Today, October 30th, is an exciting day for Lakeview! Our worship team, Lakeview Worship, has recorded a live worship album approximately every year since 2001. I was deeply involved with the earlier projects even more than the recent ones; that was years before I started working for Lakeview. Each of the CDs was produced and released in-house, and all of them went around the world in really amazing ways.

But this CD is the first one released worldwide, in 166 countries I’m told, under the Integrity Music label. The idea is, most stores carrying Christian music will likely carry our CD. It’s called Make You Known, and there are 30 second clips from all the tracks available where it’s for sale on our own Lakeview Worship website. I just turned the new Lakeview Worship online store loose today after converting it over to a new shopping cart system. The entire website is getting a facelift soon, but the store was redone in time (barely) for the new CD release. And now that I’ve given you behind-the-scenes information you can’t get anywhere else (on the web), you’re going to buy it, right? Or, just click the Listen Now link to hear the clips. Aren’t you thankful I’m telling you this way rather than the email-a-friend link at the Lakeview Worship site where the person sending the most emails gets an iPod Touch? ‘Cause I’m not… ;-)

I’ve been promising pictures of the Youth Internet Cafe running Firefox and Microsoft SteadyState but first I forgot, then I took the pictures and didn’t upload them, then I uploaded them recently but haven’t posted yet. Oh well. They’re here now! I uploaded nine photos to Flickr, you can see them all in the Lakeview’s Youth Internet Cafe set. Here are a couple:

So far it’s holding up to the abuse and none of the systems have been hacked that I know of! At our recent Volunteer Dinner, the workstations served double-duty as aquariums. Well, I put an ocean-with-fish screensaver on each system to help complement the overall ocean party theme. It worked pretty well! I didn’t take any photos, but the screensavers are still installed. So you can expect pictures of a re-creation in the next ten years, unless the computers are replaced before that. Ha ha.

The problem: Microsoft Outlook 2003 with a POP3 account works fine — except when emails are sent from a particular address just disappear. In the past several months, I’ve encountered two instances at the other office I work at (still using POP3 accounts) where Outlook sends and receives emails with no problems whatsoever, except for one exception. The first time was between two people in the accounting office. When they emailed each other, one of them never received email from the other. But most other email was coming in fine, with a few undocumented reports of missing email from other people. I tested the situation thoroughly, sending multiple test emails from the problem address and from other addresses that worked just fine. Each time, the emails from the problem address would animate the Inbox and “appear” to come in, so it looked like the email was coming through, but then it would disappear without a trace.

I did searches across all folders, I checked the Rules and Alerts settings (no rules were configured at all); no results at all, except for emails from several months prior when it was working just fine. To verify that it was an Outlook problem, because I first suspected a POP3 server issue (since other emails worked fine in Outlook), I closed Outlook, sent an email from the problem address, and logged into the webmail interface. There it was. So back to Outlook. I tried repairing the .pst file with scanpst. I did some Google searches without any useful results. And then I created a new profile, manually recreated the POP3 account in that profile, and imported the .pst file from the previous profile. And the problem went away. I almost wish I’d done this sooner, but at the same time, I wanted to know why the problem was happening!

I thought this was an isolated occurrence, but last week I had a report that another user was trying to use the copy machine’s scan-to-email feature and the emails were disappearing! Emails to another user were working just fine, and that user could forward emails from the scanner to this original user just fine; it was just emails from the copier (I was told after the problem was fixed that emails from the user’s personal Gmail account were not coming through either; this hasn’t been tested yet but I suspect that is fixed as well). Initially I suspected that the copier was configured incorrectly, perhaps sending the email to an incorrect address. But a check of the copier showed it was fine, and a check of the webmail account showed that the emails were arriving just fine. Of course, Outlook was kind enough to remove the emails from the server when throwing them away, just as before! This time, Outlook didn’t “pretend” to be receiving an email though, the messages simply disappeared.

At least this time I knew the fix: create a new Outlook profile, set up the email account, import the old data. Worked like a charm. The new .pst file ended up being a couple hundred megabytes larger than the old one, so I’m going to guess the old one was corrupt. This computer is a brand new one that’s around three months old, so I’m a bit concerned that such a problem showed up so fast, but the .pst file being used was copied over from this person’s previous system so it may have brought the problem with it.

Like the title says, I don’t have a reason behind the solution, just the fix. And I have the long-term solution as well: Exchange! I’m moving this office to SBS 2003 by early December, if everything goes as planned. This should solve the POP3 problems above in addition to giving us RPC over HTTPS access for laptop users, calendar sharing of course, webmail integrated with the mailbox, the VPN capabilities of ISA 2004, and I’m sure a few things I’m forgetting. I’ve been working slowly towards a move to SBS for about a year, and in January I had all the software and some extra drives quoted. I just had the quote updated in preparation for purchase, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the SBS licenses for the server and 25 user dropped in price by about $1000 since the first of the year! I’m glad things have come up to delay the upgrade! Should be fun to go from Server 2003 Standard to SBS 2003; I’m sure I’ll have some blog entries to share when it happens!

Thanks to Justin Moore’s post I discovered that Gmail is now offering IMAP access, for free, to regular Gmail accounts! It’s been rolled out to my Gmail account but so far, I checked one domain that’s a part of Google Apps for Domains and the option is only there for POP3 access still. No idea if the IMAP feature is coming to the Google Apps service or if it’s a Gmail-only thing.

I jumped on the opportunity to add Gmail as an IMAP account to VersaMail on my Treo 650. But when looking for the necessary server settings, I discovered this sad news: “Palm handheld users: please note that Gmail IMAP access is not currently compatible with VersaMail.” Oh well. I was happy for a couple of minutes. I’ll probably stick to the web interface all around, but it’s nice to know IMAP is an option since there is a dearth of free email services supporting IMAP (Gmail is the only major one that I know of).

In honor of being married to my lovely wife for two years today, I have decided to share my secret to finding a compatible woman to marry. Specifically, if you’re both OCPs (Obsessive-Compulsive Perfectionists). (Some people might use a term with the initials AR, rather than OCP. That’s your choice.)

The basic principle you must use to compare to your potential spouse is what I call the Toilet Paper Principle, or TPP. The principle is very simple. Do you and your potential mate agree on whether the toilet paper rolls should be placed on the holder so it feeds over the top, or down underneath? If so, it’s likely that you will be able to find other areas in which you both are obsessive, but about the same thing in the same way, which is a key to surviving at least two years from my experience. For example, you may discover that you both have a passion for correct grammar and spelling. If one of you discovers a spelling or grammatical error in a document of some sort, the person discovering the error may enthusiastically complain to the other about what a lousy job of proofreading the document’s creator has done, why can’t they use a dictionary or at least Word’s spell check, etc. and can count on their partner to heartily agree and possibly join in with a corroborating comment. This comes in particularly handy when writing; everyone, even perfectionists, make mistakes and typos, but when you have such a wonderful partner to rely on as an uninterested editor (and believe me, depending on the topic, I do mean uninterested!) to pick up your slack.

This sort of interplay with common obsessions is very important if you are to survive each other for any length of time. Because inevitably, you will discover areas in which you both have passionate opinions that don’t line up with each other. People who are OCPs I’ve noticed tend to be stubborn and opinionated. Some of them are outgoing, and everyone will recognize this immediately. Others may be people-pleasers and thus hide their opinions from the general public.

When you get married, however, you will share your opinions with each other. Stubbornly. After all, you’re always right. Or at least, your wife is. According to her. You may even be fooled into thinking this has something to do with hormones, especially if you end up with children rather quickly. Just give it 9-12 months you think, and convincing your wife to change her mind will be a lot easier. You think this because, as a guy, you’ve already forgotten the dating and engagement portion of your relationship, where she was just as stubborn.

Guys aren’t allowed to defend themselves against women if they’re gentlemen (this applies to physical contact but should probably extend to verbal onslaught as well), so they have to use other defense mechanisms. The easiest (and thus generally the most popular) is to simply forget things quickly. This usually comes without much effort, and it gets easier with practice. Fortunately, practice is easy to come by, and hey, if you really can’t remember what it is your wife said while you were in the middle of contemplating which good science fiction domain names might be available to register “just in case you need it,” you have a good, honest defense should you be accused of forgetting your wife’s statement. Of course, you won’t really get away with it, because how could you possibly not hang with baited breath onto everything your wife may mention in passing, unless she is completely unimportant and disposable and you’re a horrible person?

At least you can take comfort in knowing that you truly don’t remember her telling you–that thing she says she told you, until you forget all about it ten seconds later. And then, who cares? On to the next thing! How about mounting touch-screen computers and keyboards around your house to fold out of every wall on adjustable arms and connect to your existing terminal server session on your central server when you authenticate with the built-in fingerprint reader to pick up your web browsing or to-do list creation (to help you remember) where you left off in the last room? Sounds like an excellent project for that spare several thousand dollars that you…already spent on other necessities (ahh…a geek can dream…). Oh well, at least there are plenty of spelling and grammatical errors you can go find and share with your wife, and she’ll commiserate. And you won’t have to switch the toilet paper around the next time its use is necessitated, because your wonderful wife will have replaced the roll in the correct direction for you. And her. And you’ll both live happily ever after (until your kid hits his teens, so I hear).

(I make no claims as to the reality of any of the above (much of humor is exaggeration of reality, after all), but you know enough of it rings true to–ring true. At least if you and your wonderful partner both share OCP traits. Thanks to my wife for two AWESOME years and for many more to come! Happy Anniversary Sweetie!)

Well, I’m at the airport with plenty of time before my flight. Because it’ delayed by almost two hours; the plane hasn’t arrived yet. I can’t find a power outlet; there’s free WiFi here (better than I can say for my hotel) but my laptop won’t last three hours.

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…

Matt Bradshaw at COR was kind enough to set up feed aggregation to pull together the blog feeds of known bloggers at the Church IT Roundtable. You can view the feeds all together at http://www.bitshepherd.com/planet/citrt/ and get the feed at http://www.bitshepherd.com/planet/citrt/atom.xml (autodiscovery doesn’t work yet, so you’ll need to add that URL directly to your feedreader if desired). Thanks, Matt!

Tomorrow, I return home! Tonight, I sleep.

I’ve taken around 300 photos while at the Church IT Roundtable at COR, but I haven’t had time to sort them out and post a lot of the good ones. I did, however, upload fifteen of them (so far) to a new CITRT set on Flickr that I took of the tables eating dinner courtesy to Dean Lisenby at ACS. You can view the photos here. It’s a good group of people! I got most (not all) of the attendees that were at the restaurant but even more showed up today.

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!

I’m a part of Room B at the Church IT Roundtable, one of four individual rooms of discussion. So far, the first video sharing between the four rooms hasn’t worked yet, but we’ve had some good discussion within our room. The topics we’ve discussed so far are:

• 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!

Here at the Church IT Roundtable at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, we have about six attendees named Jason! Normally, I get stuck with various other Davids, but I’m glad to take a break and let the Jasons have their name confused instead. Looks like it’s going to be a good day!