But, I’m still pretty young, and it’s time to move on to an environment that will provide some new challenges and experience in a wide variety of settings. So I’m moving to a small company with a Christian owner that provides residential and small business IT services to the Indianapolis and surrounding communities. Based in Fishers, IN, I’ll be working out of a new satellite office on the West side of Indy, not far from Lakeview in fact, and I’ll be working primarily with larger clients, including several churches in the area. What the job will look like day to day I can’t tell you precisely yet, but that will certainly be part of the excitement! And I’m still going to be involved with the Church IT Roundtable online and in person to a large extent (it’s still relevant as I’ll still be serving churches!), which I’m very excited about, as I have many close friends in the CITRT and their expertise has proved invaluable (and I have hopefully reciprocated with valuable tidbits of my own from time to time).

I’m really going to miss all of the Lakeview family on a daily basis. The staff are basically like close friends and family; it’s where I’ve spent all of my adult life in fact (and some volunteer time for years before that). God gave me peace about moving to this new position and I know He’ll provide, but I already miss everyone and I’m not gone yet!

There are still some details to be worked out about the transition, so I’m sure I’ll have some more to post later, and I certainly appreciate any prayers. It looks like I am going to the Church IT Roundtable at Saddleback Church in California on March 11-12! If you work in Church IT or you support or volunteer with Church IT in some way, you should be there! The cost should be under $100 plus travel, though final details should be coming soon.

My first day on the new job is set for February 10th, 2010 (though a few current coworkers said they hoped when I said Feb. 10th it meant 2011! Nothing like feeling wanted!).

I talked to my Zones sales rep, Eric Inabnit (Eric.Inabnit@zones.com, or 800-258-0882 ext. 3361), about it to see what the real deal was. He did some checking, and like James found out from his CDW rep, it appears that Adobe is consolidating their Educational and Non-Profit SKUs to simplify things, but it appears the pricing will stay relatively similar to its present levels, with a few minor adjustments. To quote Eric, he is hearing that, “they will be combining the nonprofit and academic price sheets to simplify management on their end. They are saying that if you qualified before you will still qualify, your sku’s will most likely change however pricing changes if any, will be negligible.”

Adobe will be shutting down its entire licensing system from October 7th to October 14th, however, so you cannot retrieve your license information for existing licenses nor can you order new licenses during that time. I can live with that, I wasn’t planning on any October Adobe orders.

This is good news, and while it’s by no means the final word, it does make me worry less about the potential budget impact it might have on churches! Adobe’s products are already some of the highest-priced software packages we buy that aren’t for servers (and frankly, much of our software (Microsoft, especially) costs a lot less than some single Adobe licenses), even with the reasonably significant non-profit discount.

If I discover any additional information I’ll update this post; send me any new information if you’ve got it! (Leave a comment or mention @dszp on Twitter.) Thanks, James, for bringing the Adobe changes to my attention and checking into it as well.

So I make it through the renewal process, which required generating a new CSR (Certificate Signing Request) for a brand new certificate from the server since the original one had a bit length of 1024 and GoDaddy only accepts 2048 to 4096 bit lenghts (this is a new requirement). After completing the process and getting the certificate installed, I got a nice helpdesk call from a user this morning who has a Centro: “SSL certificate not accepted due to possible expiration.  Check device date & time and re-sync.”

Joy oh joy, exactly what I’d been looking for, another problem and wasted time!

OK, enough sarcasm (but really, can you ever have enough?). Time for Google and Daryl Hunter from the Church IT Roundtable! Although GoDaddy auto-renewed my SSL certificate, I was actually contemplating buying one of their UCC certificates to be ready for when we went to Exchange 2007. Fortunately I read Daryl Hunter’s post about Exchange 2007 without UCC certs, and stuck with the regular certificate for now, because per Palm KB article 43375, certificates with Subject Alternate Names (SANs), such as UCC certs, are not supported at all on Palm devices (“SSL v3 certificates which rely on the Subject Alternate Name field to do load balancing across virtual site names do not work with Palm OS devices.”). So a UCC cert isn’t even an option for me, but it’s cheaper to do Daryl’s method anyway! For now I don’t have to worry about it, since I just have Exchange 2003 for now, and that’s not the present issue (but we will likely be on Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 by the time the certificate expires). Additionally, the same article (which has a tool for installing new trusted root certificates on some Palm OS devices–but I didn’t want to mess with touching every single Palm OS device here! And, the tool works on Windows 2000 or XP only, not Vista (and I’m sure not Windows 7 either)) specifically states that, “GoDaddy Class 2 certificates do not work with Palm OS devices.” Time to drop GoDaddy!

Daryl’s favorite SSL certificate vendor (and now, mine too!) is RapidSSL Online. They sell certificates from RapidSSL.com for $17.95 per year (or cheaper, for multiple years), and they’re single root certificates (which menas you don’t have to install intermediate certificates on your server). While RapidSSL Online is cheap, RapidSSL.com directly has a 30 day trial certificate you can sign up for to test for a month, and this is the way I went. When that certificate expires I’ll be purchasing a multi-year certificate from RapidSSL Online, but I wanted to make sure it would work, and it does! I don’t know for sure, but it appears that RapidSSL.com is the company holding the root certificate, while RapidSSL Online is either a reseller or a sub-company of the parent selling the certificates at a discount (the RapidSSL.com certificates aren’t expenive but still cost a lot more than from RapidSSL Online!). Either way, RapidSSL Online claims that their RapidSSL certificates are issued by RapidSSL.com so they should be the same (I haven’t made a purchase yet), and Daryl Hunter has used RapidSSL Online successfully for years across multiple installations.

I generated a new CSR for a new certificate, again (just like I had to do for GoDaddy). I installed the free certificate on my Exchange server’s IIS (I also then exported it and imported the .pfx file onto my ISA 2004 firewall since it does the authentication up front for external clients, but that’s a pretty unique case and in most cases you want this done on the Exchange server). They were right, it’s just a single root on the certificate, signed by Equifax! I had my Palm Centro users (two had complained by this point) try syncing again. It worked! My iPhone also works fine still, and I haven’t had any negative reports from the four Palm Pre users here either. None of my users have Windows Mobile, and my one Blackberry user connects though Blackberry Professional Server rather than with ActiveSync.

So, adios GoDaddy SSL; fortunately they will refund all but $15 of my certificate (for processing since it was issued), and I’ll still come out ahead with RapidSSL Online (GoDaddy was $60 for two years, while RapidSSL Online is only $70 for five years!).

One thing I’ll have to be careful of when I go to Exchange 2007 is that once I use Windows Server 2008 to generate the CSR, it appears I will need to go to extra pains to make sure the CSR is in Printstring format instead of UTF-8, as Palm OS doesn’t support UTF-8 certificates either (Server 2003 uses Printstring by default). Daryl located this useful post while helping me troubleshoot: Ranting about Palm Centro Versamail ActiveSync and SBS 2008. Useful info, I’m sure I’ll be going back when it’s time to renew next time and Server 2008 is in place. By then, I hope we are Palm OS-free; although I loved my Treo 600 and Treo 650 both, the web is littered with forum and blog posts from people who have SSL issues with Palm OS devices (the Palm Pre and Pixi are much more flexible and up-to-date with the Palm WebOS). I was happy GoDaddy “just worked” in the past, frustrated that they “just didn’t work” this time, and happy to save money and move to a company that’s quicker/faster/easier!

Here’s what’s changed in two years: Meraki has since redefined their entire business and offers much more expensive solutions, and no Meraki Minis. Also, the campground can now get DSL and not just satellite internet, which is awesome. And although Meraki is for my purposes defunct, Open-Mesh has taken over where Meraki left off and has a similar device at the same price, with better accessories and more power!

This time, we’re covering more ground as well. So I just ordered nine Open-Mesh OM1P Professional Mini Routers. And six 7 dbi antennas, plus three Indoor Wallplug Enclosures. This time I’m going to be covering more area, and I’m hoping that using some larger antennas as well as the reports I’ve heard that the Open-Mesh devices have better range than the Meraki units out of the box mean that we’ll have a very successful network this time! We’ll also have two or three DSL lines to serve as injection gateways, which should be a major improvement over the horrendous satellite connection we had before (if you could call it a connection half of the time when it wasn’t, you know, connected :-)

I plan on taking some pictures and documenting the setup more than last time, and if I find the time I might even blog some of it!

Did I mention my whole order including shipping was under $550? That’s cool.

The best tools I’ve found for dealing with the financial and invoicing sides of side work (pun fully intended :-) are these:

FreshBooks for invoicing. Free for up to 3 clients, a bit high but reasonable for more, and integrates with way more third-party services than their competitors (although some competitors are a bit cheaper and do things a little differently). They’re on  Twitter at @FreshBooks if you want to follow them or keep in touch.

IAC-EZ for accounting. If you’re making more than a few bucks, FreshBooks will help you invoice clients and track time, but expenses, taxes, and other actual accounting stuff you should track can be taken care of in IAC-EZ. I’ve gotten to know the owner of IAC-EZ over email and Twitter and was involved in beta-testing the product, and it’s not only in active development with new features and fixes, but the owner and others know their stuff in the acccounting and business worlds and aren’t shy about helping if you ask. There’s a trial and then it’s $20/mo. If you do a little side work it probably won’t be affordable but if you have enough you need to track your finances better, you can (and probably should) spare the cash. Oh yeah, and it integrates with FreshBooks, so whatever you do in FreshBooks is pulled right into IAC-EZ, avoiding entering things twice! This alone is reason enough to pick this over something else if you use FreshBooks. They are on Twitter at @IACEZ and so is the owner as @IAC_Heather.

Minibooks from Groovysquared for FreshBooks from your iPhone. I helped beta-test this app as well, and if you have an iPhone and use FreshBooks, it’s worth checking out. It’s very polished and although it’s missing some features like invoicing by time and sending estimates, those are being worked on and the feature set that is there is much more complete compared to the official FreshBooks iPhone app, which just tracks time. Minibooks does time tracking in an extremely elegant way (better than anything I’ve seen!), lets you browse and edit your clients, create, view, and edit invoices, and mark invoices as paid. It’s kind of like FreshBooks-in-a-phone. I’m missing the invoice-from-time-tracking and estimates features personally, but that’s not hard to do from my computer for now.

I use all of these tools personally and really like them. I know friends using FreshBooks and IAC-EZ who like them as well. Disclosure: the FreshBooks and IAC-EZ links are referral links and I’ll get credit and a small referral fee if you use them (you can find them easily online, guessing the domain names even, if you don’t want to use the referral links. But remember, I’m a Church IT guy :-) I received a free copy of Minibooks for my beta testing efforts but otherwise am uncompensated by Groovysquared. None of the companies saw or directly influenced this post before I published it. Lakeview Church does not endorse these products or benefit from their use in any way (other than their IT guy being more financially able to stick around at the job he loves :-)

• A Dell PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI SAN (with 10-15 near-line SAS 1TB drives and dual controllers)
• At least one new server (likely a Dell PowerEdge R805 with dual quad-core AMD processors)
• Microsoft Server Datacenter licensing for the same
• An iSCSI Ethernet switch
• Battery backups for server and SAN
• Backup software and some drives for backup
• A rack for the server room (maybe. If I can find a free or dirt cheap used one, locally)

Unfortunately, my budget for all of this as assigned is going to be a bit of a tight fit to squeeze the last few bits in and I’m still trying to figure out the best and most cost-effective way to do this. I’m also struggling a bit with which backup software to use. The server we were using to mirror our data is now dead, and although we have a RAID 5 array that is nowhere near the level of protection we need to have, but I am starting from scratch as far as which data backup software to buy. I have no tapes nor the budget for a tape drive, but I do have some PATA hard drive arrays that are only half-full that are SCSI-attached and will probably work in tandem with an existing server to become my disk-based backup server. Figuring out how to do offsite backup, within the same budget, is high on my todo list :-)

My budget for all this is actually less than the retail price of just the server and SAN. Fortunately, I rarely pay retail and this is certainly no exception! The plan, if isn’t obvious, is to virtualize. I’ve already been doing virtualization for a while to some extent. I used Microsoft Virtual Server a long time ago but switched to VMware Server product when it was released for free. I’m currently running four virtual Windows machines and a virtual Linux machine for our helpdesk software. Recently, since VMware’s ESXi became available for free, I’ve started running it on our newest server, a 3-year-old Dell PowerEdge 1800 Xeon 3.0GHz system with 6GB RAM. It runs very well and I love the management interface, even just using the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client it comes with (since we aren’t paying for Virtual Infrastructure 3, or VI3 as it’s known!).

The goal of the new system will be to move virtual machines and file shares onto the MD3000i SAN. The Dell R805 server will be the primary virtual machine host, and although my plan was to use VMware ESXi, a good friend and mentor has recommended I examine Microsoft’s new Hyper-V virtualization platform as a strong contender, especially since Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 is coming and Live Motion will be available in the future, something that VMware does (simliarly, at least) with VMotion only for a high licensing cost. I’m open to either virtualization solution at this point, but here’s my main problem: Hyper-V will only run on procesors that support the new virtualization extensions. Right now, that’s zero of our servers. The R805 will support them of course, but the PowerEdge 1800, our only server with even a 64-bit processor, is too old to have the extensions and thus cannot run Hyper-V or 64-bit guests (although it runs ESXi just fine right now). My plan was to use the PE1800 as a backup server to run critical systems as needed if the R805 was ever down. With Hyper-V, this is no longer an option (and really, with the PE1800 and ESXi I still can’t run any 64-bit guests, so Exchange 2007 is out), and my concern is being left without a secondary server should the primary fail.

So, I’m left trying to fit a second server of some sort, new enough to have virtualization extensions but cheap enough to fit into my already packed budget. Suggestions, and of course donations, are welcome :-) I have been keeping an eye on the Dell Outlet but that is mostly pointless until I have the money to spend same-day when something shows up in stock.

At the moment I’m likely going to get a couple of refurbished UPSs from RefurbUPS for battery backup. However, I will be pursuing a contact or two who may be able to help with this as well.

The final area I’m still investigating still is data backups. There are a plethora of disk-to-disk backup options, and obviously I’m limited by price. I’m not going to use Symantec’s BackupExec for various reasons. The options I am considering so far consist of the following:

• Amanda (Enterprise for Exchange, open source if it will mix with Enterprise)
• Righeous Software’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
• Backup Assist
• CommVault (the Small Business version available only through resellers such as Dell)
• Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM)

CommVault is the solution that Jason Powell and his team use at Granger Community Church. They like it and it allows for Exchange restore down to the individual message if necessary without restoring the entire data store. The other options I have done varying levels of research on; enough to know they are still a contender on both price and features but not enough to provide an in-depth comparison summary. I am also still working how exactly how many virtual machines I will be running, and how many need to run a backup agent (some things can just be backed up with scripted backups to a file server where the data can be backed up along with everything else on that server, so I don’t necessarily have to have a backup agent for every VM).

The funding will be available most likely in the next couple of weeks or so to go ahead and make these purchases. If I can hold off on some of the backup questions, I may try to wait until after the upcoming Seacoast Fall Church IT Roundtable so I have more time to bounce ideas off of the smart guys there!

This is an overview and of course is not the only research, thinking, and questioning I’ve done about this solution! So feel free to comment and suggest away; I’m just saying there’s a possibility I’ve considered your suggestion and if so, I’ll note it. More often than not though, my thinking is challenged here in the comments, so please delight me with your insights, they are much appreciated :-)

Prior Todo System Attempts

The result is usually “cool,” and I might use it for a day or two. And then, I forget about it. (I use and love the HelpSpot helpdesk software (Lakeview is even a HelpSpot case study!), but there are tasks (and projects) I’d like to manage outside of requests in the helpdesk, and that’s just an at-work solution.) Now that I have an iPhone, although it comes with no built-in task managment program (why? Beats me), I figured someone would have made a system I could use on my desktop, laptop, and iPhone to track todo lists at home, for Lakeview, and for the Indianag A/G District Office where I work one day per week. And when I’m somewhere else, I don’t really want to see what I have to do anywhere but where I am! And oh yeah, I’d like subtasks support, tagging, sorting, searching, start and end due dates, and due time with reminders built in, and probably a few things I’m forgetting. And can you make it free while you’re at it?

I’ve already mentioned that there are a lot of online todo list web applications. On my renewed search for iPhone-compatible todos, I tried the very well-known Remember the Milk service. It has a nice interface and I thought it might just be as good as everyone seems to think, and it had an iPhone interface. Which I never tried, because although there’s a trial, you have to pay for a Pro account to use the iPhone-optimized webapp; I think it’s $25/year and you get a few other benefits as well. But I kept going back to my preference for “free” and wondered if someone else was doing it better. I’ve bookmarked some of my findings using my Delicious keyword “todo”

The other one with a funny name: Toodledo

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered it, but it was probably a Google search or a post comparing services that led me to Toodledo. The name almost turned me off from looking at it at all. It’s a nice play on words but not as “professional” sounding as I was looking for. But hey, Remember the Milk isn’t all suit-and-tie sounding either, so I gave it a shot, especially because it had a free iPhone interface called Slim. The well-done feature comparison chart also helped to convince me to try it out, given it’s completeness compared to every competitor listed (granted, the chart is a bit out of date per a few forum postings especially in relation to Todoist, which I tried briefly after I was already using Toodledo (always on the lookout for something closer to perfection :-) and if you like using the keyboard extensively it may be an excellent option, although I’m not sure about an iPhone version). Of course comparison charts are intended to be biased towards the company making the chart, but the list of features Toodledo had was impressive by itself.

This is going to get long, so for more information I’m breaking the rest out after the jump if you’re reading this on the web!

And then I gave them money

After customizing the fields I wanted to use (most of them, it turns out) and playing with the Contexts feature which lets you save a location or context for each todo item, I started to actually put a few tasks in for the next few days to get a feel for how to use it in a daily workflow. It clicked. I still find some interface things to be not as easy as they could be, but I like Toodledo so much that I’ve purchased a Pro account for $15 per year to unlock some additional features. The fee is more reasonable than any other pro account I’ve encountered for task management, and although my preference is of course for stuff that’s free, the Pro account just added enough value at a small enough price to make it worthwhile (subtasks and longer completed-task history retention were the two that put me over the edge, but the Scheduler and Stats features are also nice). However I haven’t seen the need for a 1GB file storage area that doubles the price, so I stuck with a Pro rather than a Pro Plus account; the file storage and going from 2 years of completed-item retention to forever are the only additional features for the upgraded plan.

Sidenote: Project Management Still Elusive

The definition of what I look for in a productivity app keeps changing. Universally available todo lists with all the features I’ve mentioned were the biggest need I had and Toodledo fills that void nicely. Some people, especially those using the GTD system, use Toodledo to track projects (GTD defines a project as “anything requiring more than one specific action to complete” while I both like that and have an additional one, something like “something I want to get done including collaboration with others” or something along those lines). Toodledo provides task sharing (read-only unless the other user has a Pro account) and you can use Toodledo’s Projects field to track GTD-like projects, but at work I’m still missing something between todo list and helpdesk.

What I’m looking for is Project Management. Something like Microsoft Project without the complexity, on the web, for one to several people working together on multiple projects to use for tasks and collaboration. There are nearly as many options in this space as there are todo list services! The most well-known of these is probably 37signals‘ Basecamp and their associated services (like Backpack, for todos and calendaring–but it’s not free!). Basecamp is nice but their free account only allows for one project, and their paid accounts are more than I’m willing to shell out for right now, and they don’t offer non-profit discounts (I asked). That’s OK, copycats are a dime a dozen, but the problem is finding the one that does everything the way I want it to, at the right price! Unlike Toodledo, I’ve not discovered the perfect-enough solution for this yet, but I’m still looking. My biggest concern is that most project management systems include their own todo list system, and I want to make sure I don’t split my nice Toodledo system and have to check two separate todo lists all the time! I’m keeping this in mind as I evaluate.

Ideally, I’d like a system that coworkers helping me with projects as well as volunteers can log into and update with research findings, progress, and that sort of thing. The ability to collaborate with volunteers is one of the driving reasons I want a web-based system! Projects in this context might be things like:

• Upgrade Microsoft Exchange to 2007 from 2003
• Run wires to X for Y purpose
• Use compressor to blow dust out of all desktops (recurring)
• Upgrade all or most servers to Server 2008 from Server 2003
• Purchase and implement a SAN solution with virtualization

Centrally managing a list like that would be much better than me having to come up with it off the top of my head like I just did! Yes I can just write down a list, and I have a few of those, but that leaves out the collaboration opportunity. One of the few entirely free options I’m contemplating is called ClockingIT. The interface doesn’t seem as clean as some competitors, but it has many features including a Wiki, chat, forums, and files, along with reporting and charting options. And the price is right.

This is one of many possibilities several of us in the Church IT IRC channel (#citrt on the Freenode IRC network) discussed a week or two ago when we went Googling for project management options. No one in the group has a perfect solution but several have none (hence the looking!), and others are using things like Basecamp, Sharepoint (WSS) or Microsoft Project. I refuse to get sucked into using Sharepoint and the other two I’ve already eliminated for reasons above, so that’s why I’m still looking! I’m tracking things that show some promise using my Delicious keyword “projectmanagement” if you care to browse. For churches, TeamWorkLive stands out as another very nice option, although the price is too steep for me right now. I can see this being a great all-church-staff project management tool, if everyone gets on board and you’re OK with the $200/mo for 50 users (or $150/mo for 25 users…there are other plans too).

My Toodledo Workflow

My District Toodledo context (click to enlarge)

This is a brief overview of how I use Toodledo. I have most of the fields except for the sharing-related ones enabled. I used Google’s Chrome browser to create an “Application” out of the Toodledo website so I can easily open a separate Toodledo-only window, preventing it from getting lost amid my many tabs (no, I’m not kidding! Too many tabs to provide an exact count right now though…). I have the same setup on the desktop I use at each office and on my laptop, and I have an iPhone home screen icon set up for the Toodledo Slim iPhone webapp interface (I’m also presently using the Appigo Todo native iPhone app, which is nice, but it is missing several features including subtask and context support that prevent it from being as useful in general, even though it syncs well with Toodledo. Appigo has said they are working to add these features in the near future).

Basics

I have Toodledo set to default to the Contexts tab, since you can select any of the fields to start with by default. This lists all the Contexts I have set up in tabs across the top of the screen, and I can easily select which one to view (the number of tasks in the context is shown in parentheses on the tab but that can optionally be hidden). The main contexts I have (plus a few infrequently used ones) are: Any Computer, Lakeview, District, and Home. I default to sorting tasks by Importance and then Auto. Importance is a foruma defined by Toodledo that takes into account both the priority of a task and how soon it’s due, and assigns each task a numerical value of “importance.” The higher-importance items are shown at the top, and for each task the due date or priority is displayed at the right side (whichever is the reason for the importance level is displayed, due date or priority, per task).

A quick scan shows me what I need to do today and I can pick a next action to work on based on only tasks that I can do (that are in the context I’m presently in; at Lakeview for example). I have keyboard shortcuts enabled which lets me type “n” to create a new task quickly, and I can tab through the fields to set the folder, start and due dates, priorities, context (defaults to the context I’m in) and other settings as applies to that task. The Folder field I’m using kind of as a categorization field and kind of as a “project” field, I’ve not decided 100% how I’m going to use it yet. But that’s an example of flexibility; I can use the Folder field for whatever I want however I want to! There’s also a Tags field which allows for multiple, comma-separated tags which you can view and sort just like any other fields. I’m using tags sparingly right now, but will throw “web,” “order,” “blog,” for categorization, or a person’s name (like my boss) to create an agenda to talk to that person about the next time I see them.

Subtasks

Subtasks, which are a feature of the Pro account I paid for, are nice but not as easy to use as I’d like. Without seeing or using it I’m not sure I could explain it very well so I won’t try for now. Suffice it to say the usability of the interface for subtasks has a ways to go to make it as efficient or easy to use as it needs to be for me to get much use out of it. Like others on the Toodledo forums, I would also like to see the ability to assign an order to subtasks so as each was marked complete, the next one would be “active” until it was complete, and so on. This would make tasks with subtasks very usable as GTD “projects->next actions” which I would like to get into more in-depth as I work toward trying to implement GTD myself (I am currently trying to use some of the GTD concepts but I haven’t dived in to the program all the way). I presently have 55 active todo items in Toodledo, which is the important suff I can’t forget but is not close to the full brain dump GTD requires to really work well!

iPhone

The iPhone interface is mostly full-featured but obviously limited in the amount of information it can display at once, and the lag time for the webapp to refresh is occasionally annoying. However I use it to enter new todo items at least as often as I use a computer, I think, and I edit and mark tasks complete on it as well (it’s nice that I can review pretty much anywhere when I have downtime, without having to be in front of a computer!). The biggest benefit to having an iPhone interface is that I’m more likely to follow through and use the system the more contstant and “anywhere” my access to it is. I don’t want to rely on something that goes away when I’m not at my computer; that’s when I need to be reminded what I need to do the most! Especially as I’m running around the building away from my office. Between Appigo Todo and the Slim webapp, I get what I need to out of the iPhone side of Toodledo access, but it’s not perfect. I am looking forward to the Appigo Todo updates that will add Contexts especially (and subtasks!), and Toodledo developers themselves have mentioned in their forums that they are looking at iPhone native apps themselves but have not released any details about when to expect anything concrete to materialize.

Other Ways to do Toodle

Some other ways that Toodledo provides to interface with their system are email, Twitter, and Jott. I have enough ways to add and view tasks on the go that I don’t think the Twitter integration will be very useful to me despite my extensive use of Twitter. Jott is an excellent service that I’ve used for a long time off and on, but recently they switched to a paid model and left beta status. Basic Jotting is still free but connecting to productivity services like Toodledo requires a paid monthly subscription now. If I get desperate enough to need quick voice-to-todo translation I’ll contemplate a subscription; until then I may use the iPhone Jott app to capture quick items that I can manually enter as a Toodledo task later. Email is one piece that I haven’t really gotten into the swing of using but should be pretty powerful, because you can forward an email to your secret Toodledo email address, changing the subject to the actual todo text (add exclaimation points to bump up the priority, and @context to set a context) and the body of the email becomes the task’s note. This should make creating tasks from emails quick and painless, but like I said I just haven’t started using it heavily yet, even though I need to. The same command-shorthand works to create new tasks via Twitter using a Direct Message, by the way.

There are several other ways to get information out of Toodledo, including iCal subscriptions, Vista and Apple dashboard or sidebar widgets, a Firefox extension and sidebar (the sidebar uses the same Slim interface as the iPhone), and there’s a third-party Outlook Synchronization Tool that does just what it sounds like, using the Toodledo API. I tried this (it does work!) since I use Outlook but the lack of contexts turned me off and I’ve tried and failed to use the Outlook Tasks feature for tracking todo items, so I’m not sure why I wanted to try again :-) You can display your tasks in your Google Calendar in at least two ways (as a drop down item each day to see tasks due that day, or as actual calendar items if you’ve set a due time as well), and you can get text-message or email alerts about an hour before a task with the due time field set is due (for now, you can’t configure how early to remind you, and if on, all tasks with a due time will remind you up to the maximum number of reminders you want per day).

Conclusion

Is Toodledo what I’m going to use long-term? Well, I’ve spent about $25 on Toodledo Pro for a year, and the Appigo Todo and Notebook iPhone Apps. I’ve been using the system for about a month I think, successfully, and with money invested I (hope) I’m nore likely to stick with it longer. Only time will tell! It’s full-featured yet flexible, but it doesn’t quite provide the collaborative project management that I’m also looking for, which may end up being another tool to juggle when I find the right one, rather than replacing Toodledo. Sometimes you just need a nice, smart, flexible list to give your mind some sanity by offloading the “stuff” to the system.

That’s the premise of GTD, and Toodleso is my favorite implementation so far. I just have to be careful to avoid something I recall reading on Merlin Mann’s 43folders blog a while ago (I’m not sure what article) that mentioned it was too easy to spend more time looking at, examining, and setting up a system that you more busy with that than actually using it! I agree, that is easy to slip into sometimes! I guess I’ll just have to stop and use this for while!

Yep. That’s right. In case Firefox, Opera, and Safari all don’t satiate your burning desire to be rid of Internet Explorer (even if it is improving with age, after it started to ripen at least), Google said they are releasing the beta of a new web browser called Chrome today, Sept. 2nd, 2008. It’s been in development for two years, and they’re beta-testing it with thousands of webpages automatically after each build. How? Well, they have this little archive of webpages stored somewhere… :-)

They accidentally leaked the news a bit early but have now come clean and written a blog post announcing it, and have released the original leaked “comic book” describing the project, which will be open source and they claim has pulled from both Mozilla (Firefox) code and Apple’s Safari WebKit rendering engine. The comic book is very descriptive and indicates that each tab of the browser will run in a separate process, which will reduce memory usage over time and allow multi-threaded JavaScript, as well as allowing individual tabs to crash without taking down the whole browser. If this works as advertised, a few tab-users I know (with myself as the number one offender!) may flock to this quite a bit faster than users have moved to, say, Flock. Sorry, couldn’t resist…pun fully intended :-D

I, for one, will be grabbing the beta ASAP and taking it for a spin. As long as rendering is consistent enough to not intruduce more headaches for web designers (basically, standards-compliant, kind of ), I’m excited to see if it lives up to its claims! And I love testing new software. I’m always amazed at the things I haven’t thought of yet, that others have. Nowhere is it easier and quite flexible to showcase stuff like that than in software! Just bang a few keys, hopefully in the right order, and you have something new. The only thing easier? Web design (which is correspondingly more limited most of the time). Of course, both can be done very badly…

Now I’m rambling. But this is unexpected and exciting news! I would say, don’t knock it ’til you try it, and read the comic :-)

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!

Instead, they’ve (finally) added a nice note to their email which says, “If you have already renewed these products or are working with your reseller, please disregard this notice or click here to ensure you don’t receive future notifications.” Stupid to make me do this, but sure…I click on it. It opens a new email (not a website) addressed to symantec@customermining.com (let the spam bots have it, what do I care?) pre-filled with something like this (I’ve x’d out the fields they filled in for privacy):

Subject: My Symantec Support Contracts Are Already Renewed

My Symantec Support Contracts have already been renewed. By sending this email, I will ensure that I will not receive future renewal notifications for the products listed in my renewal agreement number indicated below. I understand that if I have other Symantec products with support contracts up for renewal, I may receive renewal notifications for those products in the future.

NAME/COMPANY NAME
Agreement#: xxxxxx and Customer #: xxxxx
Original Order #: xxxxxx
Ref #: xxxxxxx
Support Exp Date: xxxxxx
Source Code: xxxxx

Why on earth do they make me go through this when they should already know I renewed!? I even got a call from Symantec right around the expiration date about this exact same thing, and I told the person that we had just renewed already–just like the email, a phone call that they should never have made. And yet it’s still in their email system!

Yeah, I know, it’s just a few emails. But it’s annoying, and I’ve been through it twice now! You’re a big company, Symantec. Please get your act together. Small things count. </rant>

If a laptop user establishes a VPN connection to your corporate VPN server, and doesn’t use split tunneling (in other words, from the time they’re connected, all traffic goes through the VPN as its default gateway no matter what), assuming that you’re using a VPN client that verifies the identity of the server (rather than blindly trusting DNS, which is easily spoofable on a wireless network), the user moves from the realm of insecurity into a much more secure environment, similar to being plugged into your wired network at the office. Of course, then your office WAN connection has to support everything they do, including web browsing!

However, using a free or paid “VPN” service from a company that just turns your wireless connection into a VPN-enabled “wired” connection is only going to help thwart unencrypted wifi sniffing and other such attacks. Unless you also use SSL and other encryption technologies, those services are just giving you a wired internet connection just like your home connection rather than the easier-to-sniff unencrypted wireless. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not like an encrypted pipe into your own network.

Don’t discount unencrypted wireless attacks. It’s never happened to me, but if you hop over and read some of Security Monkey’s case files at you’ll discover that there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world on computers :-) Those case files are slightly modified true stories from this guy’s career! His old 2005-2007 podcast episodes are worth listening to for some cool security tips and tools as well, to digress for a moment!

I don’t have a good answer; VPN connections to the office make internet run very slowly unless you have the WAN bandwidth to support fast throughput to and from all your remote users including web browsing! But that’s a much more secure way to operate. The number of ways wireless can be hijacked, sniffed, spoofed, and hacked, especially if it’s unencrypted to begin with, is downright scary! At the very least use SSL with verified certificates for anything you do of any importance (or if passwords are transmitted) on an encrypted wireless connection. As an IT guy, I can tell you (or myself) whether a particular session (POP3, IMAP, RPC over HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) is happening over an encrypted connection or not and can be careful. However, the average user is, obviously, not going to know or even care necessarily if Outlook is using POP3 unencrypted or via SSL, or using RPC over HTTPS securely. And if they log into Gmail, they’re not likely to know that although their password is always encrypted on login, their email is transmitted in the clear unless they initiate the session using SSL from the start (using https://mail.google.com/ rather than http://mail.google.com)./ Even if their email contains passwords and confirmations for other accounts!

Stuart mentioned WiTopia on his comment to Tony’s original post. I’d never heard of them before, but I’ve seen similar services to their personalVPN product. That service appears to be, like I mentioned above, just a way to get a “wired quality” connection to the internet over unsecured wireless. An admirable service and a worthy goal even with its limitations, but what caught my eye even more was their SecureMyWifi service. It’s still a wireless service but it has to do with your own on-campus wireless access. It lets you move away from using WPA with a Pre-Shared Key (PSK), also known as WPA-Personal, and use their RADIUS services to authenticate users individually to your encrypted wireless access points. It seems a bit pricey (to me–it’s currently a $99 setup fee, $99/year for one access point, and $14.95/year for each additional access point), but we have the same thing set up using Microsoft’s free (built-in on Windows Server 2003) IAS RADIUS server in-house. If you aren’t familiar with how to set it all up, the WiTopia service could be quite beneficial! They charge per access point, but at Lakeview we have a centrally-managed access points system with one controller that takes care of authentication. I assume that the WiTopia service is based on unique RADIUS keys for each access point client; since the central controller (currently running 12 access points) acts as a single client, it should look like “one” access point to the service. Whether or not this is allowed with their terms of service I have no idea; we are not likely going to use the service since I already do this in-house for free, but I would recommend reading the terms and/or contacting them if you plan on doing something similar to remain in the spirit of their offering.

Before making a decision there are certainly things to evaluate, and I definitely want to get my hands on an NSA box for a while to test first. I like the ISA 2004 firewall interface that we’re currently running and I want to make sure I’m comfortable managing SonicWALL if we go that route.

Because I recently received a request for a recommendation of where to purchase Microsoft software, I wrote an email reply with information on available options and contact information for the sales representatives that I work with. That was the catalyst for this post, and I’m going to provide some of the same details below:

Microsoft and Adobe Charity Programs

Microsoft’s charity licensing program is called Microsoft Open License Charity. Their price list is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet (or it used to be; thanks to Jason Powell for the link and an excellent post about this topic that also includes some sample pricing on common items), but you may need either extensive training or experience to decipher a lot of it! But a reseller will be happy to give you a price, which I find is often less than the suggested retail (but the reseller price will usually still have wiggle room for negotiation). Suffice it to say you’re wasting money if you can purchase at charity pricing and aren’t. Percentages vary, but expect more than 50% off and up to 90% off is not uncommon.

Adobe didn’t used to have options for non-profit, religious purchasing discounts, but in the last couple of years that has changed. Their discounts are in general over 50% off the retail price of their software, sometimes a lot more than that. They have a website dedicated to non-profits and also have a non-profit blog, although it’s not very active.

The regular charity pricing offered by at least Microsoft and Adobe, unlike the restrictive TechSoup offerings that don’t usually apply to churches anyway, is good for unlimited licenses! The main limitation is that Microsoft requires at least five licenses to be purchased at once to set up a charity pricing agreement, although these can be low-cost licenses (if not otherwise needed) that will not normally negate most of your savings if you need fewer licenses! Adobe’s current program lets you purchase just one license at a time if desired!

There are two vendors that I’ve used for charity pricing, and I use them for just about everything else as well: Zones and Dell:

Zones

I’ve been using Zones as a supplier for somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 years. They have had competitive pricing in most cases and I’ve worked with a single, excellent sales representative, Lisa Shook (formerly Brubaker), for that entire time. The Zones HQ where Lisa works is located in Washington state, but most shipments (to us) ship out of warehouses in Illinois or northern Indiana and even with standard ground shipping arrive here in Indianapolis the next day or, in rare cases, in two days. There may be warehouses closer to you, so it’s worth asking if you’re buying hardware. Keep in mind that software from Microsoft and Adobe, when they’ll allow you to order discs rather than downloading it (and my understanding is that Microsoft recently started requiring you to download disc images for their software), must be shipped directly from Microsoft or Adobe themselvles, although the discs usually arrive within a few days in my experience. Contact me if you are interested in Lisa’s contact information, I won’t post it here so she can spend more time helping me and less time dealing with spam :-)

Update 2010-07-06: Lisa moved on to larger accounts and didn’t hold onto ours any longer, as of close to two years ago. However, her neighbor Eric Inabnit (who she recruited to Zones) took over our account and has been just as excellent! I still highly recommend him. I recommend shooting him an email if you need charity pricing or good non-profit pricing in general on Adobe, Microsoft or hardware (they can resell Dell too). Tell him I sent you! You can also call him at (800) 258-0882 x 3361, or directly at (253) 205-3361. Make sure you talk to him first before another rep gets you set up so he can help you.

Dell

Although I’ve ordered some Dell stuff in the past, I hadn’t really used their business sales division where they resell just about anything (with some limitations) in addition to giving (good!) discounts on their own hardware. I haven’t verify that they carry Adobe charity licensing, but I know they carry Microsoft’s and they seem to be undercutting just about everyone else right now on price, including Zones. They appear to be making little to no money on the licensing side of things to earn your business in other areas, and I’m OK with that. I haven’t made the decision to switch to them for all licensing yet because managing licenses is easier if done through one vendor, and right now that’s Zones for us, but I’m contemplating the situation. Our sales rep at the moment is Lindsey Keen, and again, if you want contact info let me know. Dell ships primarily with DHL, and while systems generally ship out of their Texas HQ (and the most recent one took only one week), I’ve received shipments of non-Dell-branded items from the Kentucky/Tennessee/Ohio areas recently that took only 1-3 days to arrive via ground shipping.

Also, Dell will often have huge discounts they can give you at the end of their fiscal quarters if you talk to their reps, in addition to the deals they usually offer on their website. January was the end of their last quarter, so start tracking from there and see what you can get if you can wait long enough!

Update 2010-07-06: Our Dell rep, Lindsey Keen, left Dell and was replaced by a new rep who has been around for over a year and a half now, Shelton Cammon. He’s great to work with, has a good team, and is often the lowest on Microsoft charity pricing due to Dell’s policies of low- to no-margin software sales. If you do a lot of ordering, ask him to set up a Premier account so you can login and see your approximate pricing with discounts from a website, including ordering (and you can finalize order’s Shelton has quoted you over the phone via Premier as well).

Consistent Computer Bargains

A company I’ve never dealt with simply because I didn’t know about them when I first started with charity pricing is Consistent Computer Bargains. They offer charity pricing programs for both Microsoft and Adobe, and they also have many other products. They are Christian-owned and cater specifically to non-profits and churches. I have heard many good things about them, so although I can’t personally recommend them I would certainly add them to your list of places to investigate.

Purchasing and Credit

Zones and Dell both offer lines of credit, or you can purchase with a credit card. Talk to the reps to get started opening a line of credit, but basically Zones will do Net 30 terms, and Dell will do a form of Net 30 with their Dell Business Credit line for purchases under $500. If your purchase is over $500, Dell will usually do their 60-days-same-as-cash loan. If you pay it off in full within the 60 days, there’s no charge. But let it go one day longer, and you’ve got a multi-year loan with prepayment penalties on your hands! Dell offers several leasing options as well, and Zones offers leasing through their partners. (UPDATE 2010-07-06: After writing this post, I did find out that Dell will also do standard Net 30 credit terms, which is much easier to deal with than the Dell Financial Services loans, which often have brief due dates and high finance charges if not paid off in the free period.)

When you order Microsoft Charity software, most of it requires a volume license key to be entered at install time. Once you have your emailed agreement information from your purchase, you’ll want to head over to the Microsoft eOpen Licensing (now the Volume License Service Center, or VLSC, as eOpen was replaced in 2009) website, log in with (or create) a Microsoft Passport account, and add your agreement information to the system. You can then download licensed software images to burn to disc from this site, and you can view the license keys for the products you have purchased. Adobe volume licensing software will come as an email with a username and password and a link to the site where you an log in and get your license key(s).

Miscellaneous

Keep in mind that if you can’t get something through Zones, Dell, or another reseller, or you can’t get a non-profit discount, try talking to the company directly about a non-profit discount. I would say the majority of software vendors I’ve talked to, and many hardware vendors, are willing to offer at least a 10% discount for non-profits, although I’ve seen it go up to 15%, 20%, or higher. But you usually won’t get this without asking! I don’t have a list of all the software I’ve gotten non-profit discounts on, but I do recall HelpSpot and WebDrive, and SftpDrive offered a very good discount as well. Also check out Remote Desktop Manager, which has a non-profit discount (50% off a site license when I asked, which made it $100 for the pricing at the time!), as it’s my current favorite administrative tool for connecting to remote desktop and LogMeIn sessions remotely (it supports other remote connection types as well) using saved information and tabbed connections (there is a free, useful version as well).

Make sure that you know what Software Assurance (Microsoft) and upgrade insurance (Adobe) is and whether you want it or not. I usually recommend it on server products, like Windows Server, Small Business Server, Exchange Server, etc. but on desktop products (Windows XP/Visa, Office) it’s a bit of a tougher decision, although I do recommend it for Adobe products. The idea is you pay more up front and then a recurring fee (every two years in the case of the Microsoft and Adobe programs, I believe), and you can upgrade to future versions of the software you’ve purchased without having to pay full price when a new version is released. The sales reps should be able to give you the details and pricing.

Other well-known vendors are CDW and TechDepot. I don’t have experience with them, but they’re certainly options if you want to investigate further and compare prices and service.

Updated Info on Mac Office 2008 pricing; also Home Use Program

UPDATED May 23: Thanks to Jason Powell for pointing out something I have not yet run into: Mac Office 2008 is not available at Microsoft charity pricing from Apple. In fact, Apple and others are selling Mac Office 2008 at prices above $200 per license, while the charity vendors I’ve listed in this post (and others) are carrying it for under $60 (no typo!). Check out Jason Powell’s post on the topic for more details. Thanks Jason! (Update 2010-07-06: I’m not sure of all the details, but you can also use Mac Office with a volume licensed version of Office for Windows, as long as the version is ‘the same or lower’ though I’m not sure of the specifics. Do some research, but keep in mind you can “trade” OSes in some cases if you have licenses from one you want to use on another!)

Also, I didn’t mention it here at all, but I’ll throw in that if you buy Software Assurance for your Microsoft products, some of them come with home use rights (the Home Use Program, or HUP) that let your users get separate licenses to the same software you bought for use at home, generally for very low cost. This is something you can activate through your eOpen licensing management portal (when it’s actually working). Microsoft Office has been the most well-known software available through this program, but Jason also posted that Office for Mac is also a part of the Home Use Program now! I’m just starting to dig into the HUP program myself but it’s certainly a good deal! And one good reason to pay for Software Assurance, although I’ve certainly heard arguments in both directions.

Mumbo-Jumbo

Disclaimer: The licensing programs described here are based on my understanding of the programs through my own use and purchasing, reading agreements, and discussions with resellers familiar with the options. However, it’s all just my (non-legal) opinion and you should independently verify all terms and legalities as they apply to your situation. Be careful as Microsoft licensing guidelines can be and have been interpreted differently even by different Microsoft representatives themselves! If you can decipher the straight legalese in their licensing on your own, you’re a better man than me. And if you’re a woman and can decipher it, well you’re already a better woman than me, so no contest :-)

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm Eastern is the next episode of the Church IT Podcast, hosted on TalkShoe by Jason Powell, the King of Church IT (if you were at the Fall Church IT Roundtable last year where I accidentally coined that nickname, that joke might be funny :-) Don’t miss it if you can make it (I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not, unfortunately I may not have the opportunity this time). There is still the option to download a “Classic” Java client for TalkShoe chat, but they just introduced a new Web version that does not require a download ahead of time and looks more like an IRC chat window. It’s in alpha but looks nice; you can use either one you want.

Speaking of chat, if every two weeks is just too long to wait for the Podcast, you can jump in to the IRC chatroom “24/7 CITRT Roundtable” set up on the Freenode server (IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, has been around forever, or just about, in internet terms, but is not quite as common as it used to be). Justin Moore posted a couple of excellent posts talking about the #citrt chat room and about how to use IRC. He also links to Jeffrey Thompson’s screencast demonstrating graphically how to install the ChatZilla Firefox extension and join in the chat. If you’re a Church IT person, you need to be in there at least from time to time and build your network of geek friends while sharing technology tips!

So, there’s three ways you can get involved in the Church IT community without giving the seat of your chair the opportunity to rebound from your butt imprint. Go!

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Very strange. Even more strange is that I can log into one of my Google Apps for Domains accounts just fine, just not my main Gmail account.

Update at 10:30 pm: Seems to be working fine now. Not sure how long it was actually down. Around an hour or less from what I saw, but who knows how long before I checked it went down, and how soon in the interim it came back up.

They are using St. Bernard for the block list, the company that makes the iPrism for corporate content filtering. I’ve had some contact with them recently (watched an online live demo and gotten some quotes — the demo was impressive but not worth the time given the price of the quote vs. our budget) and they seem to be a classy company, near the top of the choices for premiere content filtering.

OpenDNS also allows you to put your custom image on the block page (for their typo correction, not just the content filtering). Their service is already being put to use in several churches, but I can’t help thinking this will bump that trend right on up! Andrew Mitry at Anchorite switched from OpenDNS to ScrubIT in March (it sounds like he either used OpenDNS before or liked it, hard to tell from that post), while at the same time commenting that OpenDNS appeared to be more mature (an assessment I’d fully agree with). This is the first time OpenDNS has responded with a content filter on this level however. In my experience (and I’ve corresponded with several of the OpenDNS staff including owner David Ulevich), OpenDNS doesn’t do something unless it can be done right, and going with a large provider like St. Bernard for their list sounds just like something they’d do.

Now, to test extensively! Detailed reporting (especially at the user or internal IP level) is really the key component missing from this service, since you can add your own blocked domains as well. I also don’t see a way to override specific blocked pages if you run into a site categorized incorrectly (although OpenDNS is known for adding additional control features later on). And, while it will catch direct-access porn and other adult content, it can’t do much for direct-IP access sites, or a bigger threat, open proxies (possibly the most well-known being Google’s own English-to-English translator, among hundreds of others) since it’s not doing URL filtering or any content inspection, just DNS blocking. But it’s a good first line of defense, at an even better price. Our free wireless internet is getting switched over post haste!