Here's some quick and dirty post show notes from today's talkcast over on talkshoe.com. Some great dialog ... thanks to everyone who participated!
Get the audio/mp3/iTunes downloads here
Hope to see everyone at the next talkcast on May 17th 2pm EDT
TODAY = 19 callers, 9 chat client only, 18 live audio streaming only
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Kewl Tools
Jason P - SpinVox.com ... converts your vmail into text and sends it to your email!
Jared B - Space Monger ... makes a graphical representation of your hard drive
William P - ACS Financial Module ... separate module (don't need other ACS software) that their financial folks say is better than Quickbooks.
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General Discussion
Some discussion about the need to gather church IT stats to help other churches with hiring decisions. I've blogged about this already here. I'm thinking of just throwing up a surveymonkey survey so we can start collecting some data.
Chris K - curious what CMS solution people are using? Like Drupal, etc?
Andrew M - switching from Joomla to Drupal. Suggested contacting David Russell.
Chris K - who's using outside hosts for CMS solutions?
Small discussion about a data center co-location. Chris K has rack space. [definitely need to revisit this]
Chris K - anybody using 316 Networks or Akami or other streaming solutions as he's saturating his 75MB pipe ... over 500 users @ 282Kbps. Several options mentioned. Neokast.com, lightcastmedia.com, churchquest.com and others.
Jason P - Who's budget does unexpected requests come from? Some helpful discussion followed. Consensus seemed to be that IT handles essential needs and then each department needs to budget for "above and beyond" purchases (like CS3). Tony talks about some details behind how he budgets ... very interesting stuff ... SHHH, he really didn't want to have this recorded ;-)
A good bit of post Church IT Roundtable discussion. DVD's should be available in a few weeks.
Suggestion to focus a future podcast solely to discussing what an Church IT Association "thing" might look like ... perhaps wait until we can get Phill Martin from NACBA or other organization leaders to take part.
Quick question about Sharepoint ... who's using it ... likes/dislikes
VMware now part of newest release of Ubuntu Linux
Jeffrey Thompson planning a Church IT talkcast May 4th 2pm Eastern ... see ITDiscuss.org for details
Cringley has a write up on Neokast here:
http://tinyurl.com/35l8vw
Posted by: Andrew Mitry | April 26, 2007 at 10:49 PM
Chris K, you can reach me at drussell -at- theaterchurch -dot- com. I'd love to take you through the best systems on the market (free and commercial).
Jason, from the looks of these notes, I think I should've been on this week. Bummer.
Posted by: David Russell | April 30, 2007 at 01:15 PM
Re: Kewl Tools
DirGraph is a good, small and free alternative to Space Monger.
I carry it around on my USB flash drive.
Posted by: wvpv | May 02, 2007 at 10:51 AM
On the topic of a CMS, I'd suggest checking out the free blogging software at WordPress.org. Very flexible, makes for a simple CMS, plus there are lots of plugins out there. We're using it for our "small church" site.
Posted by: Kevin | June 22, 2007 at 08:23 AM