Church IT Roundtable at Granger, September 26, 2007
JASON
Welcome! One thing that would be very helpful, we’ve got this church IT survey, so far there are 36 churches that have taken the survey, you can find the link on the www.churchitpodcast.com website, but it on your task like. The goal is to have a lot of data sitting there, we are trying to build this resource to have some data to back up requests for new hires or whatever. You can say, “Look what Granger is doing,” stuff like that. Northpoint is the great reference for all things Mac. So do that survey.
Speaker
Is it the expectation that we are putting our info out there so that we can contact each other?
Jason
Yes, that’s one of the goals, so we can contact each other with questions, etc. I don’t know many churches there are in America that have someone in an IT capacity. When I first started here at Granger I felt like there was no one to talk to about church IT stuff. So just being able to have people to contact and reference.
Speaker
When it comes to hiring new people, it seems like there’s plenty of money for missions and the Senior Pastors and all that, but when it comes to getting an IT Assistant, we just have no idea.
Speaker
Tony was doing more of a “how does your IT budget fall into the scope of your church budget” and I think there were only 6 churches that agreed to give that information Time We said we would do it but we didn’t. We’re reviewing that stuff right now.
Speaker
Part of it is that the cost of living is different from one area to the next, so it might do a disservice, so I would recommend to utilize other resources like www.churchstaffing.com The church market is obviously significantly different, we all know that, we do this as a ministry. We typically look at cost of living for individuals in the education industry [Time Stamp00:05:46] and we use that to gauge where to get the healthiest assessment. From a leadership perspective, it’s not healthy to compare salaries.
Jason
I’d try to hook up with other non-profit organization.
Speaker
If you want to see what a position would be worth in the corporate world, one of the best resources is Account Temps, they’ve done these great salary surveys where you can see salary across the board.
Speaker
If we fill out the survey, do we get more salary? Ha-ha
Jason
That depends on how you answer it!! Ha
I get calls often and I don’t know what to tell them, we don’t release our salary data to anybody. [Time Stamp00:10:09] We are looking at outsourcing.
If you need to leave here today with one thing, what is the one thing you’d like to have discussed here today?
Speaker
Wireless, security, coverage, lots of things.
Speaker
What tools for the best coverage?
Speaker
Spam
Jason
2 year record high for spam, 400% more spam recently, unreal.
Speaker
We are trying to move from an environment where if people want to sign up to volunteer or for classes or whatever, our poor welcome center people are going crazy taking down peoples names, we have an automated children’s ministry registration system, but we want to move to more of a kiosk environment where members can sign up online.
Jason
Talk to Dean or Alfred. CHMS. Tony Dye’s blog is a great resource. There’s a Google group.
Speaker
I’m interested in what you guys are doing for notification of outages, monitoring is one thing but if something goes down, what are you using and how do you set that up, monitoring your internal stuff to get an external alarm.
Speaker
I’m curious how people are handling multi-type support.
Speaker
IT budgets.
Speaker
Sharepoint.
Speaker
Sans and virtualization.
Speaker
Team building, leadership development.
Jason
Ok that gives us 30 minutes to start cranking through some of these before our first break. We’re flexible. So who had the T1 question?
Speaker
Are you looking to converge date (couldn’t hear all of what he said)
Speaker
They are not providing a router?
Speaker
Yes, but we have to configure it.
Speaker
We had that for a while before we went to a fully white solution. They gave us the router, we also split voice and data on it and it was like$5 a month, they took care of it and they monitored it. that was good.
jason
Well SPC told [Time Stamp00:18:15] us that we can manage it but then they would no longer support.
Speaker
It’s better to spend the money to have them manage it so that your end-point is at that router because once you get into managing it, it can become a ‘who did this’ pointing war, it’ll save you $hundreds of dollars of pulling your hair out.
[Transcribers note, henceforth, double dashes – will represent the next speaker]
--
When you are trying to troubleshoot, they look at the circuit, the circuit says it’s up.
--We manage our own now. Put firewall after that, on your side.
--I’m curious to hear since a number of you have T1 why you changed. What are the advantages of the T1 over some of the other choices.
- The reason we went with that is our local cable provider only provides sticky IP, not true static, they stay static if they don’t reset their system. We’re looking Time [Stamp00:20:59] at bringing in redundancy from two different ISPs, one being cable and the other a T1. We have to have Verizon, so fiber is not an option for us.
-Non-static IP address is a key issue. We just run into client after client who might be paying $400-500.
-Really if it comes down to hosting, even DSL is a viable option for smaller. Verizon is doing this thing called boosting DSL, its still cheap at $700. If you’re not going to do any hosting, why spend the money?
-All these people tried to sell me on T1s and I looked at my options and for half the price I ended up bringing in DSL, like a 3 by 1 DSL connection, we’ve got load-bouncing, we’re hosting our own email. That DSL has been the most solid thing we have.
-We get TimeWarner Roadrunner down in South Carolina. At my house, $74 a month I get 7x2.
-Keep looking, it changes so fast.
-We’ve had some issues with Comcast, they eventually got it fixed.
-How do you loadshare multiple, if you have DSL and cable?
-Sonic wall 20x40. I love [Time Stamp00:26:55] Sonic wall. It manages all our wireless, Gateway antivirus, lots of stuff.
-We’re using a Sonic wall and it’s been my experience that trying to load-balance similar network connections is an issue. Our T1 and our dish on the roof, they don’t load-balance.
-What type of load-balancing do you use?
-We tried Round Robin and a lot of different things. But think about applications that are checking what IP address you come from, one time it’s establishing a connection on your core, the next time it establishes on your secondary connection, so some things blow up. We ran into a lot of different issues.
-We’re using a wireless broadband provider, that would be something for you to check into. It doesn’t work well for streaming, or just check outside connectivity, so now we can go off to this secondary network.
-Talk with vendors, there are solutions out there.
[Time Stamp00:30:05]
-Does anyone have issues with Comcast running cable, that’s our main deterrent, they want 5 grand to run it from the pole to the building so we haven’t done it.
-Push back on them [too many people talking at once, can’t understand what’s being said]
-They wanted a 4 year contract, I won’t do anything longer than 2 years, push back and make them meet your terms. Also check and see if there’s someone in your congregations certified to do any of that stuff.
-It saved us significantly to put in our own conduit.
-Word of advice, if you ever open up your parking lot, but an extra piece of conduit in it!
-We’ve got a small church but the administrative person, who is no longer with the church, signed a 5-year deal, so we’re pretty much stuck, but within a year, we will be looking at re-vamp all that. We are a small community so our options may not be as good [Time Stamp00:33:17] as some of yours. I don’t know about wireless or fiber options. Do you all run voice-over IP, separate phones?
-Clarify, voice-over IP internally or externally?
-I’m not sure. External I guess.
-We have two services, one is TimeWarner and the other is Bell South.
-Are they standard phones or do you have PBX, because if you have a digital internal system, we’ve had many different ones. You can converge voice and data and for us it was pretty cheap and we support up to about 60 staff.
- I think we have AT&T and Charter
- AT&T has a product called Flex IP, basically data team sending your phone signal to you, they do all the management, low up-front cost.
- We had that at a smaller church that joined us and they had a completely hosted thing from AT&T and their phones were programmed like a digital PBX hosted by phone company and it was converged T1 [Time Stamp00:36:54] or whatever and it just had a box in there and it went on your standard phone lines. Pretty cool, probably pretty cheap.
- From a facility wiring perspective, it’s always going to be more cost effective for an existing to use digital telephony than it is to do voice because typically you only have 2 pair in the wall. If it’s a new construction, it could be cheaper to do a voice solution. Internally, are you incurring cost for the calls that go outside of your building and can you save that by sending it over the Internet? If it’s on one campus there’s really no cost advantage to doing voice.
- The biggest challenge we run into is they will tell you that internally you can run your voice system on the same cable, the problem with this is it will choke your computer.
- If your system is engineered from the ground up though, it can work. You really won’t notice too much in my experience, but if you are adding it on, [Time Stamp00:39:08] it can add a lot of bottlenecks.
- If you know your growth for the next five years, there are other solutions. I think Lynkis has a system with everything in one box. Opensource is another.
- One thing that I heard you mention, 3 years should be the max on any contract.
Jason
Let’s talk about anti-spam solutions. You better have one or you are in trouble. We use Postini (??? Not sure if I got that right ???) It’s about 20 some dollars per user per year.
I’ve switched my personal home domain over to Google, my wife, my mom, everybody’s email is now filtered through Google. We used to get 200 spams messages a day, now it’s all filtered through Google.
-(female)
We have a company that manages our website and our email so we are just hammered with spam.
Jason
Well, Postini and some of these other spam solutions are actually hosted offsite, so if somebody send me an email, it goes through Postini first and gets washed, all the bad junk is dropped before if gets to us, they can set that up for you.
-
We just moved to a hosted outsource solution and they have an internal spam filter and they told us up front that it’s not very good but they’ve contracted with [Time Stamp00:45:41] Ap River, which is a spam solution and they just pass the cost to us at cost for churches, so they give it to us for less than a dollar per account and a $5 a month fee standard.
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Is anybody layering spam?
-
How many layers of spam protection? We have four. So we don’t get much spam. The downside is that an occasional legitimate email can get trapped but Barracuda sends us an email alert when one is trapped and all the other filters put it in their junk email folder so they still have it.
-
We recently tested Barracuda and we were impressed, I get hit hard, we ended up buying one of their larger systems. We tested the 300 and bought the 600.
-
How much overhead did you have in shaping your rules?
-
We’ve set a standard that is catching almost all of it. Each user can modify it themselves.
-
The only problem we have it ours is hosted offsite so we don’t [Time Stamp00:50:42] have as much control over the routing and reporting, so I don’t really know.
Jason
Let’s come back to this after the break.
