I've been pondering the switch from Exchange to Google Apps as GCC's corporate email solution for over a year. While there are a couple of obvious benefits to switching to GApps, my
team's hesitation has been the overwhelming number of unknowns along
with a number of features we know we'd loose. Getting answers to our
unknowns has been a challenge ... and in talking with other church IT
peers we all have similar questions.
For non-profits, Exchange really doesn't cost much, offers a ton of
enterprise class features, and in our experience requires little day-to-day
maintenance. However, we're not married to Exchange and if there are
solid and compelling reasons to switch we would seriously consider it.
To that end a couple of us got together and started a wiki page on citrt.org listing all the questions/concerns we have about Google Apps as an Exchange replacement. http://citrt.pbwiki.com/Google-Apps-Pros-Cons-OtherWe've already had 29 updates to the wiki page and it's barely 24hrs old :-)
What about you? Do have Google Apps questions you'd like to have answered? A few of our church IT peers have made the switch already and we hope they'll help answer our questions (they better!). Better yet, do you know someone at Google that can weigh in? Regardless, please join in the discussion.
Wondering about practical events where you get tools and training for your team? WiredChurches.com workshops are teacher-led, classroom-style, one-day events. Boring they are not. You'll hear from Granger leaders about what works and what doesn’t. Practicums are facilitator-led, round-table discussions. It’s the sit-down, roll-up-your-sleeves conversation you’re craving. Not quite a support group but an informal, safe place where you can share and gain ideas from others like you.
NEW! Events grouped into two-day chunks. Make the most of your travel...come for one day or stay for two. NEW! Everyone gathers together for a half hour of worship on both days before breaking into individual workshops and practicums.
Events happening Thursday and Friday, March 5-6, 2009
One-price: Pre-register to get $20 discount rate of $99 per person, per day. Includes materials and lunch. Where & When: Granger Community Church campus, 90 miles east of Chicago, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday and/or Friday, March 5-6, 2009.
Ah life ... it's been one of those extended seasons in my life where it seems no matter what I try I can't keep up. Basically I'm living in a mode of the most critical stuff gets dealt with while all else fades into the background. It's not pretty or efficient, but it's working well enough for now. A number of you have emailed me various questions over the past few months ... I got your email ... I will reply ... it just won't be anytime soon ... sorry :-(
I've even stopped reading blogs for the past several weeks unless I get a ping via my google alerts ... aren't you curious what alerts I have setup? ;-)
I'm bummed I don't have more time/energy to be blogging more frequently, but I've found 2 outlets that feed my need to be "connected" with others in the church IT world ... IRC and Twitter.
IRC: Typically a few times each day I poke my nose into our Church IT Roundtable IRC channel ... it's basically an online chat room where a number of church IT staff and volunteers hang out. Here I can catch up on the latest news, ask questions, give answers, and just get to know better my fellow IT peers. A contributing factor in my recent hiring of Justin Moore was from being able to interact with and watch him interact with others in the channel almost daily since last winter. You can learn a lot about a person by hanging out in a crowd together, even if that crowd happens to be virtual.
So I'd strongly encourage anyone involved in IT (yup, we have non-church IT guys/gals joining us as well) to get involved in this virtual community. Together we can accomplish so much more! Here's a link you can bookmark that willtake you to the chatroom with a single mouse click...nothing to install...that's about as easy as I can make it for you.
TWITTER: I know a number of you think Twitter is stupid and pointless...I did...then I started seeing it's potential value. And I'm happy to report it's return has been greater than I expected ... even moreso if you tie Twitter to your Facebook status (I rarely visit facebook anymore so this was a big plus).
So, I don't have/make time to create blog posts to keep those interested up to date on what we're doing IT wise at GCC. I DO have the time to blast out quick 140 character updates throughout the day. I've also asked for help via Twitter and gotten almost instant feedback ... even from vendors! Now that's service! I'm diggin' that 2 way instant interactive aspect of Twitter.
You can easily get overwhelmed by the amount of "noise" flowing back and forth in Twitter. You have to determine what your acceptable signal to noise ratio. My suggestion is to add people you "follow" slowly and strategically. And no, you don't have to follow everyone that follows you. I'm VERY selective in who I follow right now. No offense to anyone if I'm not following you (yet), but I've only got so much space right now :-)
So while you wait for future blogs posts ... you may want to follow my Twitter.
There ya go ... Twitter and IRC make me feel like I'm still able to contribute to the IT community even if time is scarce and their reach is not near as great as the number of people subscribed to this blog. There are other neat social aspects to of each of these as well, but I'm out of time for now to tell ya ...
Dustin shot me an email this morning with the news ... next week VMware is going to start giving away it's latest ESX3i hypervisor ... and yes it fully supports iSCSI SANs!
Of course, you'll still need to pay for the big daddy features like vmotion, virtual center, etc; but this is a great move by VMware to get their hypervisor product into the publics hands (like ours) before we look closely at switching to Microsoft's new hypervisor :-)
Sadly, we don't have any physical servers that are on the hardware support list for 3i ... but the list is still young and growing. That won't stop us from testing it on our older Dell servers :-)
This is just the next step in the virtualization ladder. VMware Server is a great entry point to get familiar with virtualization and we've been running it production level for 3+ years now. It works VERY well. However, the bare metal 3i hypervisor eliminates the need and resource hit of the host operating system, in our case Server 2003 Enterprise, along with a host of other benefits VMware Server doesn't offer ... and again all this for free. So we loose nothing and gain features all for free? w00t!
Even support is available for a low cost of $500-900 ... that's a no brainer.
Now if only VMware would give us non-profits a big price break, like Microsoft, for vmotion and the other VM goodies! Pretty Please!!!???
By request ... I'm putting our IT Best Practices document online for your viewing pleasure. Actual document can be found at the bottom of my prior presentation post. Feel free to modify it at will for your own purposes.
I also want to say a huge mega thanks to David Drinnon and team. I basically plagiarized everything I could from their IT doc over at Second Baptist ... with his permission of course! :-)
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.
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 :-)
Finally got around to measuring the power usage of one of our main Intel servers ... ~326W combined across both power supplies. Frankly, I expected this to be less considering our EqualLogic arrays pull 300W and they are spinning 14 disks and big blowers. Oh well, it's more data for the power project.
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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