Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

I've Removed The Daily Tweets

I've changed my mind and decided I like the idea of Twitter.  Since I don't have time to craft as many large blog posts, it gives me the opportunity to let you know what I'm up to in short blurbs any time of the day and it's so easy to do.

The problem is that some of you (many/most?) could prob care less about the non-IT events of my life and thus I'm going to spare you from having to read about it ... plus it's adding a lot of 'noise' to my blog posts.  So I've disabled the 'daily tweets' from posting to my blog. 

However, you can still read them if you choose to do so.  Why would you?  Well, you'll get some insider info about IT stuff I'm working on that wouldn't actually make it to a full blown blog post.  You'll also get the inside scoop on personal stuff like diet, our current home buy/sell situation, and other goofy or random things that I feel like sharing :-)

So if that interests you here's the link to my daily tweets where you can view and also subscribe to the RSS feed.  I've also added a widget that places my 10 most recent tweets in the sidebar of my newly redesigned blog site.

See, it's all about providing options to make everyone happy :-)

Another Reason To Buy Dells

... they come in great boxes perfect for moving :-)

I'm glad we hung on to all these empties ... we'll use them all.

sticky post: Church IT Info and Links...

Are you involved in IT for your church/ministry? If so you really need to check out our active Church IT community at http://churchITnetwork.com. Here you'll find other like minded IT peers from across the globe sharing tools and best practices in efforts to push the Kingdom forward.  ALSO MAKE SURE you're subscribed to the Church IT enewsletter. Here are a few select quick links as well:
- Listen/join the Church IT Podcast
- Join the 24/7 Church IT Chat Room

MozyPro Pricing Increase and MozyEnterprise

I got this email yesterday from a MozyPro salesdude about our account ... the gist is a HUGE price increase is coming :-(

"As a valued customer, I wanted to provide you with advance notice of a new MozyPro backup offering. March 2008, the MozyPro service will expand to include both a desktop and a server license.

The MozyPro desktop offering will run exclusively on desktop operating systems and will maintain the same low monthly price of $3.95 per license and 50 cents per GB.

The new MozyPro server offering will be available at a monthly price of $6.95 per license and $1.75 cents per GB. In addition to all the features found in the desktop offering, the robust MozyPro server product offers: 

• Desktop and Microsoft Windows server OS support
• Network share support (only available with server      license)
• VSS writer backup and restore to Exchange, SYSVOL, and      Active Directory  

Here's how it will affect you as a customer: 

New server and/or desktop licenses purchased including storage purchased and assigned to these licenses will fall under MozyPro's new pricing and product plan. 

Existing MozyPro licenses and storage on your account will be "grandfathered" and pricing will remain the same. Any additional storage purchased and assigned to a grandfathered license will retain MozyPro's existing pricing plan as well. Grandfathered licenses will retain existing features, functionality, and support. 

Take advantage of MozyPro's current product pricing:

Any licenses and storage you purchase before March 1, 2008 will be grandfathered. That means you'll lock in the current MozyPro license offering and price!

                                       

#   Server Licenses	#   GB	Grandfathered   Pricing per Month	New Server Pricing per   Month
1	10	$8.95	$24.45
5	20	$29.75	$69.75
10	100	$89.50	$244.50
20	500	$329.00	$1,014.00

If you anticipate needing additional licenses, purchasing now will save you money. If you switch your account to one of the discounted yearly or two-year plans, you will save at least 10% more as well.  Now is an excellent time to save money on our service. 

Please contact me with your questions, to purchase more resources, or to take advantage of one of our discounted plans."

Don't forget non-profits also get a 10% discount as well ... or at least they did.  Guess a good thing can only last so long.  An approx quadrupling in price seems ridiculous to me, but what do I know.  Thank goodness for the grandfather clause :-)

Also to note is the newer MozyEnterprise product line ... what caught my eye about this new offering is the local pre-population of data before you start backing up over the wire.

MozyEnterprise is a new offering based on the award-winning Mozy™; family of online backup SaaS solutions that became part of EMC with the October 2007 acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems. MozyEnterprise is an enhanced, highly scalable online backup and recovery solution that has been made enterprise-ready with several new features important to enterprise customers, including:

                   

• Enhanced security through RSA, the Security Division of EMC™ including integrated key management, authentication and authorization security features
• Rapid enterprise-wide deployment options such as assisted activation, auto-activation and proxy support as well as physical seeding up to 2 TB for larger devices to speed delivery of first backups and facilitate rapid rollouts in an enterprise environments
• Enterprise-class availability and support options tailored to meet the more demanding performance and availability needs required by large organizations
• Economical off-site data protection for remote servers, desktops and laptops located anywhere on a network—comparable solutions cost up to 10 times more than MozyEnterprise.

MozyEnterprise powered by EMC Fortress is available immediately in North America through EMC and its reseller partners. EMC plans to offer MozyEnterprise to its partners and customers outside of North America later in 2008. MozyEnterprise requires no minimum contract and imposes no fees for early service cancellation. Monthly subscription list prices are:

                   

• Desktop/laptop - $5.25/mo. per desktop/laptop plus $0.70/mo. per gigabyte protected
• Windows Server - $9.25/mo. per supported Windows server plus $2.35/mo. per gigabyte protected

Guess I'll be making some calls to Mozy this week and see what makes the most sense for GCC.

EqualLogic Lunch and Learn Friday 2/22 postponed

In case you were not already contacted directly, the Lunch and Learn we had scheduled for tomorrow (2/22) at GCC has been postponed to a later date.

Foxit PDF Previewer For Outlook 2007 ... ROCKS!!

After getting tired of all the updates that Abode Acrobat Reader nags you about weekly it seems, we dumped acrobat reader from our software build last year.  In it's place is the free and extremely fast Foxit Reader.  And when I say fast I mean fast.  Acrobat takes an eternity to open a PDF compared to Foxit ... seriously, the time your staff will save over the course of a year by not waiting on Acrobat is significant.  But don't take my word on it, do your own comparisons.

So, I love Outlook 2007's ability to preview many files right inside of Outlook ... what a time saver!!  But PDF attachments still required launching Foxit outside of Outlook ... which is still light years better than if we were using Acrobat, but still it's annoying.

This week Kyle did some digging and found out that there's a Foxit PDF previewer available for Outlook 2007! w00t!!  Only catch is that currently it's only Vista compatible.  Since most of our staff are on Vista that's a moot point for us.  What's also nice is that it's already an MSI so we'll be slapping it into SCE to push out to all our vista boxes soon.

I immediately downloaded and installed the previewer (which was just a few clicks of the next box) and was soon enjoying the sweetness of viewing PDF's right inside of Outlook.  This so rocks and is such a win ... and yet another time saver.  Of course I'm kicking myself for not going out and hunting for this months ago.

So if you're still using Acrobat Reader and are tired of the slowness and barrage of endless updates you need to checkout Foxit Reader.  And to take your Outlook experience up a notch install the Foxit PDF Previewer.  2 thumbs up for Foxit from me :-)

Reminder: Church IT Podcast TODAY at 2pm Eastern!

Hey, don't forget we're doing another live interactive Church IT Podcast Today (Feb 21) at 2pm Eastern.

If you hadn't heard: You can now join the talkcast without downloading the client ... 

"(Jan 8th 2008) TalkShoe released a new version of software highlighted with a Web Based version of TalkShoe live. This new client (see below) requires no download and is a one click option from any web browser. The client enables both participates to join in and host to start and run their calls. Guest do not even have to register to join in the chat or call in on the phone. The download version is still available for use of ShoePhone and more robust chat. See here for other key new features."

Possible Discussion Topics:

- MinistryTECH and spring RoundTable updates

- Kewl Tools ... what tools are you using to make your life (and those you support) easier, better, more efficient ?

- What are your plans/ goals / initiatives for 2008?

- Other topic ideas????

Otherwise, it's an open forum baby!  Bring your questions/topics and let's run them through the mill.

ALSO NOTE: we now have ALL of the podcasts transcribed ... yup episodes 1 to 23 ... please help edit the content for product names, spellings, URL's, etc.  More info here

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

Blog Turns 3 Years Old

Feb 19, 2005 - my first blog post as the IT Director for GCC a year and a half after coming on staff.

Back when I started the only other church IT blogs I found were Terry Storch and Terry Chapman both from Fellowship Church ... oh and Brian Bailey who was on the web side of things at Fellowship.

Then ever so slowly a new church IT blog would surface, then another, then another ... today there's a good 80+ church IT/web related blogs.  Clif Guy is trying to keep an active list of 'em here.

Why did I start blogging?  Here's what I put in that first post:

I've been kicking around the idea of having a church IT focused website since coming to GCC in late '03 as I've found few resources on the internet geared towards church IT ... and so I hope this blog will provide some means toward that end.

I think/hope I've stayed pretty close to that initial vision.

For those that like stats here's a few for the past 3 years according to typepad:

835 posts
2,148 comments
239,468 page views

Here's what feedburner shows for subscriber count over the past 3 years:

And the breakdown on what RSS reader you all are using as of Tuesday:

Regrettably I've really slowed down my blog posting in the past year ... just too many things competing for my time.  So thanks to everyone reading this little blog.  Hope it's providing some value to you from time to time ... if you are ever bored the archives have some good stuff.  I probably google my own blog daily to find something I've blogged out prior :-)

Some Stuff

Here's just some random stuff for ya ...

• Back to Dell Laptops
  I've switched us back to Dell for laptops.  We've had a bad rash of hardware issues with the Lenovo's I got last year.  We've also found that they require more user training ... the access connection tool is sweet, but it's not intuitive.  So it's back to Latitude D830's as our standardized laptop. 
  
  
• We drop Symantec and Webroot for Sophos
  As we were gearing up for implementing Vista, I took a close look at our anti-malware solutions (Symantec and Webroot).  We evaluated several other solutions and narrowed it down to Microsoft's Forefront Client Security and Sophos Endpoint Security.  I wanted a solution that would give us a single interface to manage all things client virus/spyware related.  Forefront was a beast on backend requirements and it was still in RC1 when we were testing it.  Sophos in comparison didn't require all sorts of backend beef and has been around for years.  I know many giant school systems using Sophos and their IT guys always give it good reviews.  Long story short ... we're using and liking Sophos.  I got a killer deal at under $11/PC.  Sophos is very resource friendly and the console is also easy to navigate to manage/push/update end clients.  Sophos can also manage client firewall settings and block file types from launching ... handy if you don't want certain apps being loaded/installed.  The new version 8, now in beta, even includes NAC ... nice!  The other nifty feature is that your licensing includes at home use rights.  So all your staff can install Sophos at home if they want for free.
  (yes yes, Macs don't need to run malware software ... yet.  When it becomes profitable to do so Macs will be targeted).
  
  
• Done with Facebook
  I've pretty much given up on Facebook.  My account is still out there and my blog gets pulled into it, and I will respond to messages people leave, but I'm not go to do anything more in Facebook.  Not enough ROI for the time.
  
  
• Reduced Blog Reading
  Along the lines of Facebook, I've cut my blog reading back to ~10 blogs I try to check daily.  The rest of the list just piles up for a while until I get some spare time.  At least during this season in my life blog reading has taken a back seat.
  
  
• We've started watching LOST
  All my friends are big LOST fans, but since I didn't get in on the ground floor I've not bothered to watch.  Now that you can watch, for FREE, all the past episodes via abc.com my wife and I decided to see what all the fuss is about.  The HD streaming from abc.com is sweet!  I installed the abc client on the macbookpro, connected a DVI-HDMI cable to our 30" HD Sony and it looks amazing.  Yes, my wife and I are now hooked on LOST :-)  We watch an episode or 2 every night ... and are now just starting season 3.  What a great husband/wife show ... action, drama, suspense, romance, mystery ... actually I think my wife is more hooked than I am.  I wish you could skip the commercials in the stream, but alas no.  For free HD streaming I can live with annoying commercials ... for now.  I hope all the networks get on this free HD stream bandwagon.
  
  
• Goodbye Cable?
  Recently Comcast yanked The Discovery Channel from their basic cable package ... which has made me very ticked.  The only real reason to have cable for our family was Discovery ... GRRRR!!!  I'm bummed to miss some of our favorite shows, but I can't see forking out an additional $ 35+ per month.  So I plan to dump cable, dump Tivo and build my own PVR.  More on that later.

20 Pounds ... Away!

After being stuck hovering around 200lbs for 2 weeks ... man that was frustrating ... this weekend I up'd the workout routine and it paid off :-)

So this marks the 20lb lost mark ... yeehaw!  I've dropped 3 belt notches, my energy level is higher, obviously I feel better about my health/look, my clothes that used to be tight are loose, my appetite is reduced so I get full much faster, etc.

I'm telling ya ... celery and salsa is a winning combo for a tasty healthy snack!

I've still got some distance to go, but I'm getting there.  April is the end of our Church IT Biggest Loser contest ... I may not win, but I'm in the fight :-)