Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

REMINDER: interactive Church IT Podcast Thursday November 1st at 2pm EDT (-4GMT)

Hey, don't forget we're doing another live interactive Church IT Podcast this Thursday (Nov 1) at 2pm Eastern.

Discussion Topics:

- I will have some more details for everyone about the recently announced free SharePoint training ... it's a GO!

- Ryan Clevenger from North Point will do a little Q&A about their IT makeup (almost 400 Macs) and is also interested in discussing using Google Apps as an enterprise solution.

- Albert Martin will be in my office to give us some background on his iWorship software, now in public beta, and do some Q&A.

- Tony Dye has some sweet news re: podcast transcription

Otherwise, Thursday is a open forum.  Bring your questions/topics and let's run them through the mill.

Interested in joining this live interactive podcast?  You should be!
Want to hear past podcasts?  Of course you do!
Get all the deets on the Church IT Podcast Wiki

* NOTE: that when you call into the TalkShoe conference bridge please don't use option #1 ... which logs you in as a guest and in the chat window you show up as "City,State" ... not helpful in identifying who's talking :-)

ALSO ... don't forget Ed Buford is doing a webinar with VMware about GCC's implementation and use of VMware server over the past 2 years ... Thursday/tomorrow 9am Pacific

Possibilities

Please don't have liquids in your mouth when you read this new demotivator poster from despair.com ... said liquid contents will eject from your nostrils.

iWorship now in free public beta

Seems like every month I get an email asking what software GCC uses for the lyrics and backgrounds on our mongo screens ...

Prior to 2007 we were using ProPresenter.  Of course, with any software you always find things you wish it did better ... and thus iWorship was spawned.

One of our interns took that "wish list" and decided to write his own software ... which we started using Jan 2007 for our weekend and midweek services.  Since then he's been tweaking on it and now is ready to move it into beta testing with a larger audience ...

"After nearly a year in development, I am happy to announce that iWorship has finally moved on to public beta stage!

iWorship is lyric presentation and management software for the Mac with a beautiful, intutive interface and rock solid stability. Even in development, iWorship has been undergoing real-world testing since January at Granger Community Church being used in both the weekend and midweek worship services. The stability of iWorship speaks for itself as there was not a single crash or major crippling bug experienced during this time.
For a brief overview and screenshots of iWorship, visit http://www.renovatiosw.com/

iWorship is in need of some beta testers to use this program in as many different real-world environments as possible and report back on the results. I am looking for bug reports, feature requests, or usability questions to help improve this program before it is released. If you currently use another worship program, how does iWorship compare? If it doesn't meet your needs, what specific features would need to be added to make iWorship appeal to you?"

So if you're interested in checking it out head over to http://www.renovatiosw.com/ and tell 'em Jason sent ya ...

New GCC Tech Arts Blog!

After lots of prods and encouragement over the past year I'm excited to announce that Adam Callender, GCC's Technical Arts Director, has finally started blogging!!  Wahoo!

Adam's an amazing dude leading an incredible team ... and it just so happens we all get to hang out together in the same office space ... sweet!  While I hear of other churches where IT and Tech Arts are butting heads, here at GCC we have a great relationship.  In fact, our teams go out for lunch together every chance we get to swap stories, experiences, talk shop, and tackle the world's largest problems. 

I'd encourage every church to get your IT and Tech Arts teams meeting together regularly ... with Tech Arts continued migration of A/V equipment to IP based communications and their increasing dependance on Macs, it's a no brainer that these two teams should be chatting with each other.

So pass along this blog link to your A/V folks to get the inside scoop on Tech Arts stuff at GCC :-)

Here's another shot of one of the new Studer boards Adam's team is working to install ... my kids are going to LOVE messing with these when no one's lookin'  ;-)

Upcoming webinar about Granger's use of VMware Server

Our very own Ed Buford will be giving a webinar November 1st about our virtualization strategy and how the free VMware Server has made a monumental positive impact for our organization.  If you've not yet dived in virtualization consider this 1 hour event a must attend :-)

Event:	Granger Community Church Gets more out of IT with VMware Server
Date and Time:	Thursday, November 1, 2007 9:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)
Program:	VMware Webinar Series
Duration:	1 hour
Description:	Learn how an Indiana based community church leveraged free VMware Server to support a quickly growing IT infrastructure to quadruple CPU utilization, free up hardware resources and achieve 10:1 server consolidation. Attend this webinar and hear Ed Buford from Granger Church discuss how VMware Server and Converter provided the perfect solution to help their small IT staff and limited budget. Guest Speaker: Ed Buford,Granger Community Church VMware Speaker: Azmir Mohammed, Senior Product Manager SMB Company description Indiana-based Granger Community Church was founded in 1986 with the goal of providing a place of worship for people who were not currently attending a church because they saw church as too boring, too intimidating or just not relevant to their lives. The approach struck a chord, turning Granger into one of the fastest growing churches in the country

No work 4 me 2 day

In very rare fashion for me ... took the fam on a last minute impromptu trip to Chicago last night ... I've badly neglected them the past weeks.

Today we're at the Museum of Science and everyone is excited for the Star Wars exhibit.

We're thinking we'll hit Dave and Busters if it's not too far for dinner and games before returning back home late tonight.

Makin' memories!

FREE SharePoint Training! ... Interested???

OK ... so there's lots of us talking about Sharepoint these days ... pros, cons, etc.  Check this out!!

As mentioned last Thursday in the Church IT Podcast -
What if you could attend a 5 day SharePoint training course taught by a well known and respected Microsoft Certified SharePoint Trainer, author and MVP ... for ... FREE!!??
NOTE: This same training goes for $2995 + $200 for training materials!

Interested?  Good grief you should be!!

Bill English has offered us church IT folks an incredible opportunity!  Who is this Bill character?

An author and educator specializing in SharePoint Products and Technologies, Bill English (MCSE, MCSA, MVP, MCT) is an industry leader on this exciting product set from Microsoft. Since 2000, Bill has authored 11 books on Exchange and SharePoint products and is currently working on another book with Microsoft Press.

Bill is the co-owner of Mindsharp (www.mindsharp.com), a company that offers top-notch educational opportunities on the SharePoint platform.

He has presented at Comdex, The Microsoft Exchange Conference, TechMentor, TechEd, Advisor Live, TechEd Europe and Networld Interop. You can find his blog at his AdminCompanion book site.

Bill lives in Minnesota with his wife and two children where he enjoys boating, photography and summer.

I'd say that qualifies Bill as an uber expert on SharePoint :-)

Details are still solidifying, but here's what's known at this point ...

• This training will happen the week of Jan 7th ... Monday through Friday 9am-5pm.  Put that on your calendar like right now!
• Slots available for up to 40 folks who are directly employed by a church/ministry ... sorry, no outsourced staff
• Each person would have to bring their own laptop.  The requirements are 2GB Ram and 20GB free Disk space ... 1.5GB of the RAM will be completely used by the image that will be provided to you.
• Cost will be kept as low as possible ... whatever it takes to cover lunch and maybe facilities usage during the day.
• Training will be focused around the free SharePoint Services product, but will also touch on the benefits that the full blown SharePoint Server can offer.  We'll also have a day or so on SharePoint Designer.

Presently we're looking to host this here at Granger Community Church ... but location could still change.  We're trying to nail down this piece ASAP.  Mega props to Fady over at Willow Creek for getting the ball rolling on this!

What we need to know -  DOES THIS INTEREST YOU?  What other questions do you have?  Please comment below and give us feedback.  Your feedback will help customize this training opportunity.

Also ... please help spread the word about this opportunity via your blogs, email, etc.  More to follow... 

50TB!? part II

Continuing on my prior 50TB post ...

After a conference call with some Apple enterprise folks last week, today Jennifer Miller was once again onsite to chat with us about XSAN stuff.  Jennifer is an Apple Systems Engineer and not only does she know her stuff but she's also an excellent communicator.

So for 2 hours we chatted and drew stuff on the whiteboard to flesh out how XSAN works and what makes sense in our environment.  Very early into the discussion Jennifer let us know that XSAN would not do everything I was wanting ... rats!  But I really appreciated that honesty.  At the end of our time Ed and I feel like we have a really good grasp on all the pieces (and there are many!) that make up an XSAN.  It's a very slick yet complicated technology.

Here's what our first step into an XSAN would most likely look like ...

In the end the XSAN doesn't meet my "one place for all data" model, but for our video needs it holds a lot of value.

Some other nuggets gleaned from our time with Jennifer:

- Apple recommends Exabyte tape autoloaders
- Apple recommends Atempo's Time Navigator backup software for the XSAN.  I'd never heard of it before, but it appears very robust and even has windows agents for SQL and Exchange.  Hmm!  Recall that another of our objectives is trying to get one backup solution for the entire organization.  Atempo deserves a closer look.
- XSAN is designed for big files
- XSAN can not support VM's running on the SAN .. DOH!
- Apple OSX Server Sofware Support covers all sorts of stuff including Final Cut and even Active Directory integration ... that's got some value. 
- OSX Leopard has much improved AD integration ... Jennifer said she'd have to kill me if she told me any further details.

So the XSAN is still on our radar as a possible solution ... just not the complete solution.

Contenders on our list currently:
Apple XSAN
EqualLogic
DataCore
Intel
IBM

Still more conference calls and onsite visits yet this month and the following ... yee haw!

REMINDER: interactive Church IT Podcast Thursday October 18th at 2pm EDT (-4GMT)

Just a friendly reminder that we're meeting again tomorrow (Thursday) at 2pm Eastern over on talkshoe.com for episode 18 of the Church IT Podcast.

Chris Kehayias will be talking about his recent switch to an Aruba wireless network at Calvary Chapel Melbourne.

I'll be announcing an exciting FREE week long sharepoint training opportunity just for us church IT folks!

Certainly we'll chat a bit about the recent Church IT Roundtables and such.

Rest of the time is open forum ... bring your questions/topics to discuss.

For instructions on how to join the live podcast jump over to www.churchITpodcast.com

Hope to "see" you tomorrow

My Blog Gets Hacked!!! ... well, sorta

As you have seen, Tuesday evening someone other than myself posted on my blog.  This individual was going to wait until I discovered it on my own, but the suspense was killing them ... so they sent me a text message saying, "look at your blog" ... then a few moments later I got a call from said individual saying the same :-)

When I saw the post I busted out laughing big time!  "Raul" is an inside joke that goes all the way back to my college days.  Even if this individual hadn't called I totally would have known who the culprit was.  Of course I was very curious how he got into my TypePad account ... I use a username that most wouldn't know.

So now ... the rest of the story ...
First off, Rob was one of my best friends in college (Taylor University) ... I completely blame him for my academic probation my freshmen year :-)  If you look up "passion" in the dictionary there should be a picture of Rob.  He has this incredible passion for life and his passion for Jesus is unmatched.  I could go on, but suffice it to say Rob and I are still great friends 15 years later ... crud, I suddenly feel older.

Anyways, Rob has this really old computer that basically is just something his kids use for games and such.  He also has just recently started to blog and decided to do some quick blog work for some crazy reason from his kids old slow PC.  When he went to the login page for Typepad ... taadaa ... my username and password were filled in.  What?

Why is are my credentials on his old PC?  We got to thinking and several years ago I must have been at his house and gave him a little show-n-tell on Typepad ... somehow I must have clicked yes instead of no for IE to remember that login info.  So for 2+ years nobody has bothered going to Typepad on that PC ... why would they ... until tonight ... and 2 years later that login info is STILL cached.  Amazing and scary.

I purposely don't let IE or FireFox "remember" any of my user/pass stuff for any websites on any of my computers.  Why?  Because it forces me to remember them and it also keeps the above senario from occuring.  So it's some sort of poetic justice that lead to these circumstances tonight :-)

I decided to not delete Rob's Raul post ... and instead make it an object lesson for us all.  Be very careful what you do on "foreign" computers ... you never know what info you might leave behind!