Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 5, February 16, 2007
JASON
Hello everybody. Today is Friday, February 16, 2007, this is Episode 5. 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 My name is Jason Powell, I’m the IT Director at Granger Community Church and I’ll be your host today.
First off, if you’re in the chat window, stick your name, blog address, church name, position, so forth into the chat window. If you are just in the phone only, just shout out your name, church, and position please.
Looks like we got a full house today. Welcome. The first thing I want to do is say Congratulations to David and his wife.
David
It’s wild! We are stoked! We are the fourth pregnancy on staff in the last 12 months.
Jason
We’ve had the same thing on the administrative team here. One is due today, one is expecting. Exciting.
David
This is our first, we are thrilled. Thanks.
Jason
Second, any Nascar fans out there? Nobody? You’re just not gonna admit it. Well, I’m not a die-hard fan, but I used to do some amateur racing myself, so I am looking forward to the Daytona 500 this weekend. TiVo is great. If you have not read anything about the IT technology behind the Nascar stuff, go to my blog. It is the most technologically challenging sport IT wise. All the tracking, etc. I digress.
Couple of things we want to talk about today, Kool Tools as usual, hopefully Tony can update us on the Roundtable, also, how are you keeping up with the fast-changing IT world, would like to talk about back-up, firewalls, maybe some VISTA Office stuff.
First, Kool Tools. Mine is YSPY, for $100, a little USB device that plugs into your laptop, shows your BG spectrum, really helps you figure out where you are having channel interference, check out my blog. That’s my cool tool. Anybody else?
Michael
Has Process Internals by Sys [? I couldn’t hear the name clearly]. It’s like a glorified Task Manager, you can track processes, you can right-click on a process and do a google search, and you can narrow down stuff like what came from what DOL, what initiated the process or thread. It’s pretty neat for fiber and that stuff and it displays it in like a tree hierarchy, where processes can generate [Time Stamp00:07:19] other processes.
Jason
We don’t have it out to all the desktops but we are gonna to make sure it goes out in the next reload because it is so much better than Task Manager. And it’s free. Just go to www.sysinternal.com or just Google it. Or Microsoft/sysinternals and all their tools are right there. They are powerful, most are single executable, the defrag tool automatically defrags your files right at the front. We’ve noticed some boosts just from running that, especially on laptops.
Michael
Also Sysinternals utility config, I use them for defragging VM ware and virtual hard drives. Did you ever do that?
Jason
No we haven’t tried that yet. It is on my list. Probably when we get new servers in, we will look at it.
On all our VMs, we’ve not done any dynamic stuff, we have created non-dynamic partitions because we’ve read the VM ware docs that say not to do that.
Are you guys running virtual server?
Michael
Virtual server. Looking forward to the service pack one of that. The biggest feature that I’m looking forward to is the volume [? Can’t hear him] You can back up your virtual hard drives while they are running, which is nice, you don’t have to take them offline. You are able to take a snapshot and back up the snapshot.
Jason
Cool. Anybody else?
Will
I recently played with the Windows add-on, I’m Will from Windsor Crossing Community Church in Missouri, I’m the IT guy here. I’ve been trying to figure out a back-up solution, look forward to talking about that later, but this is a quick fix on a few workstations, I had been told that Thinktoy [? I don’t know for sure what he is saying]. It allows you to run various back-up settings, echo a folder [Time Stamp00:12:54] onto several locations, use Windows scheduling to run that whenever you like. So that has been pretty handy. I downloaded it from Microsoft website.
Jason
Cool.
If everybody could put in your real name, your church, your website or blog address in the chat window. Lots of people in the room today.
Hi Nancy! Cheeseheads! Tell us about your environment there in Wisconsin there Nancy.
Nancy
We’ve got about 30 users and just trying to keep up.
Jason
I know how that goes. I’m glad to have a non-male member in our group. One of the things I’ve been thinking about, I had somebody send me an email saying they really appreciate the podcasts, but can we take a future one and dedicate it for really small organizations, or like if you are building a church for the first time, that sort of stuff. If we could think about, we’ll schedule a future discussion on it. I think that would be good to chat about.
I see somebody from Fellowship One. Awesome. See some familiar faces. Well, I’ve never seen most of your faces.
Let’s continue on.
Scott
I wanted to add Provantage, the vendor I use for most of the my purchasing. Compared to CDW, they have some good charity pricing, verses CDW, we’ve been happy with them with their pricing and turn-around. I’ll type their URL in the chat window. They won’t haggle pricing, but they are pretty good, we buy all our toner cartridges from them.
Jason
Excellent. Sometimes it’s nice to have somebody that won’t haggle. I’d rather not haggle. It’s exhausting, just give me your best deal and let’s be done with it.
Sp
Most of my vendors, I will only do business with them if I can compare prices. I’m not going to haggle over $100, just put your best price out there, if you are better, I’ll go with your company. That’s worked pretty well.
Jason
I’ve [Time Stamp00:19:53] hear good things but never used Insight. I know several people have used www.insight.com and they’ve gotten some good deal from them.
Sp
Is it me or are there always local companies trying to sell you toner. Always trying to beat prices, but just by a dollar.
Jason
Yeah.
Sp
I have to share a funny story that happened this week with a refurbished toner cartridge. The user thought we had put a dotted background behind all their printing and wanted to know what to take out of the printer to get rid of that dotted background, when really it was a refurb toner cartridge that blew up leaving smudge marks.
Jason
That’s funny.
Sp
We always have people calling trying to quote prices, but I’ve used CDW for 6 years, they give me good prices, deliver overnight.
Jason
We’ve got Tech Data sitting right here but I can’t get access because I’m not a vendor. That stinks. But we have two volunteers that have direct access, so, cool.
David
An update to our use of the Wildfire server, Instant Messenger server and their Spark clients, integration, we are also looking at another tool of theirs called Clearspace, if anyone is interested, just hit www.jivesoftware.com and check out some of their solutions.
Jason
Awesome. Thanks David.
I’m curious how people experimentation, trial periods, how all the anti-spam is going. I know some of you are using that Katharion, how is all that going? www.katharion.com It is a hosted anti-spam, anti-virus, disaster recovery solution where all your email is sent to an outside party to get washed of viruses and spam before it hits your email server. So at Granger, we are using Postini, which is similar to Katharion.
Jason Lee
We have gone from hosted to in-house, we’ve gone to Sonic Wall Solutions. [Time Stamp00:25:15] We like it a lot better because of the integration into Active Directory and don’t have the overhead. Sonic Wall nails onto your product, which is actually an appliance that they sale, it is less overhead for us.
Jason
Jason Lee works with one of our volunteers, who is an IT consultant, that is a neat story how that all came together.
Jason Lee
He has been a great help to us. One thing we learned about Sonic Wall, we had users that thought they was getting slammed with 20 to 50 pieces of mail a day that were spam, coming off of MX Logic, we didn’t have that, now our users are only reporting 1 or 2 pieces per week.
Jason
I’m curious to hear how that goes. Ours is Firewall also.
Jason Lee
Their pricing was competitive.
Jason
Good.
Jeffrey
First Baptist Atlanta, I’ve switched everything over it Katharion and it has worked flawlessly. And it is picking up some things that our Baracuda was not doing. It also has Active Directory integration and there’s no hardware, you just direct email through server and it comes already filtered out.
Jason
I know Tony is using it but he is not on the phone. C’mon Tony. He is at home today, we’ll give him an excuse this time. We’ll wait on the IT Roundtable update.
Another reoccurring thing, where are you guys going, who are you listening to, reading, whatever to keep track of what’s going on in the IT web technology world? What blog sights? If you could only pick a few places to get the information that I need, what would those places be?
Sp
Jason Powell’s blog. What else is there?
Jason
Ha Ha
Tony
I’m here now, I was going to give the same response.
Jason
Ed is not here today, he is vacationing at a water park with his family today.
Ok, real blog sights… one of my favorites is www.betanews.com [Time Stamp00:30:52] That’s where I go typically if I can’t read anybody else’s blog, beta news has a lot of great stuff, typically written really well, not a lot of bias.
Michael
I go to Bink, it is Microsoft centered newsite, get some pretty good inside news from MS, product news, updates, technology. www.bink.nu Also Channel 9, I’ll type it in here, it’s more for developers, but I watched where the developers are going, what to read up on, it’s good.
Jason Lee
I’ve used Slash dot. It’s more a general what’s going on in the industry.
Jason
Is there a lot of noise on there as well?
Jason Lee
Anything technology orientated, like Dell’s CEO, more of a corporate thing but
Sp
Dig.com I love it and hate it, but what I have found is if you filter out everything else except technology, it reminds me of the old Dig, really hard-core tech news. If you can wade through the garbage, it can be useful. Also I think an overall general technology, I love the podcast network. The stuff they do it top stuff. For me as a web developer, it is fun for me to listen to, it may not be broad enough for this group, but things like encryption, things like that, have been helpful.
Jason
I’ve got a list of podcasts to listen to, but I don’t have time.
Sp
When I’m doing certain tasks, I can listen to podcasts while I’m working. Of course something I can’t do with background stuff but some things I can.
Jason
I think if I had a work-out schedule, that would be a good time to listen.
Sp
Can you get those podcasts through the TiVo Jason?
Jason
Yeah, you can subscribe to any podcast through TiVo. The thing that urks me is you can’t pause or rewind, so I’m committed if I start it. I can’t pause if a kid needs something or whatever.
Other blogs sight? I used to be a big fan of Ingadget, but it is so filled [Time Stamp00:37:23] with noise anymore, I don’t check it much. So much irrelevant to me.
For Vista users, there’s a Vista blog, it is awesome, they talk about all sorts of stuff, tips and tricks, so I’ve learned a lot about Vista from that. The Windows Vista team blog. www.blogs.technet.com/windowsvista
Sp
For those Mac users out there, Parallels Desktop has a pretty good blog, you could Google it. All kinda of information about new betas and issues and I’ve found that very helpful. Just the other day, I had an expanding 8 gig virtual hard-drive and I tried to save a Word document and it told me Access Denied because I had run out of disk space, so I had to figure out how to expand that disk drive, and on this blog, it explained what I needed to know. That was really helpful.
Jason
I’ll also put a plug into the IT discuss, www.itdiscuss.org Seems lately we’ve had some good threads about all sorts of stuff. Check that out, subscribe.
Tony
I’m a good target, I will willingly step in there and let you shoot things at me.
Sp
Is the Google RSS feed working?
Jason
I’m just using it through the email stuff, I haven’t done anything with the RSS feed on it yet.
Tony
I do regularly go out and look at the Yahoo group for church admins, which is a painful thing to go through, 50 to 100 messages every day, a lot of noise but occasionally some really sharp stuff in there, and I figure this is what the administrators of churches across the country are using. I look at the questions that are dealing with and every once in a while, there are great IT questions on there and no answers so I’m trying to re-direct some of those people to IT discuss. Just a heads up, it’s interesting place to explore. I can do [Time Stamp00:42:29] something on that on my blog.
Jason
And tell us about the CHMS group too Tony.
Tony
For those who are really interested in church management products, we’ve got a discussion list over on Google and we’d love for you to join it and jump in. One of the things that comes off that church admin list, you can count on somebody saying something that they like or don’t like and it is amazing the responses you get. You will immediately get a variety of responses. It looks like everything is wonderful but I don’t think that is the case. A few of us are trying to figure out what is a good evaluation criteria. If that’s something that anybody in this group is interested in, please jump over there and help feed in and help save those other churches from bad church management software. It’s a scary situation when you think about the average church staff member and their lack of technical knowledge and their satisfaction with church management products. Sometimes they say, “Oh I’m so satisfied, I call them every day and they know me by name and are always helpful,” but I’m thinking, “if you are calling them everyday, something is wrong.” But they think that’s a good thing. So help save the world and join that discussion group. That’s my plug for the day.
Jason
Some entertaining threads as well, some good humor stuff as well.
Hey I just was Kim Myer join the group. Welcome. Kim is the Communications Director and she’s my boss too. This is her first Talkshoe experience.
Kim
Thanks Jason. Talkshoe is very cool, Jason is exceeding my expectations. I love it.
Jason
And it is recording everything we say, so hundreds of people will listen to it sometime. We are up to over 400 and some downloads of the shows we’ve done so far.
Kim
Do you send out an agenda before you have these?
Jason
Yes. Typically I push people to churchitpodcast.com which is just a talk cast category on my blog for now. And we never get through all the stuff we think we are going to talk [Time Stamp00:46:02] about it, but that’s part of the fun.
Kim
Thanks, I’m just gonna watch now.
[A few comments about a tattoo that I’ll leave out]
Jason
Also, another tool, Tech Net Magazine has some really good articles in it. There are many magazines that I encourage people to check out, but if you are a Tech Net subscriber, two thumbs up for it. It typically has really good articles. The other one would be Windows IT Pro, another great magazine, good articles.
Jason Lee
Sometimes Windows IT Pro is about a month or two behind.
Jason
Yes, I agree. But it is nice that you can go into their knowledge base on their website and look up some stuff.
Jason Lee
I think it’s only around $50 a year. They had a great article a couple weeks ago about setting up [?] and using second partition utility in Windows.
Jason
I missed that. Do you know what article?
Jason Lee
I have that magazine sitting off to the side because we are going to deploy it on a couple of machines here to try it, but basically what it does is creates two partitions when you are building the machine and it doesn’t allow right access to the second partition, then when the machine reboots, it calls for that partition to overwrite the primary partition.
Jason
We are getting ready to re-do everything we are doing with kiosks and figuring out how we want to restructure and reghost so I’m going to need to make a mental note about that.
If you find that article, would you email it to me? You don’t have a blog yet do you?
Jason Lee
No way! Nobody wants to hear what I have to say.
Jason
Lame excuse!
Jason Lee
I’m too busy reading your blog and Tony’s blog for me to have time to blog.
Sp
For those who don’t have a blog, use itdiscuss.org
Jason
And the nice thing about itdiscuss.org is that it is capturing everything so you can do searches on stuff, I’ve actually [Time Stamp00:50:04] went back to it and done a quick search to find something, I did that with the YSPY thing. I had deleted those emails, but went on there, found it. But I’m afraid to use my microwave now.
www.willitblend.com to be completely off the subject, quite humorous.
Sp
I’m putting that on my recommended resources from Jason Powell.
Jason
Time is flying. Let’s hop into back-up solution stuff. Tony, can you help me out? I want to ask, like some of you, I’ve got some home-users or some small business clients that I moonlight with that I’m always preaching back-up to, but I’m looking for free or cheap utilities. Anybody got a favorite back-up utility for home or small number?
Sp
For the home user, there’s Windows Live that does anti-virus, spam, automatically schedules defrag and also has a back-up feature. It’s like $33 bucks for a year.
Jason
Does it back it up offsite or just onto the same machine?
Sp
Either onto disk or the same machine. Other users have been happy with it to. It is not a system hog.
Sp
I always recommend Sync Back. www.2brightsparks.com It does a great job of synchronizing. I’ve got a file server and a laptop and it synchronizes all the files between the two, it has nice scheduling. It can compare and contrast one machine versus the other. You can choose which way to go to update, user-interface is real nice, solid program. They have a free version, but they also have one for $30. You can also do multiple schedules for multiple drives. There is also a program called Find On Click, that thing is the fastest find program ever, you can type in anything and it will scan your entire hard drive in about 20 seconds and show you the list. And you can try it all for nothing. Good quality.
Jason
Ryan, can you give us options [Time Stamp00:56:19] for backing up Macs?
Ryan
We use the mobile sync that is built into OSM server. But another great tool that we use is Synchronize Pro, I use that on my servers to create live back-ups or bootable back-ups once a week or whatever to an external or alternate drive. You can back up to the network drive or the attached drive. It’s a neat program. Another good one is the built-in Apple software restorer, which is built into the OS, if you look at the ASR page on the Mac, it is simple to use, we use it extensively for like cloning a computer to another computer.
Jason
Ryan is Manager of Network Systems at Northpoint, about 400 Macs. Ryan agreed to, on a future podcast, to talk about some of the details of how they manage Macs and imaging and how they lock them down and who can do what and stuff. I think that will be cool.
Sp
I can’t provide much knowledge in that area but that is something we are working on this year, our web is all AD based, to start taking the web form away from developers and start putting it in the hands of administrators.
Jason
Tony, do you have another 10 minutes? Can you lead on the back-up stuff then?
Tony
I have no answers! If we gotta go for 10 minutes, we are gonna have a lot of silence! Let’s see if I can even remember what the questions were…do you have a back-up strategy? The answer for all of us is yes, we do. What’s yours? Don’t get caught without one.
Jason Lee
I can share a nightmare, second week on the job here, our exchange server went down, I said, “We’ll restore from back-up,” my network admin said, “We didn’t back exchange up.” That was ‘welcome to my new job’. We have a strategy now.
Jason
I’ve had people asking about back-ups, how and what and I don’t have any great answers yet, other than the say we spend 2 months completely re-writing, re-thinking how we are doing back-up. Our volunteer, Dustin Hanison, he has taken on the project, he comes from a large firm with 200+ servers, so he understands backing up critical data and good tools, so he has evaluated about every back-up software under the sun, and we are very close to pulling the trigger on a product soon. So we’ve created a spreadsheet with the data we have, I think that is step one, figure out what data you have first, then start prioritizing. If your church burns to the ground, what data is it going to make people really upset that they can’t get to, that’s priority. Back it up religiously, probably cart it off-site, but we are still in the middle of wrestling with all that. I’ll stick that spreadsheet [Time Stamp01:01:43] on my blog. We are looking at Exchange, how often to back-up, and how often do you keep those back-ups on site, how often do you send them off-site, we’re backing up on disk and on tape, how long to keep all that around? What do you guys do Tony?
Tony
One thing I’ve learned about off-site back-ups is don’t take your most recent back-up off-site. Wait a week. I had a horror story, once trying to be a good guy, I was heading out of town with my family and I ran by the church first, picked up the weekly back-up, brought it home, locked it up, and we headed to Memphis. The next morning, I get a call from our guys saying they needed to recover a file from the back-up tape from last night. Nobody has a key to my house, I’m hundreds of miles away, and it was critical. So the most expensive recovery ever, I got on an airplane, flew home, took a cab, got the tape took it to the church, and still made my 8:30 conference.
I don’t remember the detail of what the file was. Nobody questioned that $1,000 round trip. So don’t take them off-site too fast.
I pull mine at the end of each month, I stagger them between on-site and off-site. I’m at home now looking at my off-sites back-ups dating back to 1994. At some point, I don’t need those anymore, and they are on media we don’t support anymore anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. How fast do you rotate through your drive types as your storage grows?
Jason
Yeah, lots to consider. Suppose somebody breaks into my house and steals the back-up tapes? Then you start looking at farming it out but I don’t know that I would trust them anymore than the likelihood of somebody breaking into my house for back-up tapes.
Tony
Bigger chance [Time Stamp01:06:15] of my house burning down than somebody breaking in, which is why I stagger back and forth between home and church. The stuff at church I keep in a safe.
Sp
I think keeping them in a safety deposit box at a bank is reasonable.
Jason and Tony
Yes.
Sp
But then you are limited by bank hours to get to it.
Jason
Good Point.
Sp
Keep in mind I’m from the corporate world, but keeping them at your house, I’m thinking of liability issues, you are holding the tapes at your house and what if a fire happens at your house?
Tony
That’s a real issue, that’s why we stagger.
Sp
Iron Mountain was trustworthy. We handed them a locked box, so the guy couldn’t get to it if he wanted to. And they are 24/7. I know that’s an extra service you have to pay for but it is your insurance policy when it comes to your data.
Jason
I think part of that is you’ve just got to take this to your supervisor and ask for help with it. Our Financial Director wants to know what’s happening with back-ups, we have chatted about what we’re doing and what would make him more comfortable. I think just capture your information and present it to the higher-ups and ask for help determining, like how much to spend to protect this data?
Tony
Getting that higher level interest could be a hard thing to do.
Sp
Let your Exchange server crash and not have a back-up, they become interested.
Tony
You almost need to fake an emergency to get their attention.
Jason Lee
I don’t have any trouble getting people’s attention with back-ups anymore.
Tony
One of the problems of being a church IT Manager is you sometimes don’t have a whole lot of credibility, unless you are an alarmist, then you lose credibility, you can’t win either way. We’ve joked about the best thing we could do to improve our credibility is to walk [Time Stamp01:09:57] into the server room and pull the power plugs on everything, wait 30 minutes and plug it back in, and we’d be heroes. That’s a sad way to build a case for how much down-time hurts, but it would work.
It’s just remarkable how when something goes wrong, afterwards, we look so good. I don’t long for things to go wrong, but it sure does feel good afterwards.
Jason
Yes, yes. Isn’t that funny. Somebody last week mentioned how our Executive Pastor said his machine was compromised, so nobody else really cares about security, but us, it turns out that nobody hacked him machine at all, somebody else’s wireless mouse was overriding his wireless mouse, so yes, somebody was moving his mouse without him doing it, it took a while to figure that out, but it raised a lot of excellent security points, and it raised it right at the Executive Pastor level, it has opened the door for a lot of great security discussion now. Here’s a list of what we could be doing with security. Kinda like that back-up stuff, you can try to get them interested, but until something critical happens, nobody really seems interested.
And it was the Senior Pastor’s mouse overriding from 40 feet away!
Jason Lee
On Traces’ blog a couple weeks ago, there was an article about IT Nazis, that was helpful to me, to help my supervisor get some perspective about why I am so meticulous when it comes to security.
Jason
Great point. I think we get paid to be pessimists. If somebody suggests we do something, I immediately start thinking of all the possibilities, nobody else considers the security issues, or back-up issues. But getting that higher-up is sometimes tough, but if you can get them involved, don’t make it overly complicated.
Does anybody have a back-up software that you actually like?
Does anybody actually like Veritox Back-up [Time Stamp01:14:00] Exec? What are you using?
Jason Lee
We’ve gone away from tape-based, using CDP and I think it’s working for us right now really well. There have been a few bumps in the road. The nice thing about the CDP, we’ve used it several times when a user deletes a file, I can say, “Which of the 12 versions of that file do you want brought back?” We are backing up Exchange, SQL, and more applications. I’ve turned the corner from tapes and not looking back.
Tony
What does that do to your Internet bandwidth?
Jason Lee
Right now, it’s all internal. We are going to purchase a second CDP that will be at my house. Hopefully we will be on the same ISP pretty soon, just up the bandwidth, but you can throttle it. It can set it up so that if one dies, you can bring the other one in and you’re up and going. We haven’t seen it affect our bandwidth. The back-up of a Word document is almost instantaneous.
Jason
We are doing somewhat similar, we are using Windows 2003 R2 in the synchronization feature inside of it, remote differential compression, so we’ve got a box sitting at my house, we’ve got one of our servers here, so we are replicating data from on-site to off-site. So we are looking at off-site storage solution.
Sp
I was going to mention that. We are interested in that here at Sunset, I was afraid to mention that because it’s an awkward back-up solution, but technically it works.
Jason
That’s what it is designed to do, to replicate this data set over yonder. So we’ve got a persistent VPN connection between my house and the church. These are large files too. We are backing up SQL and replicating it over. It’s just all experimentation. I don’t know if it makes sense to have [Time Stamp01:18:12] a server at my house.
Sp
Who pays for the power bill?
Jason
That’s one of the things. I’ve got lots of stuff down there, I’m not sure how much juice I’m pulling. I’m hoping we will eventually have not just one location but we’ll have our youth building set up on-site so if the church should burn down, we could replicate everything from the church to the youth building and vice versa. I have to think about tornadoes. Where should the servers be located? My house is only 3 miles from the church, so what are the probabilities? You know what I’m saying, a lot of questions to wrestle with. But first, figure out what your critical data is. Financial date, start with that, membership data, very critical. Then work into a solution.
Sp
One question I had was how are people backing up VM? It would be nice to back those up without shutting them down, is anybody doing that?
Jason
We are just putting the back-up agents inside the VMs and treating them like a real physical server.
Sp
That’s what we’ve been doing.
Jason
We have snapshots running on our san, so we’ve got not only those back-ups running but also those snapshots. For VM ware, the ESX route, you can do hot back-ups of your VM files, but I don’t believe there is a hot back-up with the VM ware server.
Well, we need to table that for now, we’ll talk about it next time. I think it is a hot topic.
Tony said Roundtable registration is going live this weekend. If you have not pre-registered, go to Tony’s blog and do that.
I appreciate everybody swinging by. We’ll see about getting Ryan to give some Mac wisdom in a future show.
Phones and chat will still be live.
Thanks!
Wow ... lots of people in the talkcast today ... 24 of us on the conference call and 22 live audio listeners ... thanks to everyone for participating.
Thanks again to David Russell for taking some notes for us all to look over :-)
And David also grabbed a short video capture of the chat window threads ... get it below
Download church-IT-podcast-chat-window-2-16.mov
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Church IT Discussions Episode 5 2/16/2006 - listen here
0:00 Intro
(Jason inserts: Congrats to David and his wife on their "baby on the way" announcement!)
3:00 NASCAR
4:30 Overview
5:00 Kewl Tools
Process Explorer by sysinternals - Michael Sainz
VM Discussion
SyncToy - microsoft.com - Will Richardson
Provantage.com - Scott Reichling
Insight.com - Jason Powell
CDW.com
Jive Software - David Russell
24:00 Anti-spam Solution Check-up
MX Logic - Jason Lee
Katharion - Jeffrey Thompson
28:30 Resources - What are you reading, watching?
BetaNews.com - Jason Powell
Bink.nu, Channel9.msdn.com - Michael Sainz
Slashdot - Jason Lee
digg, TWiT - David Russell
Parallels Blog - Will Richardson
ITdiscuss.org - Jason Powell
TechNet, Windows IT Pro - Jason Powell
Redmond - Scott Reichling
WillItBlend.com - Jason Powell
52:00 Backup Solutions
Windows Live Care
SyncBack - 2brightsparks.com - Jeffrey Thompson (See also "Find on Click")
For Mac: Synchronize ProX, Apple Software Restore - Ryan Clevenger
Tape Solution - bakbone.com - Ryan Clevenger
Backup Stories
Backup Strategies
Announcements
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Lots of continued discussion on moving forward with some sort of national church IT group
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