Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

2014 National Church IT & WebDev Conference Oct 22-24 - BE THERE!

What's the best way to learn IT & WebDev best practices as it relates to the Church/Ministry space?
Attend the National Church IT Roundtable this October in Peoria, IL!

Join 250+ Church staff and volunteers from across the country this Fall to learn from knowledge experts, connect/share with your peers, and get a big shot of encouragement!  Now in it's 8th year, this un-conference continues to grow in size and impact.

This will be our 2nd year combining forces with RefreshCache to cover all things Web/Dev. 
Wanna talk virutalization, VLAN routing, VoIP?  We got that!
Wanna talk jquery, .net, UX/UI?  We got that too!

Registration is ONLY $75 for all 3 days and includes most of your meals!  You won't find a conference with better ROI, PERIOD!

Registration is open so signup and spread the word.

LOTS more details HERE

Hope to see you all this Fall!

Addressing The Consumerization of IT aka GCC's Transition to Macs and Mobility - Part 6 - Is AppleCare worth the cost??

This is a continuation of a blog series I started back on April 2013. You may want to start reading there if you're new to this blog series.  Part 1

Part 6 ... Mac Repairs and Extended AppleCare
This week marks the 1st time, since early 2011, we've had to pay for a mac repair.  Though this particular air was still under it's 3yr applecare, it had water damage.  $800 later and Apple replaced virtually all the components...so it's kinda like a new refurb LOL.  We've also had very few instances where we've actually needed applecare...11 times in almost 3 1/2 years. 
So this has raised the question:
Is it worth buying the 3yr applecare warranty at $199/air and $279/mbp15???

Let's look at the data...

2011 - 25 Macs purchased
1st year repairs = 2 (1 was an accidental screen break miraculously fixed at no cost!)
2nd year repairs = 2
3rd year repairs = 3
** All Macs from 2011 are now outside their 3yr applecare **
2012 - 29 Macs purchased
1st year repairs = 0
2nd year repairs = 3 (1 was the accidental water damage at $800 repair cost)
3rd year repairs = 0
2013 - 9 Macs purchased
1st year repairs = 0
2nd year repairs = 0
2014 - 9 Macs purchased so far
1st year repairs = 1

Leaving out accidental damages our totals are
1st year repairs = 2
2nd year repairs = 4
3rd year repairs = 3

So as you might expect, especially for laptops, we're seeing more repairs AFTER year 1.  2 repairs were covered under the included applecare that comes with each Mac, and 7 repairs covered by the extended 3yr applecare we purchased.  Now let's do some rough math. 

We've purchased 72 macs (mostly refurbs) since March 2011 (Production Arts purchased their own Macs prior to 2011).  They were not all airs, but for easy math we'll say they were.  72 macs times $200 for 3yr applecare = $14400
Let's say our 7 extended warranty repair jobs would have been $800 each (they were usually much lower) ... 7 x $800 = $5600. 
$14400 - $5600 = $8800 = at minimum 12 more repairs before matching what we've spent on applecare.
Granted, we didn't buy all 72 Macs at the same time so a chunk of them can still fail inside their 3yr window and incure no cost to us, but how many more will likely fail?
Since the macs bought in 2011 are now outside of their 3yr applecare, we can make some predictions.  Out of those 25 Macs, 5 required repair after year 1.
25 Macs times $200 3yr applecare = $7500
5 repairs at $800/ea could have cost us at most = $4000 (Again, this number is an overestimation)
In other words, we spent about twice as much for applecare than what repairs would have cost us.  Boo!  Of course that's a risk you have to weigh.  We had no data to go off of at the time, so we err'd on the side of caution and bought the 3yr warranty.  Now that we have over 3yrs of data to go off of, we can make some much better decisions ... meaning the data is telling us we should no longer be purchasing 3yr applecare :-)
However, there is a slight catch.  In 2011, had we NOT purchased applecare we would have saved $7500, BUT you have to accurately budget for future unknown repairs ... which for those 2011 purchases we estimated the repair costs (see above math) to be $4000 2-3 years after their purchase.
Again assuming a repair would cost $800 and had we NOT purchased 3yr applecare for any Mac
2011 repair costs = $0
2012 repair costs = $0
2013 repair costs = 3x$800 = $2400
2014 repair costs = 4x$800 = $3200 ... and 2014 isn't over yet
Moving forward I should probably keep a $4000 budget line for mac repairs each year, especially since we now have 25 Macs with expired 3yr applecare.

Another factor in the equation - self repairs.  I keep using a high estimate of $800 for our local Apple Store to do repair jobs.  The reality is that we could do many of these repairs ourselves for much less $.  For instance, I have an estimate from the Genius bar for $567 to replace a 256GB SSD.  WHA?  We can buy several SSD's for that cost and it's pretty simple to swap them.  Now for stuff like screens and logic boards, we'd probably let Apple take care of those and just bite our tongue at the premium they'd charge.  The easy stuff we'd handle in house.

Apple does have a self service program which we signed up for years ago, but we've yet to actually DO anything useful with it.  Guess it's time to dig back into that and see how we can leverage it :-)

Summary?  So far, for our environment, our data is telling us to STOP buying 3yr applecare.  Instead we need to budget about $3000-4000/yr to cover repairs.  This will save us several thousand dollars each year, which if our purchasing and repair trends stay the same, we'll end up saving $10,000-15,000 in 3yrs time.  Yeah, that's a lot of dollars we can invest in other projects!

I'm very curious who else has done a similar exercise and do your results match up with what we're seeing?

That's it for Part 6.  I'll plan to do one more final post to wrap up this blog series.  Stay tuned :-)

** I decided to close comments on this blog post and direct folks to comment over here.

Addressing The Consumerization of IT aka GCC's Transition to Macs and Mobility - Part 5

This is a continuation of a blog series I started back on April 2013. You may want to start reading there if you're new to this blog series.  Part 1

Part 5 - Mac Hardware and Software

Wow, it's hard to believe we're into year 4 of this transition to Macs and mobility ... time flys!!  Surprisingly, we've made only a few edits to our mac hardware and software standards since we started this journey.  Also to note, after 3 years, the macs are still going strong giving us no reason to believe they won't give us 5 years of service.  We do see some reduced battery longevity, but so far it's not newsworthy.  It will be interesting to see how the batts are holding up this time next year.  We also see folks originally lobbying for a 15" or 17" macbookpro now asking to trade in for a 13" air or 13" retina mbpro.  Heh, told 'em so ;-)

Hardware
On the hardware side we still use the 13" air as our default ... still i5, we've bumped ram to 8GB, and in 2014 we up'd to the 512GB SSD.  Yes, we're still mainly buying Apple refurbs when possible.  I predict we'll see more interest in the 13" retina mbpro unless Apple releases a 13" retina air (yes please!).  I've been using a 13" retina mbpro for over a year and really love it!  The extra pixels are worth the slight weight and thickness tradeoff.

External Monitors - most staff, especially air users, have an external monitor, which is typically purchased by their dept (through IT of course).  Some are using old 17" LCD's we left in place when we removed a desktop PC, some are using Dell 24" LCD's, and some are using the really slick 27" Apple Cinema display.  While the Apple display is a whoppin' $799, it really is worth it when you consider everything it provides: amazing resolution, charges your laptop, provides a Gig network port, thunderbolt and usb ports, webcam and audio.

Software
We don't use any imaging software for mac deployment.  That could change someday, but so far we've not had enough pain to make us head down that road. Here's essentially what happens when we get in a new mac:

New mac comes in ...

• record the serial number off the box into inventory (we use smartsheet) and write end users name on box as another form of initial record keeping.  Yes, we have a GIANT stack of boxes in storage!
• power on (duh!)
• join to public wifi
• enter our TechOps info and user/pass
• UNCHECK NATURAL SCROLLING!!!!
• run software updates
• name computer (jpowellair, jpowellmbp13r, jpowellmbp15, etc)
• enable remote management and remote login
• create another admin user account matching the end users AD user/pass
• enable guest account ... uncheck parental controls (we want a theif to be able to easily log in so we can hopefully have time to track their location)
• login as the end user
• uncheck natural scrolling
• join to private wifi via ruckus zero-IT portal (uses end users AD creds)
• require password from sleep
• keyboard > shortcuts > change to all controls (allows you to tab between all fields)
• finder preferences ... check all
• shared drive and media drive shortcuts
• add needed printers (we use a mac mini running OSX server as our mac print server)
• install our custom LogMeIn free client (part of LogMeIn Central)
• Office 2011 install and run updates
• Outlook 2011 setup
• CrashplanProE install (our backup software)
• ESET NOD32 install (our antivirus softare)
• print and attach a label of the machinename to underside (silver label tape)
• For some users like Finance, we install and setup the free Microsoft Remote Desktop app. This app combined with a Remote Desktop Gateway config gives users one-click access to a terminal session desktop or published app, like Great Plains, from on or offsite.  Bye bye VPN!
• handoff to happy end user with training as needed

Sounds like a lot of steps, but it's really a quick process.  We could script some of it, but again there's not been enough pain to warrant the effort to figure out scripting ;-)'

If end user needs a paid app from the appstore installed we ask them to create an apple ID with their church email address.  Their dept pays for any additional apps.  For stuff like Adobe CreativeCloud we manage licenses and charge depts for new users and renewals.

What about iPads?
If a user needs an iPad we will make the purchase for them (again usually a refurb), but their Department is on the hook to pay for it.

So that'll wrap up part 5 of this series that now spans 2 years (facepalm).  Part 6 will be about Applecare and is almost ready to publish.  It's got some pretty revealing information that I think you'll want to check out :-)