Army knife for our admin type people.

Sp

How much time have you guys wasted trying to teach people how to work the Macs though?

Sp

Almost none.  Just a couple of “where do I find” or simple things.  Nothing enormous.  Our philosophy is to put the best tool in front of the person to do their job, so if they are more comfortable working on a PC, that’s what we give them. If it’s Apple, that’s what we give them.

Jason

Cool. How many machines you guys got out there Sam?

Sam

About 70, maybe 80 clients. About half Mac.

Jason

Are you running Xserve?

Sam

No we don’t have any Apple server hardware running.  Otherwise everything in plain Jane, we’ve got  a few boxes running around, other than that it is pretty straight-forward. 2003 RD2 server, it gives us some advantage.

Sp

How are your Macs connecting to your network?

Sam

SMB and for our wifi we are using certificate authentication for security so when people log in, they are using their domain password to authenticate on the wifi network.

Sp

Do you have digital signatures disabled?

Sam

I don’t know what you are talking about. What is that specific too?

Sp

We are having a problem integrating our Macs under the domain and there was two choices, either add Apple Talk or disable digital signatures which Microsoft recommended not doing.

Sp

Just turn off your security so your Macs will work.

Sam

I can’t say directly how we did that but if you’ll email me, I’ll send it to our network admin and he can answer.

Jason

Cool. We turned on Mac sharing in the Windows 2003 settings and we had to do something, I think when we rolled up to 2003 R2, we couldn’t apple all the security settings because it broke the Mac sharing piece, but that’s been so long, I don’t remember the details, I just remember there were some settings we could not apply.

I think this Mac thing is going to become a reoccurring topic, we will have to keep talking about it to make it work well. We’ve decided that Final Cut Pro is what our video guys are gonna standarize on, we have one person still using Vegas, but mostly Final Cut, it is a Mac product, we are going to figure out how we can help those guys interact with the network. I wish  Entourage was a decent product, maybe the new version will work 100%.

Sp

They say the Mac version of Office is 6 months behind the Windows version so we’ll probably see it later this year.

Jason

Or maybe Apple will do something with Leopard [Time Stamp00:41:43] that will take the Mac mail client and make it more integrated with Exchange. That will be interesting to see too.

Sp

Over here at Marcail, we are using Entourage. The way Macs are set up, the users authenticate using what Exchange provides for oha [?], so that oha is delivering the connection for Entourage. The biggest challenge we’ve had is that there are some calendar issues, but minor, we think we have it figured out.

Jason

Let us know when you have that figured out.

Sp

Our Mac users are just using Imac with the Mac mail client to connect.

Jason

I don’t get to hear from our Mac users enough to hear if they’ve tried using Entourage and if it is working or not, but we had an instance where Entourage would just do this endless synchronization loop, so stick your Mac laptop on the network and it would delete everything in the Entourage client and start resynchronizing everything off of Exchange, and once it got to a certain point, it would do it again.

Sp

Are you using Exchange mode?

Jason

We’ve got it turned on for the Windows client. I’m not a Mac guy, I don’t know, even what options are available. If it is default, that’s what they were using. We’ll just hope Entourage gets better.

Sp

Does anyone know if it will support http or rpc? The new version with Leopard?

Jason

That would be nice if it did that.

Sam

Yes, it does support rpc and http.  I can double-check that, but I’m pretty sure.

Jason

I’d like to know how to configure that. Sam, you’ve got a blog right?

Sam

www.bloodthirstysinner.com I don’t update it very often. The problem I find is that as soon as I end up writing about something, I realize that anybody can find that information with Google, so there’s really no point in me sharing [Time Stamp00:46:51] my what I think is unique and interesting, when I start and look at it, I realize anybody can do it.

Sp

But I think that is the nature of blogging, on any topic, I think it’s you taking your slant to the problem and even if you are rehashing, I don’t think you need to avoid that because there are going to be variable situations, and if it weren’t for people producing content, Google would have nothing for content anyway. I think it is worthwhile to shoot those things out anyway. I get tons of comments on stuff that I thought was nothing.

Jason

Absolutely, I’ll second that.

See if a bunch of us have irrelevant stuff, it becomes relevant, to us anyway.

Sp

There’s our name for our podcast, The Irrelevant Technology Broadcast.

Jason

I love it!  We could probably devote next time to hashing through Mac issues. I’d like to get some of the guys from Northpoint to field some of these questions. But they are not using Windows domain.

We’re about 10 minutes on the countdown. Let me throw this out.  So one of the things I’d like to talk about here in the ending moments, so we’re doing this podcast thing, it is cool, I enjoy it, I’m hoping it is a great resource, but I’d like to see it expanded. Let’s supposed I wasn’t involved in this podcast and somebody told me that there’s this gathering of church IT guys talking about the challenges we all face, I’d want to know and participate, I’ve got to believe there are umpteen people around the world like us that would want to know more about that. We’ve had 143 downloads of the two shows so far, that tells me people are wanting to listen to this stuff, which is weird in itself. But I’d love to see this move in new directions. I’ve been talking to our communications folks about a way to market it or create some blurbs we could [Time Stamp00:51:37] send to some magazines that other church leaders would read and pass on to their IT people. We saw what the IT Roundtable did in September. I had to turn people away and that was done with no advertising. Tony is doing the next one, and it sounds like tons of people have signed up already. I think if we advertised this stuff, an overwhelming number of people would get involved. So I’d like to land on what do we call this thing, you need to understand it when you see it. Church It discussions is pretty clear but it’s kinda long, I’d like you think about what we call this thing, do you agree with the fact that we should be looking at getting a wider audience, passing this info on to other church IT folks, and having a cool looking logo art that is used on iTunes and the talkshoe website and to put on our blogs. What are your thoughts?

Jason Ferguson

We’ve talked about this offline before, we had started this conversation, we went a longs in the direction of the IT Roundtable, I’m not saying that’s what it should be. Take a look at the website, we went with a blue theme, but initially our meetings were all about roundtables sessions, it seemed appropriate to call it the IT Roundtable.  I’ll put the url out for it and let me know what you think.

Jason

That brings up a good question, do we use the word church in the title? I’d be more likely to listen to something that said church IT rather than just IT in general. There are a gazillion IT podcasts out there.

Sp

I’ve been thinking about that this week, there are so many angles you can go with.  If you did not include church term in the name, we could cater to a larger crowd, but there are a lot of variables. But we also need to be as specific as we can about our motivations and goals, I’m reminded of Godbit.com where a lot of Christian web [Time Stamp00:55:56] developers go and their goal is to increase web standards in the Christian web master community. That’s a very targeted, specific goal and I think they do a good job. It’s open to anyone but the idea is that specific vision in mind.

Sp

Small churches will be more likely to look at something that says church IT.

Jason

And if the word church is in there, it might convey a more collaborative environment. Our heart is ministry, here at my church and to help other churches, and I want to learn from churches larger than us. A lot of value in that.

Sp

I think that we have a common heart and a common overall leader that we are serving, that if you take church out of it, it’s just gonna be another IT thing. We could all be making a whole lot more money somewhere else if we wanted to but that’s not where God called us to be, if it were me, I wouldn’t do the podcast if it wasn’t a church thing.

Jason

Good point.

Sam

I would say too that there are specific challenges and tactical issues pertaining to church IT that really makes us different from other shops.  We have to focus on church management systems and specific information and the uniqueness of the message we are trying to extend really puts us in its own status.

Sp

And I think we have, when you look at stewardship relative to what we do, it’s not like making your budget in the corporate world, our people are giving to God and we have to take care of that.  [Amen from the transcriptions]. 

Jason

For sure. I’m hearing we keep the word church.  I’m totally on board with that, that confirms what I was thinking. Keeping the word church in there actually helps, if I’m a church IT guy and I see it, that looks interesting.  Now here’s my differentiation between IT and Tech is I see a lot of stuff on the web that says Tech that is [Time Stamp01:00:47] Tech Arts. I lean more toward keeping the IT part of it as being significant.

Sp

There’s a suggestion there, if churchit.org if that is available, that might be a good one.

Sp

Yeah, tech is way too broad.

Sp

Eli brings up a really good point, apparently there are 999,999,999,9999 IT podcasts out there. I like churchit.org.  Something short in terms of url would be nice.

Jason

Churchit.org has been gone a long time.

Sp

I’ll list a couple url’s later.  I guess we should get something going as to what to call it as well as the url.

Jason

Right, our communication guys are so much better at this than I am.  It’s all about branding.

Sp

Are we going to have, do you want to keep this centered around your blog Jason? I know a lot of people in the community read that and keep up with it. Would you want to do a dual thing, your blog plus an official site? 

Jason

From my standpoint, I don’t want it to be the Jason show. I like having the content on my blog because I know 400 plus people are hitting it regularly, maybe it is drawing some interest.

Jason Ferguson

The web tool is my passion, that’s what I do for a living, so I’ve been working in the background on revamping the IT Roundtable web site, if we need to rebrand it whatever that’s cool. I can operate a lot of those things for free and operate as the hostess service for this community.

Jason

Cool.  We’re running out of time and it’s Friday. Great dialogue.

To get back to David’s question, let’s suppose we make it it’s own entity, then I think of wild things like wouldn’t it be cool if we had a church IT organization where you pay a small membership fee, cause there are other church organizations like Church Business Administrators.

Jason Lee

My boss here at Seacoast is an active [Time Stamp01:06:29] member and he talked to us about helping us organize and they were interested in the idea of trying to get that started through them, so they were open to helping us out since we fall under that organizational structure at the church.

Sp

And we have gone down that road and created a corp but we haven’t used it for membership dues or anything like that.  If we pool together, we should be able to leverage a lot of the resources we already have. Like NCBA or having vendors sponsor financially as well as resources.

Jason

Exactly. I was surprised at the last Roundtable that vendors would pay for meals and gave away iPods and stuff. I think there is a market out there. Microsoft is even looking at the church market. I’ve got these dreams.  I think it is cool that we are thinking bigger, we want to see it grow.  There’s a lot of challenging stuff that goes with that.

Maybe next time we can chat some more about this. I think I’ll just call it the Church IT Podcast for now. Start working on a logo, it needs to be 300 x 300 pixel logo, just get some ideas, the word church and IT needs to be in the logo. Somebody suggested the Chit Chat, ya know CHIT as in church IT.  T-shirts.

I gotta go. The lines will stay open, the chat window will stay open. I appreciate your dialogue today.  Within about 10 minutes, it should be on iTunes and you can download it directly from Talkshoe.com.

Thanks guys.  Every first and third Friday. Continue to leave comments.  Thanks to David and Andrew for the notes. 

Another great show ... thanks to all who participated!  We had 19 live (phone) participants and 21 live streaming audio listeners ... that's 40 people!   Already the show has been downloaded 18 times in the past 2 hours since the show aired ... amazing.

We've decided to do this every 1st and 3rd Friday afternoon at 2pm Eastern ... so mark your calendar now!  Block out 2-3pm for the recorded show and 3-4pm for the post show dialogue ... come early and stay late :-)

After the show about 10 or so of us continued to yak for another hour ... we're considering also recording the "post show" chat as there's some great discussion going on then as well.  Would people listen to a 2 hour podcast?

You can listen to the audio here ... http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=6983

Thanks to David Russell for gathering the following info and notes on the show ...