Curtis over at Fellowship Tech passed the following IT job opening along ... if you or someone you know might fit the bill check it out.
Seeking IT Pro with Passion for Tech and Local Church
Are you searching for a career with true meaning? A job that allows you to use your God given talents to empower the local church through advanced technology? A job where everyone you work with shares your passion, drive, and intense work ethic while keeping in check the priorities of God and family before work.
Last Wednesday I had the privilege of unveiling our new GCC IT Best Practices document at our weekly all staff meeting. I was also allotted a very short amount of time, 15mins, to go over the document and educate our staff on anything IT related they should all know or be reminded of.
It's very rare that IT gets center stage to present at an all staff meeting ... last time was when Indiana changed time zones back in March of '06! Being so rare, I had to ensure I covered all the key items I've wished I could publicly address to our entire staff ... however, in such a small time space only the essential items would make the cut.
The actual presentation took 17mins almost to the second ... would have been a tad shorter but 2 people asked questions ... how dare they! ;-)
It's amazing how much prep time it took to maximize those 17mins. Kem helped me filter the talking points down to 5 main areas. From there I easily had 6 hours of time invested in the content development and rehearsal. I rehearsed the whole presentation out loud a good 15 times ... timing each one and making notes along the way. Our senior management team gave me a unique opportunity and I wasn't going to waste it on poor preparation.
The presentation went off even better than I had planned. I made it fun, lively, and memorable ... and wow did I get great feedback from many folks afterwards. Several said "I didn't know anyone could make IT stuff fun!" :-) I actually love presenting though I don't get to flex that skill very often these days ... don't forget I used to teach high school so I have a lot of experience being a "presenter."
I brought my laptop along to record the audio ... and for those interested you can listen to the entire presentation below. Here also are the 5 talking points I landed on ... ENJOY!
· Standardization: allows for compatibility, knowledge transfer, decreased costs and downtime and improved response time. You decide to purchase, download or install something that’s not on the list and don’t use IT…you’re at the back of the line. If you want team support, play by team rules.
· Purchasing: Centralization of all technology purchases leverages our church buying power and helps with support and compatibility. Even if you’re the one paying for it, IT is always a stakeholder. This applies to mobile phones, software, hardware, etc. IT doesn’t have to approve your every move, but it’s in the best interest of you and the ministry of GCC to include them in your decision making process. In other words, even if it’s a personal purchase, you’ll end up using it for work which makes IT a Stakeholder. Don’t cut them out of the conversation, it’ll hurt you and the rest of the team when you do.
· Security: Your login is YOUR login. Goodbye 'password' and hello 'passphrase'.
· File Storage: Server storage isn't cheap. Don’t store your personal music and photos in your My Documents. IT can help make recommendations on where to store your personal data.
· Support reminders: Don't send support requests to Jason or Ed. Use our support system to make sure your request is captured and tracked to ensure you get the best service. Also make sure you tell us when you're experiencing issues rather than letting it go for weeks until you're about to go postal.
I'm soooooo flippin' excited I could explode! If you've been following my twitter you already know ... but for those not ... today we could finally go public with our newest addition to the GCC IT team!
It's been a very long process ... but we couldn't be more excited!
I'll post more down the road, but I just had to share the great news. Please congratulate Justin and if you're not following his blog you'll for sure want to now! :-)
Great days are ahead for my team, our church, and the greater Church IT Roundtable movement ...
The large church IT round-table that we held here at Watermark back in May was a big success, but frankly we want to expand the reach of our IT discussions to Dallas ministries of all shapes and sizes. This Friday, June 27th, we will have our IT gathering open to all church and para-church organizations in the Dallas area. The main meeting for this lunch is to talk about how we can get more local ministries involved in our community. This is a great opportunity to share information, network, and talk about how we can use technology to further the cause of Christ in Dallas. Feel free to invite friends that are involved in IT ministry.
The lunch will be held at Gloria’s in Addison. For more information and to RSVP for lunch, email us at [email protected]
TOPICS: * Fall Roundtable updates * Podcast time change from afternoon to night? - 10pm Eastern?? * jtsmith would like input on a new volunteer management web 2.0 app he's developing. * other?
I was sooo excited for the noon service at GCC recently. Why? Because our uber volunteer, Dustin Hannifin, was going to receive one of five "smooth stone awards" ... and he had no idea it was coming :-)
Smooth Stone Award? Each year GCC recognizes and celebrates a few of the many outstanding men and women that have made a monumental impact on the ministry of GCC.
Luckily I had a perfect story to get Dustin to skip his regular Saturday night attendance and come to noon Sunday...wanted him to meet an IT dude we were interviewing. I also invited the rest of our core IT volunteer team to sit in the same area to cheer and celebrate this awesome recognition. Below is the actual video snippet from the service where Mark Beeson talks about Dustin, but of course Dustin doesn't know it's about him. I asked Dustin afterwards when he realized Beeson was talking about him ... he said when Beeson said 'sharepoint' I knew it was me :-) watch the entire service (scroll down the page to Guitar Hero)
I sat beside Dustin Sunday and as he got up to go get his awards he said, "I'm gonna kill you" :-) He's just that kind of humble behind-the-scenes dude, which is just another great quality about him.
Check out all the many things Dustin has helped us with ... it's an amazing list. So thanks again Dustin for your great service to Christ and GCC. I'm honored to call you a fellow geek and friend.
Our friends over at The Chapel passed along an IT opening they are looking to fill. I chatted with Jim about the position this evening and it sounds like a great opportunity. Here's the job description PDF and associated blurbage:
The Chapel is a contemporary, non-denominational, casual and kid-friendly church made up of people from all walks of life. We’re a multi-campus church with locations in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. For more information about us, please visit www.launchingamovement.org or www.chapel.org.
God has continued to bless our church and we’ve experienced some terrific growth. We are currently searching for an Information Technology professional to lead our central Operations Info Tech team out of our Libertyville, IL campus. This team is responsible for providing the technology infrastructure and support systems across all of our campuses.
We are always looking for ways to use technology so the church can be effective and relevant to our community. Our current systems include leading edge technologies such as a four-campus wide area Cisco network, Cisco Call Manager, MS Exchange, Blackberry’s and iPhones, ACS Financials, FellowshipOne, Windows and Mac clients and servers, a PerformancePoint data warehouse, and intra-campus video transmission. We’re continuing to advance our systems and processes as we expand to more campuses in the Chicago area and beyond.
If you’re interested in joining our team in this fast-paced, entrepreneurial and creative environment, please contact us. Please visit www.chapel.org, click on the “How To Get Involved” tab, and then the “Employment Opportunities” in the left column.
Jim Alexander Executive Pastor of Operations The Chapel 847.281.3333 jalexander at chapel dot org
What topics would you like to hear discussed? I need more interaction from you guys .. you don't want to hear me just ramble to myself now da ya? ;-)
Possible discussion topics:
- Fall Roundtable - Upcoming Day/Time changes for the podcast? - CITRT site overhaul and how to build more community - XP embedded PC's / Thin clients - Justin Moore's recently Sonicwall experience - Multisite support
Bring your questions and let's get some dialogue going!
One again I'm actually finding a legitimate use for Twitter. For several months I've been thinking more about using thin clients (embedded XP in particular) for our checkin kiosks ... especially as we're planning on 3 multi-site campuses going live this fall. Why? Very small, draws little power, image is locked down to a flashed memory state but is fully functioning windows XP. Ian over at COR blogged about their use of HP XPe thins for Arena checkin not so long ago which got my wheels spinning again. I also knew Fellowship Church was using XPe WYSE terminals for F1 checkin but I hadn't followed up with the IT crew there about it for over a year. So I fired up Twitter and asked about F1 checkin on XPe ... a short while passes and taadaa ... here's Mo Murray's email reply:
Jason,
Good afternoon, I heard thru the Twitter-vine that you were wanting some info about using F1 on XPe.
I'd be happy to tell you my experience.
We installed F1 on Wyse V90L 512MB Memory 512MB Ram Part Number 902141-01L It works with the Elo touch screens out of the box, that was nice.
To get things installed you just enter the admin mode on the V90 disable the write filter (more on that later) Reboot Install Pre-req for F1 (.net, plug in printer ect ect) Install F1 Reboot Log in as admin add "user" to the admin group log in as user, test.
if it's working log out
log in as admin
check clock settings (important)
if all is well, re-enable write filter, reboot and your done.
The write filter if you have not used it, is just a feature that WYSE has on the XPe clients that once enabled locks the system at it's current state.
So even with user as a local admin it can't do too much damage. When the system is power cycled it is restored to the state that the filter was enabled.
This is cool because it makes trouble shooting quick and easy, does it have power? does it have network? reboot. 99% of the time that does it. Down side to this is updates (although they are few and far between on XPe) F1 updates you must touch the system (log in as admin, disable write filter, reboot, update F1 reboot, re-enable filter, reboot) and if the clock gets off you have to go thru the same hoops to do an update to adjust the clock for it to stick.
It's not bad, in my opinion it's much better for total cost of ownership to have the XPe clients than full blown windows boxes. They are fast, never had to rebuild one because it was "slow". They just worked.
WYSE does have a way that you can build one image and have all the clients network boot from it so updates and such are more manageable, or you can use the imaging software they have (free) to do a Ghost style image to the systems. It can be done remotely so you don't even touch the systems just from an MMC tell the ones you want to update to reboot to a new image. This took some playing around with to get it to work (use an old P3 whatever for this and have it be a dedicated box).
But thats the nuts and bolts of it.
We had one hiccup with the front end that Terry Chapman made getting the Elo button to calibrate the screen to work but took less than an hour to resolve that.
If you have questions or would like to talk over this on the phone feel free to give me a call. Feel free to share any of this on your blog also I'm all for sharing of the knowledge.
Thanks for sharing Mo! Now to narrow down which hardware vendor to go with - WYSE, HP, other? Wonder if we can get some demo units to try from these guys? Of course a requirement for us is units must have a PCI slot for our Proxim wifi cards. Any other XPe hardware vendors you'd recommend? Anyone else doing F1 checkin with an XPe unit?
PS ... yes, there is a lot of noise on Twitter, but it's nuggets like this that keep me using it. My Twitter RSS feed for those that wanna follow.
What options do you have for your organization when they need to share large files with people offsite? Even GMail has a max attachment size that a large graphics file will choke let alone a multi-Gig video file.
Sure FTP is an option but it's not easy enough for the average user to navigate IMO ... and I don't blame them ... I don't even like dorking with FTP.
There are numerous services on the web now like yousendit.com, eatlime.com, drop.io that work well for small files, but I want something more that doesn't cost an arm-n-leg for big files and features.
I'd also like the service to be hosted onsite so our staff have lighting fast upload/downloads to it instead of trying to squeeze it up our always congested pipe. And above all else it has to be very simple and easy to use ... otherwise it won't get used. Does such an app exist?
David Drinnon has a sweet sounding drop box app they developed in house, but porting it for other churches doesn't look pretty. He did suggest I check out Absolute File Send ... as Second uses some of xigla's other products. I'm liking what I see of AFS so far and the price is right.
I'm still open for suggestions ... you'd think there'd be some linux opensource do-dad that would solve all my issues ... and BTW we are now a linux friendly shop since Matt joined our team :-)
Jason Powell is the Information Technology Director at Granger Community Church. The views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of GCC
... or are they? Hmm???
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