What's new?

Wahoo!  I'm on vacation until Jan 3rd!  I haven't had extended time off since spring so I'm interested to see if I can actually refrain from doing work from home.  Yes, it's sick and wrong, but I'm a work-a-holic.  Perhaps I should have Ed disable my VPN access.  I will have to go in at least a couple hours on the 30th to wrap up some purchases, but otherwise I will really try to disengage.

So here's a quick update on some of the stuff we've been working on recently:

Evaluating Track-It - Wow, this software is pretty incredible.  Version 7 came out last week and introduced software license tracking/auditing/metering.  Although the installation hasn't been as simple as we'd like, support has been good in helping us get the trial up and running smoothly.  Based on what we've seen so far compared to other solutions, Track-It will probably be my last purchase of 2005.  It appears to actually be able to be our all inclusive IT portal.  I do plan to read the Adminstrator's Guide over break as part of my leisure reading ;-)

Voicemail/Email integration - I finally got integrated messaging working between on new voicemail system and exchange.  Now folks have the option of having their vmail emailed to them as a .wav attachment.  How nice to never have to check voicemail again!  Of course I am curious to see how this effects our exchange store size.

WSUS - we've been testing WSUS for a while and finally have it ready for full-on deployment.  OU's are setup and now we'll just start moving computers into the specific OU's and breath a little easier that our PC's are getting regular updates. 

Webroot Spysweeper - although I was leaning to switch to Omniquad Anti-Spy, my Webroot salesman made me a good offer to stick with Spysweeper at Granger another year.  And now Spysweeper has a 100% guarantee.  Yep, they guarantee their software will detect and remove all spyware ... and if not they will custom engineer def files specific for your organization.  That's a pretty bold statement even if there's some fuzzy fine print.  So by not switching that's one less project off my plate.

Office12 - Both Ed and I have been using Office12 beta1 on our laptops.  And we've both determined that Outlook12 has some really nice features, but it's performance bites.  It takes forever to load and bogs down your system pretty hard...and I've even got 2GB ram!  It's beta so I can't complain though.  It's slow enough that I'm going to remove Outlook12 from my laptop as I just don't have enough patience.  I'll keep the betas of Word and Excel though as they've seemed to do their job just fine.  Looking forward to the next Office12 release.

Tony Dye - had a great phone chat with Tony last week.  It's interesting in that our 2 churches have very similar organizational structures (web, communications, technology) and we face very similar struggles/challenges.  One place they really excel is in IT training.  Check out their new staff IT training procedures ... great stuff! 

Live Streaming - we've been testing live internet streams of our Thursday evening and weekend services for the past 2 weeks.  So far so good.  It's surprisingly way more simple than I figured it to be.  All you need is a box with XP (2GHz w/ 1GB ram in our case), a video capture card (I choose the Osprey300) and install the free Windows Media encoder.  We're using ChristianVideoChannel.com as our stream distributor ... it's only $70/mo for unlimited streaming.  So you open the encoder software, click next to a couple wizard screens, and bam you're streaming. 

There ya go ... some of our recent projects.

Comments

[David Russell]

The Windows Media Encoder really is quite a useful tool. I use it to stream TV from my capture card at home across the Net to watch here at work. (Of course, only for special events or news-filled days.) :)

[Joshua Gregory]

How long until I get that magic link to the stream, Jason? :)