Last week, listening to my iPhone while traveling home, I heard the first verse of the song Calling All Friends by The Low Stars:

Calling all friends, and people I met on the way down.
Calling all friends, and people I don’t even know.
Calling on high, I wanna believe there’s a way now.
I’m too tired to pretend I don’t wanna be alone, I’m calling all friends.

For those working with Information Technology in churches, it’s easy to feel isolated and alone, trying to figure out what the best technology solutions are (and how to afford them!), how to best support your staff, recruit and manage volunteers, and figure out how to communicate your needs and solutions to leadership and users in ways they understand, go along with, and fund. Most churches have either a volunteer IT staff, a paid staff member who does IT as part of their job, or perhaps one full-time IT position. If you’re really large and fortunate, you may have a small team of two or more to support your environment, creating some camaraderie, but it’s still easy to feel alone, isolated and seldom understood.

Read the rest at IndyGeek.net. (NOTE on Dec. 12, 2011: IndyGeek.net is no longer operational. I am republishing the rest of the original article below, picking up from where I just left off above.)

Fortunately, Jason Powell, the IT Director at Granger Community Church (GCC) in Granger, Indiana felt that way himself several years ago, and decided to do something about it: he started blogging. The online community created by Jason’s blog led him to invite other church IT folks to GCC and have a “roundtable” discussion to see if they could benefit from sharing with each other. This was the first official Church IT Roundtable (CITRT), a term that now encompasses an unofficial group of people, discussions and community that connect from around the US and even the world so no one has to “go it alone.”

Roundtables are generally held a couple of times a year. The most recent Roundtable was held at Saddleback Church in Foothill Ranch, CA on March 10^th through 12^th. Approximately 75 people from churches around the country (and a small number of vendors) attended.

On Wednesday night, officially the optional “pre-roundtable” dinner, old friends and new ones gathered for some excellent dinner provided by the on-campus foodservices at Saddleback and some even more excellent socialization. Sharing technology and technique are excuses to have a Roundtable, and don’t get me wrong, the both were shared in abundance and the knowledge and experience is invaluable. But the real, just as tangible but less quantifiable, reason to get together is to share life with each other and forge long-lasting friendships with peers who just happen to often have resources they’re willing to share with you at and after the Roundtable. For all the technology, there’s at least a triple dose of inspiration and connection.

Why get together in person? That’s a good question, one that geeks of all stripes would probably ask in a similar situation. After all, technology and the Internet are pretty powerful now. Why not leverage blogs, social media, online chat and streaming video to accomplish everything remotely? Because that already happens, and it’s not enough! Relationships developed online can be good, and even somewhat deep, but it’s not often they are as rich, full and close as ones developed when eating, laughing, sharing and telling stories together around a table or tables. The “roundtable” events often happen around square tables, and the CITRT geeks enjoy pointing out the irony of this fact—however the national Roundtable at Saddleback actually took place around round tables! Additionally, it’s much easier to focus on sharing and developing friendships in an environment removed from daily workflow and life.

That doesn’t mean that the CITRT group foregoes the use of technology! In between Roundtable events, the group does leverage Twitter, Facebook, wikis, blogs, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a very old and once more widely used Internet chat protocol where the chat rooms are called “channels”) to communicate regularly, and for those who have met in person it’s that much easier to continue those friendships in between get-togethers when everyone is spread around the country. There’s a social aspect, but every day there are usually multiple technology problems and questions answered by others in the group in the IRC channel, saving those who ask countless hours of their own research, trial, error, and often even the cost of hiring a contractor or outside expert to provide advice and/or solutions.

And that is the focus of the daily Roundtable sessions in California on Thursday. In addition to a daily keynote speaker, there were two Roundtable discussion times on Thursday and one on Friday. Wednesday’s discussion started revolving around how the spiritual life of Church IT staff was affected by working in a church. Generally, a moderator stands up at the front of the room and takes topics from the group, writing them on a whiteboard. That’s how the rest of the sessions worked, but because most geeks would rather talk about technology, the spiritual discussion was a pre-picked starting topic foisted on the three rooms of Roundtable groups at the opening session (with 75 attendees, the sessions are much more manageable and more can participate if they are divided up into groups of around 25 each). After the spiritual discussion, the groups moved on to pick a set of topics ranging from email systems to storage solutions, networking to working with volunteers, and many more. The afternoon session on Thursday was divided up into four groups by type, with infrastructure in one room, management in another, helpdesk and user support in another room, and web design and support in the final, while the Thursday morning Roundtable was an open discussion of any remaining topics.

Attendees are admonished at the beginning: if the topic you have questions about isn’t covered, it’s your fault! Speak up, join the conversation, and participate so everyone can get what they need most from the group. Yes, geeks often are shy and reserved, but it’s much easier to open up with friends. Many in the group are already friends, some have met at prior Roundtable events and some were only friends online until this week, but even for those there for the first time, the pre-existing online friendships created a fast connection.

On Thursday afternoon, an unscheduled visitor stopped by, Pastor Rick Warren, founding pastor at Saddleback Church and author of the bestselling Purpose Driven Life book. For him to take an hour and a half out of his busy schedule to greet everyone individually, give a very insightful talk and stick around for individual pictures was not only unexpected and very welcome, but demonstrated a down-to-earth man with a heart for service and Christian ministry.

Friday morning was opened with a keynote from Scott Smith, CEO of Solerant, a company that was founded to provide IT services and support to churches, although they have corporate clients as well. Solerant has been a long-time supporter of the Roundtable online and in person, and Scott delivered a much-needed message from a CEO’s perspective about how communicating as a technology person to leadership needs to be carefully constructed to provide information that the leaders care about in a context of the things they care about, rather than spewing techno-speak that may very well be correct, but won’t translate into a concrete reason to provide support and resources. Scott focused on how to position projects and requests through high-level descriptions and especially by using stories and analogies that are easy to relate to outside of the geek mindset. Geeks in all fields could benefit from using his tips.

The daytime food and events were just the icing on the cake, as most attendees continued their discussions after dinner, often late into the wee hours of the morning in their hotel rooms, the hotel lobby, and for some, the pool and hot tub! This could range from group discussions to one-on-one or two-on-one teaching or assistance. The knowledge transfer happening at all levels is something most organizations probably wish they could leverage on demand.

It’s an event that’s hard to describe, as much as I’ve attempted here, and a lot of people who might benefit from the event, even if they already participate online, have wondered if it’s worth the time and expense (travel is most of the cost as the registration, including food, has always been under $100 thanks to sponsors who not only bring technology and services to display, but also in most cases participate in the discussions and truly help just like everyone else—the group encourages vendor engineers and technologists to attend and become part of the community, not just sales people!). However, without fail, first-time attendees enthusiastically said at the end that it was indescribably valuable, that they’d forged new and deep friendships, gathered excellent ideas to take home and implement, and that they couldn’t imagine not making this a part of their regular schedule whenever possible. This is my personal feeling after attending all but three Roundtable events since they started, but it was by far a widely shared opinion.

The CITRT main website is currently a wiki located at http://www.citrt.org/. The site provides links to participant blogs, Twitter lists, ways to connect to the #citrt IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network, and information and registration information for future in-person Roundtable events around the country as it becomes available (they move often or will break down into multiple regional Roundtables around the country in some cases), along with other information, and allows anyone to easily get involved. And because it’s a wiki, anyone connected to Church IT can request an account and add/update information on their own—just one more way to connect and collaborate! Every church, contrary to what it sometimes feels like, has many similar technology needs and those supporting them are not alone. And sometimes, that makes a big difference.

Also, for more technical notes, Tony Dye posted his excellent rough notes of Day 1 and Day 2, my article is a high-level overview but Tony provides a blow-by-technical-blow of the sessions he was in (and the main ones), even though it’s unedited there’s a ton of useful information there. Worth checking out, thanks for sharing Tony!

The trip is off to a good start, with milk shakes at Steak-N-Shake as a late night treat. Ritters was our first choice and Culvers our second (were trying for custard! We have some custard virgins among us!) but it was still good!

It’s time for bed, going to be a long day tomorrow! I’ve also got some server and storage infrastructure upgrades in the works that I need to find time to write about, some exciting stuff! See some of you tomorrow, and the rest of you in #citrt? We didn’t make it in in time for dinner with Dean Lisenby or Sheldon so will get to see them tomorrow along with Jason Powell!

Speaking of the national one (wow, what a natural transition! :-) it’s coming up next month! October 8-10 at Seacoast Church. Check out the official website for details. Early bird registration was extended by a month until September 8th, so you can still get in at the cheaper rate! I’m planning on going to this one too and so is my wife, unless plans change at the last minute.

You should go too. See you there!

Also, the Church IT Roundtable Fall 2008 is coming up in October, but the registration price goes from $50 to $75 if you don’t register by August 8th! The actual Roundtable is October 8th and 9th, but there are pre- and post-activites planned for the day on either side if you can make it (see the schedule). My plans aren’t firm yet, but my wife and I will likely both be there!

I’m trying to get a 90-day trial of Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE) installed. The non-profit charity pricing is under $400, so if I like it I’m hoping to buy it this Fall. Right now, I’d be happy to get it installed! After attempting to install the software (at Service Pack 1) on a virtual Server 2008 machine and failing (you have to install SQL Server Express 2005 with SP2 manually first, which I did, but it kept complaining that I needed to run the Configuration for SQL Reporting Server…which I did! The best I could, at least, but it kept complaining I hadn’t!), I finally switched to a Server 2003 virtual server. 3/4ths of the way through the install it failed saying it couldn’t contact the SQL server (that it installed) so it rolled everything back (the install and the rollback both took an hour!). I’m spending the time installing all the Windows Updates that are available for Server 2003 before trying again, which are a lot! Was trying to try it out quickly and update later, but obviously that’s not going to work! The concept of SCE is very cool but if it’s this hard to install, it better be a whole lot easier to use!

I’m probably the last person to post this, but the Fall 2008 Church IT Roundtable has an official website now! Visit (and subscribe to!) citrt2008.com for updates, details, and links to other update methods like Twitter! It’s being held at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, SC on October 8-10. Be there or be…there streaming online or in the chat or something :-)

I’m getting ready to switch over to Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Premium from a non-SBS, non-Exchange network at the Assemblies of God Indiana District Office where I work one day per week. It’s been in the works for a long time, but the official switchover is scheduled to happen June 6th and 7th (Friday and Saturday) with the 8th available if spare time is needed and some on-site support on Monday morning the 9th to work through any kinks. I’m confident in things going smoothly, but that could just be a lack of knowledge on my part (see the Dunning-Kruger effect :-) My plan is to get Postini installed in front of Exchange at the same time or shortly thereafter. I may get around to broadcasting some of the switch via webcam, but there will be some internet downtime while ISA 2004 is brought up and configured so we’ll see how that works.

In still other news, I’m going to be trialing FeedBlitz for sending out email newsletters for our Worship and Creative Ministries team in the next few weeks. I’m curious to see how that goes; I know Constant Contact is the well-known name in that space and we’re open to going with them as well. Pricing is the same for our subscriber levels, but FeedBlitz seems to have the corner on social features including publishing email from an RSS feed and now sending out messages via Twitter as well so we’re going to try it first I think.

It gets harder to blog stuff the longer I go without doing so. I seem to pressure myself to “write long, big post with a ton of juicy technical information” as the first post back from an absence. I also seem to subconciously want to post only big, important stuff to avoid wasting time with any smaller things. This contributes to not posting at all! Thus, I will attempt to be less picky about what I’m posting or the length of posts in order to keep going, while still providing some good, solid information! I may also kick up the number of shorter posts with links to other content, or republish the occasional funny comic, but will try to keep the “noise” down. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments about what you’d like to see, one way or another!

One more thing: I have Woopra set up for statistics tracking on this blog now. I don’t run the client often right now, but when I do it allows me to chat with visitors in real time! So if you’re reading this on the website and not via RSS, I can actually initate a chat with you! It’s unlikely, but keep it in mind! If you want to start a chat with me, you can do so via the Google Talk Chatback badge, currently in the sidebar menus on the site. No registration is required. If I’m not at my computer, you won’t get a response, sorry! I try to keep my availability status updated but I don’t always succeed. Try the #citrt channel on IRC or just send me an email (use the Contact Me page) if it’s that important! Blog comments are preferred if it’s a public topic or question, though!

What is Facilities Management?

(View Video 1 directly on YouTube – makes full-screen option available)

Metaphors using sharp objects, plus “The Howling FMer”

(View Video 2 directly on YouTube – makes full-screen option available)

The basic idea I gather is that the group is a way for Christian geeks to fellowship and share, similar to the Church IT Roundtable concept only smaller and not focused specifically on “church IT” and more on a shared love of Christ and electronic gadgets. I didn’t take my laptop, but without it I felt in the minority, although I think it might have been split 50/50! My Nokia N800 was charging or I would have taken that at least!

I’m sure I’m leaving someone or something out, and it was great meeting everyone, but I met a few people at lunch that were particularly relevant to my present activities. One was Neil Cox, aka IndyChristian. Neil is a local Indianapolis blogger who has been using social media extensively to help his life and with Christian outreach. I have been accumulating del.icio.us bookmarks for a while and have over 1,700 links saved, but Neil has several times that! I like Web 2.0 technology and social networking and it’s nice to meet someone else in town who shares a similar interest! Of course, Dr. Ho is also quite into social media, but is currently using Twitter the most (granted, I have been too!).

Eldon Kibbey was the first person I saw when I showed up for lunch. He was at a table by himself, but as he had a laptop open I figured it was a safe bet to head over and introduce myself. The bet was as safe as I thought! Eldon’s the Director of the Christian BusinessMen’s Connection (CBMC) Indiana and is also the Transform Indiana Moderator.

I also met Tom Buckley, who works for Exacq, a company I was only vaguely familiar with before that I’m taking a much stronger interest in now! They make security camera software that I can’t wait to get my hands on and try, both because it’s cool and because we’ve been having some security camera issues that I may get around to blogging about. (Exacq is pronounced just like the word “exact” without the “t” at the end, by the way.) Because they run a demo system in their offices that records 24/7, Exacq managed to get some footage from their office cameras of the recent earthquake in Illinois that they put on their blog and it was picked up by several news stations. Ironically, the company that installed our current security system was Vigilcorp, whose offices are in the same building as Exacq and who now sells primarily Exacq systems, which was not the case when they put ours in. We really like the guys at Vigilcorp and I really like Tom at Exacq, which is a good combination!

Alex Connor, an IUPUI student and programmer/web developer who also maintains the IndyChristianGeeks.com website, was also at the meeting banging away on some code, along with a woman who stopped in a little bit later whose name I have unfortunately temporarily forgotten.

This seems to be a great group to get to know, and an excellent way to get into the local Christian IT community and not just the online one, not that there’s anything wrong with either. But I think this may help (even though most of the Geeks aren’t necessarily “church IT” geeks in the same sense that I am, or many of the CITRT folks are) with my eventual goal of bringing together a Central Indiana Church IT Roundtable as a regional extension of the national CITRT. I’m already making contacts in that direction, but I don’t have any firm plans. If you do IT at a local church here in or around Indy, in a paid or volunteer capacity, why not get in touch with me and start a relationship? We can work towards a Roundtable, which I think would be beneficial to everyone. I’m not the most outgoing person I’ll be the first to admit (which makes meeting new people and sometimes even working with people I don’t know very well a challenge outside of my comfort zone), but if you get me started talking tech you’ll have a friend you may not be able to shut up once in a while! I’m definitely planning to be at next month’s Indy Christian Geeks lunch barring last-minute schedule conflicts!

The Roundtable, Now and Again

Each Roundtable ends with a discussion regarding the future direction of the Roundtable. Do we want to continue as-is, or do we want to become more of an official group? Do we want to stay the same size, or try and grow? Do we have a problem at all, and if so, what is it? The general consensus I think, was that we will continue as-is until we discover a problem to solve. We’ll keep inviting people, but it doesn’t matter if they come or not. That’s their problem. I think almost everyone who has been to a Roundtable has had an amazing enough time that they are excited about it and want to share such an amazing experience with others in a similar position who haven’t heard of it, and that’s where the desire to grow comes from. At the same time, the group works well with approximately the number we have (25-75), so why change it?

I agree with both perspectives, how’s that for being on the fence? Until we have a problem, we keep it small but work to make it bigger. We have local Roundtables in our area if we can drum up enough interest among the locals Church IT folks. We work on centralizing and updating the main CITRT website more often to provide some cohesiveness and a single-source-of-information without becoming too structured. We keep hanging out in the #citrt chat room on IRC (connecting online with people we’ve met in person is a tremendous boon, at least to me, and the two complement each other very well), and we keep blogging. It’s worked pretty well so far. A couple of vendors suggested creating more structure, and I think they could end up being very helpful in this area when we get to the point that we want or need to do that! Until then, we’ll stay on what looks like auto-pilot (can you tell I’m writing this in an airport?) but with the usual careful planning and assistance that the “founding partners” have provided behind the scenes with everyone else helping out where willing and able. I think that was the consensus as I heard it, feel free to correct me or provide an alternate view.

One issue that was raised in the final discussion was, “Why keep having a discussion about the group at the end of each Roundtable, does that mean we need to change or people want change?” I think that group introspection and evaluation is a good idea to see what did and didn’t work each time, since each Roundtable is different. We are very “un-group” still, and rather than a core group getting together to review and plan after the event, I think it’s beneficial to have everyone contribute to the process as a part of the meeting. I would call the discussion useful and beneficial, which is why I feel posting the details for anyone to see here is just continuing the same transparency and discussion already started in person. Of course, this is all my understanding mixed with my opinion, so feel free to disagree (comments are welcome although if you care that much, it’s likely you have a blog of your own!).

All in all, I had at least as good a time at this Roundtable as the last, if not better. I love the people and the friendships and the discussions and the shared enjoyment of technology with fellow Christians. Sure, I can read Wired or Network World magazines and see a lot of cool gadgets, but there’s no shared worldview or mission to really connect with, it’s just technology (and often, in the case of Wired, a very atheistic worldview comes through very strongly). With the Roundtable, it’s not just a meeting and it’s not just about technology. It’s an excuse for friendships and relationships (shhh, don’t tell my boss–oh wait, developing relationships is higher on Lakeview’s radar than technology, and getting both at once is quite a nice combination :-)

MinistryTECH

So what about the new MinistryTECH conference? Overall, I think it was a success. In addition to the CITRT group, many of whom were present, MinistryTECH managed to reach a wider audience due to their existing MinistryCOM foot-in-the-door history and an actual marketing budget (apparently there are some benefits to charging $325 instead of $15 to attend, and hosting a vendor exposition hall!). They also were able to attract some well-known people in the Church IT world (such as Terry Storch and Tony Morgan and others) that provided some great information and ideas to re-energize us and provide food for introspection, in addition to the great church tours we were able to take (even though I missed about half while traveling). A side benefit to the conference and the many attendees was the opportunity to mention the Roundtable to people that hadn’t heard of it. We are at least getting seeds planted and the more we can get people involved in the national (and global) Church IT community rather than hanging out by themselves, I think there will be more of a reach for both MinistryTECH and the CITRT in the future.

In Which The Babbling Stops

That just about does it for my thoughts right now. I have a lot of pictures to sort through and upload (in the range of 600-700 raw), and I’ll post them or links to them when I do that. I left my laptop off and did more Twittering than blogging or note-taking this time, but Jason Lee and several others have done an excellent job of posting outlines and summaries of many of the talks and topics, and in many cases speakers have posted their slides for download as well. In addition, a couple of talks were streamed and recorded using the uStream.tv video service thanks to Ian Beyer.

Also, this post was written primary on Sunday, April 6th (the day after the Roundtable) while I was in the Cincinnati airport on my way home, with links added later. So it’s a fresher perspective than I have now, not that I’ve had time to think about it since! Being gone for a while from work means a bit extra waiting when I return :-) Since it’s taken me a while to get this posted, Tony Dye (at least) has already managed to beat me to a lot of this. Check out his posts, and as usual they are very logical and well-considered (he also re-caps each session he attended and all of the Roundtable in posts just prior, check them out too!):

• Spring 2008 CITRT: What’s Next?
• MinistryTECH, CITRT After-Thoughts
• Roundtable Reflections, part 1
• And, for an funny hotel story: My Interesting OKC Hotel Room

I know others have posted as well, I just haven’t had time to find them all yet!

UPDATE on April 7th: I have gone through the entire Live Blog below and spent some time linking to people (the first mention of them) and products as well as cleaning up a few areas where the wording was a bit unclear. Just click Replay below and you can scroll through “blow by blow” notes on the discussion topics from 3 pm to 5 pm!

I’ve put my recent ‘tweets in the right sidebar of this blog for quick reference. My flight leaves Indianapolis at 8:15 tomorrow morning and I arrive (supposedly) at 11:10 am Oklahoma local time. Once I get my rental I’ll likely try to track down the megachurch tour in progress, hopefully for lunch and the tour’s second half, but we’ll see how things pan out. You’d think I’d have a better handle on this stuff, leaving in the morning and all…

Terrell was concerned that the weather had caused enough disruption with local communications that he has so far been unable to call or email everyone scheduled to attend the conference, and hasn’t been able to get his internet access to work long enough to update the MinistryTECH website with an announcement, and hoped that putting the word out through blogs would be enough to alert everyone.

Hopefully the airlines and hotels will be understanding of the situation created by the weather and refund people’s tickets and reservations, or it may be difficult to afford travel when the events are rescheduled. Unfortunately, airlines are known for making up reasons for not giving refunds in such circumstances, but we’ll see how it turns out in this situation. An alternate idea might be to contact the government and see if they can assist with disaster relief funds, although this might be limited to people attending from organizations without any religious affiliation.

I was really looking forward to attending these events this week, but I guess there’s always the Roundtable this fall to look forward to…as long as there aren’t any hurricanes in the Carolinas this October!

Crossings Community Church
14600 North Portland
Oklahoma City, OK 73134

Map of Crossings Community Church in Oklahoma City

And of course, if you haven’t make sure you check out the official Church IT Roundtable web site.

I hope everyone else from the Roundtable either had or has a safe trip home! A big Thank You from me goes out to Clif Guy and his team for the amazing job they did with the Roundtable, and the vendors were also generous with the excellent meals they supplied. I was also given rides throughout the week (to and from the airport, to and from my hotel, and to the restaurants) by Matt Bradshaw of COR, Dean Lisenby of ACS Technologies, Nick Nicholaou of MBS Inc. and Ministry Technology Institute, and David Crist of First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue, so a big thank you to all of them as well! I appreciate the rides but also the conversation.

There was myriad technical information to absorb at the Roundtable, which was worth about ten times the actual cost in value, but the biggest reason to go was to network and build relationships with others in similar situations. I was able to meet people that I had only known though blogs, and there were also many people who don’t blog that were great to hang out with. This applies to the peers and vendors both. When a vendor sends their IT person and not a salesman, they can make excellent contributions on the level we in the Church IT world are looking for without annoying us with sales pitches. Save those for our supervisors. And that’s what I experienced from everyone I talked to this time.

All this applies to the Granger Roundtable last week put on by Jason Powell, which I have not had time to blog about but was equally as informative and relational. (Hmmm…saying “relational” makes me think of databases. If you know me, you’re probably not surprised :-)

Well, that laptop battery I mentioned is almost dead, so I’ll cut this here. I suppose that’s good; they say less is more. Unless it’s a Church IT Roundtable, in which case, more is more :-)

UPDATE (at 9:22 am Central): I found power! Sometimes, going to the restroom is useful. Well, it usually is, but sometimes what you find along the way is useful as well…but my flight is delayed another half an hour now, so 11:28 is the target time. Not that I believe them this time after it moved from 10:45 to 10:55 to 11:03…

Tomorrow, I return home! Tonight, I sleep.

In this photo, the three guys around the table on the left (left-to-right) are Matt Bradshaw, a desktop support technician, and Brian Slezak, all from Church of the Resurrection. These guys either develop for their website or have recently, and I got to chat with them at a techie level about website development (not design!). We talked about different backend CMS options (CMS in this case is Content Management Systems, not to be confused with CMS meaning Church Management System, which apparently has been around as that acronym for twenty years and isn’t officially changing to ChMS any time soon per some Roundtable discussion Wednesday afternoon!), and we also shared some stories about some vulnerabilities we’ve had exploited on our websites for various nefarious purposes in the past and how we discovered and dealt with them.

In our afternoon Roundtable session, we discussed spiritual issues surrounding Church IT departments, which I didn’t end up with many notes on. We moved on to Church Management Systems, which had some useful information but my few notes are not in an easily digestible format. In our room, three churches currently use Shelby, two use ACS Technologies, and we had one user each of Fellowship Technologies and Microsoft CRM (which has been heavily customized). This provided some fodder for both theoretical and practical discussion about each system, but I think we were all about ready to wrap up after a long day of discussion and thus this was probably a little less informative than it could have been, but there were a few new gems of knowledge I gleaned. This is one area where I think the vendors in the room should probably have been allowed to participate rather than just observe, because we had vendor reps from Shelby, ACS, and Microsoft CRM (or an integrator of this one) in the room and the systems are sufficiently complex that they may have been able to provide additional information. Oh well, they are great folks to talk to outside of the Roundtable format and I think everyone is making great connections and relationships with the vendors and the attendees.

We moved to the main meeting room after the afternoon Roundtable and got to hear for 30 minutes from Rev. Adam Hamilton, COR’s Founding and Senior Pastor. It was very informative hearing from his point of view, and several people had some very well thought-out questions to ask him afterwards. Around his talk, we watched a leadership video and an awesome, hilarious movie about Facilities Managers (“FMers”) created by I believe the COR facilities manager. It was sooo stinking funny! About 90 laughs per minute! There was another similar video earlier today as well, just as funny. The best part is that everything in the videos about FMers applies just about equally to ITers, which I’m sure made it extra funny for all. We had a half-hour break after this and then it was time for a great dinner at 6:00 from a local BBQ joint catered to a room down the hall, sponsored but I don’t know which vendor paid this time.

7:00 brought a worship service and sermon from Clif’s wife and the band from her church plant, which were excellent. At 8:00 they opened a room (until 11:00 pm at the latest) for hangout and open discussion, where I stuck around for 15-20 minutes and then caught a ride back to my hotel again from Dean Lisenby and Josh Wyse from ACS (thanks Dean!), where I am writing most of this post.

Going back to this morning, I can’t forget to mention that Jason Powell lost his Roundtable name badge and had to make a “fake” one for himself. He was razzed first thing this morning, and he was kind (apparently I said “king” rather than “kind” when writing this post late last night, so let me clarify: JP is cool, but not king :-) enough to post for a photo just so I could blog about it!

In other news, back on the home front I ran into an issue back at Lakeview today: I let the SSL certificate expire for our OWA webmail (which also is used for RPC over HTTPS in Outlook, and by our Treos with ActiveSync). So I spent part of the afternoon Roundtable remotely accessing the Lakeview network and working to resolvethat situation. Technically, the certificate didn’t expire, the renewed certificate was just never updated on the servers. This was for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that it fell off my priorities list with everything else going on, and also I didn’t have the username/password information handy for that account and didn’t find the time to track it all down with all the steps that will likely require. I have a temporary solution halfway in place now (everything but some Treos are working again) that I have to tweak tonight before I go to bed (also known as right now), and it should give me the time to deal with the original problem in the next few weeks. I won’t get into the details for both security reasons and because I’ve spent enough time recapping today already!

• Storage and backups
  • Mozy and MozyPro for offsite backup of some critical data (Shelby, Exchange) and is doing Shelby offsite backups on encrypted hard drives as well
  • SANs
  • NAS
• Email spam filtering
  • DefenderSoft is used by Lakeview Church, which is an MX Logic reseller
  • Symantec Barracuda in use by several churches
• Phone systems (VoIP vs. traditional) discussion I was not able to take notes on.
• Digital signage for internal church display
  • Jason Wilson (Indian Creek) mentioned that they are using Axis TV that lets them run an in-house TV network. The system is used to display announcements, splitting an LCD screen into multiple frames (a PowerPoint on one half and other feeds or announcements on the other half, like the auditorium feeds). Content can be assigned to individual areas so video can be targeted. It’s IP-based but feeds standard def RF to the TVs (HD capable but not doing it). Axis allows scheduling of upcoming events so announcements can be set up via it’s web-based administration area to display and turn off at particular times. Ballpark cost for the software is around $25k.
  • PowerPoint is being used by a couple of churches, including one church that pipes PowerPoint through EasyWorship.
• WiFi
  • Lakeview is doing public and private WiFi on separate SSIDs and separate VLANs throughout their building. Nomadix is being used to limit guest access with a well-known password, bandwidth limits, and content filtering via OpenDNS.
  • Seacoast is also doing WiFi through a separate public network at several of their locations.
• Network Monitoring
  • What’s up Gold is being used at COR
  • Nagios open source was mentioned by Matt Bradshaw from COR
• Websites and division of labor between IT and Communications
  • Mary Walton said it is difficult to get each pastor in different areas to create or update content for their website.
  • Steve Hewitt attending a church of 3,000 that is using a flash site that can’t be updated easily so they’ve had to create a separate site for their ministry area (as lay users).
  • Asbury United Methodist posts their sermons online
• Sermons online and podcasting
  • Most churches represented in this room that are doing online sermons are also posting the feed in iTunes.
  • Steve Hewitt said churches should make sure to post sermons with keywords and good descriptions in the titles, to make sure people around the world can find them rather than just using the date and church name for the system
• Email blasts
  • Room A asked about email blasting experience and options:
    • Steve Hewitt highly recommends Constant Contact for email blasts (50,000 addresses, 20 different groups) because they have relationships with AOL to get the emails through. Cost for his level of use is about $350 per month but it depends on the number of addresses.
    • Asbury uses ACS to blast out directly to 5,000 twice a week and hasn’t had any problems with blocking.
• We also dicsussed multi-site service streaming a bit but I was unable to capture notes on that.
• Mac integration
  • Asbury just got two Macs in their Communications department and they have had a lot of trouble integrating them.
  • Indian Creek hasn’t had a push to use Macs but they have some high-powered PCs.
  • COR does not backup the default storage on their Macs but they give them a UNC path they can store documents to be backed up. But they can’t integrate with Active Directory for free.
  • Lakeview integrates Mac OS X 10.4 with Active Directory using the Directory Access utility in Utilities. It does authentication including to (non-DFS) network shares but does not apply any policies. ADmitMac software supposedly can do a lot more including DFS operations but is expensive and Lakeview has not used or tried it.
• Patch management
  • Indian Creek is doing patch management through the Windows Software Update Server.
• User software testing
  • TotalTesting.com is recommended by Rod Cadenhead to test user’s ability to use Office products
• Service Planning and Music software
  • Lakeview uses PlanningCenterOnline.com to organize their weekend worship and music
  • A couple of churches use software called Music Manager
• Donations
  • Seacoast generally does not accept computer donations because they’re old and generally don’t work
  • Indian Creek takes donations and has a volunteer who eBays the items and the money goes back into the IT budget

Lunch time!