Regular involvement with the planning, the good-fast-cheap concept is a reality and is used to force requesters to think about what they really need and their requirements. Outsourcing to Fellowship One and the use of Google Applications has reduced the labor requirements. Good way of collaboration is with the use of Google documents, still supporting some MS Office (none in the school), admin uses Office and the church is still all Office. IT volunteer nights (idea by Jason Powell @ Granger). 100% Cisco shop due to two Cisco trained volunteers who support the equipment.
Challenge is to keep up with growth, very much stove piped like, IT is challenged to stay involved, no vetting process of ideas, business processes are very stove-piped focuses, IT happens with and without coordination with the IT group. Using Fellowship One CHMS. Operations Team sits down with each group to understand and determine which needs to address. 10-year plan for IT and AV teams. Challenge is meeting all the demands.
Pastor not focused on long-term plans, tough to schedule/plan
Meet as a leadership team that discusses strategic plans, lots of information sharing across all departments.
Yearly planning efforts around budget time
Discussions with different departments, sold leadership on a SAN based on consistent argument
Second Topic: Extranets:
Use of SHAREPOINT for project management and for Intranet. SHAREPOINT eliminates the for shared folders. Requires lots of time investment for customization. Microsoft did free SHAREPOINT training for nonprofits. SHAREPOINT designer is the replacement for FRONTPAGE. SHAREPOINT hosting provider is mailstreet and tagit. Google sites is a comparable SHAREPOINT product.
Third Topic: Wireless
Examples of manufacturers of wireless access points recommended by IT Roundtable members: Xirrus, Cisco Aironet, Proxim,
Fourth Topic: Virtualization
Using VM Ware, Jumpbox http://www.jumpbox.com/supported-virtualization-software
Citrix Zen server, ESXi popular with IRC chat members
Fifth Topic: VM backups
Equillogic http://www.equallogic.com
Proxmox – has lots of backup solutions free http://www.proxmox.com/
Crashplan http://www6.crashplan.com
Sixth Topic: Internal Issues
Blocking of email: AOL blacklists quickly and is tough to get off of, use other sources for bulk email, need to get added to their whitelist. Rob uses Fellowship One or Vertical Response. Make sure the SPF records and Reverse DNS are set up correctly. Vertical Response allows up to 10K emails/month free for churches.
Use of Tweeter for alerts for church closings (Tweeter alerts)
Google Calendar works for room scheduling
AV media stored separately usually without back ups
Seventh Topic: WebPages
All Facebook and Twitter accounts are set up by the church with them as the first administrator and then the user set up as a contributing editor. Need for common themes and logos in all communications products and messages.
Eighth Topic: Email
Forever email storage for achieve purposes; Google lets you have 15G. Video and other multimedia files are the largest storage problem, encourage users to store files as separate attachment.
Are there any legal requirements for churches that state how long email need to be retained?
Ninth Topic:
IT Roundtable at
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