Church IT Roundtable at Granger, September 26, 2007, Part 4
Jason
This is Wifi Manager from the same people that make Op Manager. Op Manager looks at all of your core network devices, Wifi Manager, you shoot it at your access points so this is a graph of the days total mobile users on the network, 71 is the high, currently 59, both public and private.
Sp
How much is that?
Jason
Wifi Manager free for 30 days, for 2 access points, I think it’s $500. Not bad.
[Several minutes of just background noise and several people talking in the background]
Jason
Ok, it’s group picture time.
According to my notes, we’ve covered four things.
Sp (Stan?)
What I’m really interested in knowing, is at your churches, where are you using technology that actually touches the members? Do they sign up for classes, do they check in their own kids? Do they set appointments? What are the creative ways to use technology to touch your members? Sign up to be a volunteer, etc. I’m just curious.
Jason
We check in all students from nursery to high school. We’re working towards having all volunteers check in. We are moving towards anybody that comes into the building that isn’t staff checks in at the front desk, get a tag so we know. You can go to our website using our Fellowship 1 to register for classes, events, members can log in and see their giving history, you can sign up with credit card to have it automatically deducted.
Sp
Do you have any online sign-ups for volunteer opportunities?
Jason
Yes, it’s right on the website, click where you want to volunteer, you’ll get a contact back. We’re trying to figure out how we can make it easier to engage with the church.
We keep the keyboard and the touch-screen up at the same time, we don’t do self-check in except for volunteers, so on weekends and events there is always somebody manning the station to greet and smile and help.
Sp
We [Time Stamp00:06:47] just started using the Shelby Arena stuff for check-in and we’re going to start using for pretty much everybody that comes in the building and we are getting ready to go with our new website that will do volunteer sign-ups and contributions and stuff.
Jason
What about IT budgeting? We’ve had some questions. Let’s talk.
Again, on this church IT survey, there is a place for what percent of overall budget is devoted to IT, the problem with that is it’s hard to dig down, for our church IT is not responsible for the website, also not responsible for Fellowship One, that falls under Communication, we are around 3 or 4% of the total budget.
Sp
The average is anywhere from 2 to 9% of operating budgets, probably closer to 2 to 5%.
Jason
I think you have to be able to prove to your upper team the value of what your budget brings. We’re looking at this giant storage solution for 6 figures, so it will require me to really sell this thing, here’s this large line item for storage and back-up. We’ve got Mac users and data everywhere, so finding data is difficult, there’s a bunch of data that’s not backed-up, so we’ve got to create some way for people to store their data, and back-up.
Sp
One strategy that we’re taking this year is getting away from the proving that we have to do it and what the validity of it is, to where a particular ministry has to partner with IT and assess the need and go down the budgeting process with us so we’re requiring the ministry’s director to write the proposal for that need. It gives credibility to that need, so IT just comes along and says how much it will cost. That has worked for us. It’s to the point where when it comes to chopping [Time Stamp00:12:43] things out of the budge, it’s not me defending those funds anymore, the ministry is fighting the cause.
Sp
Tagging on that, does anybody else have, for instance I had a service programmer person come to me and say they needed a computer for something and I said I don’t have funds to do that right now and they said ok we’ll just buy it out of our budget. Anybody else have that happen?
Sp
All the time.
Sp
Where do they get the funds?
Sp
For my budgeting purposes, where the money is coming from, we over-budget for those things. Obviously there is a commitment by that ministry not to spend that money, but that allows me to look at my budget and see oh, I was short $15,000 on workstation purchases this year, it allows us to plan better for next year. You can purchase things out of the ministry operating budget for IT but it has to have my signature. Checks and balances, it works well for our organization.
Sp
I don’t pad the budget request. It’s a matter of credibility. We try to come in just 5 or 10% over but we are most realistic.
Sp
An executive team has to make the decision.
Sp
With our server room relocation, we have to come in under budget, that’s not an option. So I do the budget realistically, but then that’s when I hit the vendors for discounts to make sure we come in under budget.
Sp
Some ministries come in under and that’s where they get their money.
Jason
You also have to build in for some unknown stuff.
Sp
Yes, there’s gotta be dollars build in for unknown, but that’s different than padding your numbers.
Jason
This will be the first year that we’ve been over-budget, because the unknowns this year were big [Time Stamp00:19:26] when they hit.
Jason
Collaboration tools. The more I look at Google, the more I like Google Aps. Not for email piece but for the spreadsheet and doc stuff. Dustin found out, you tell them.
Dustin
After you log on, it goes from [ss something, couldn’t understand him] to http traffic and you can capture all the data going through, but you can force it over to ssl you can put in the https and it will kick over to ssl.
Sp
I’m not disclosing IP schemes and passwords.
Sp
Everybody probably has 2 to 5% at a time of whatever they are dealing with that should be secure or confidential.
Sp
If you’re not encrypting it, there’s a problem.
Sp
How do you balance that, ok it’s possibly a valid tool to use but the reality is stuff that shouldn’t be there, a training issue? Are we needing to provide that service to our users in an environment where we have control? Some of our staff wants to use Google tools for on-the-fly notes or whatever, yeah, it offloads stuff, we don’t have to worry about backing it up and all the variables to that. Where do you balance that?
Jason
All I know is everytime I look at Sharepoint and Google Aps, Google Aps is doing it easier and better for now. But I keep looking at Sharepoint going please make it easy for people to do what they need. Several of us are using a simple Word Document on Sharepoint, only one person could check it out at a time. I needed to make an update and somebody else had it checked out, I had to wait and wait. With Google, I just go in and make my edit and it’s there. We’re looking at One Note with the collaboration feature. But now if I’ve got a volunteer offsite and they don’t [Time Stamp00:23:43] have One Note and they need to work it, now what do you do?
Sp
We’re using Smartsheet, almost like Google spreadsheet and they have a lot of templates so maybe you can create checklists and share document. You can take pieces of your spreadsheet and assign tasks to people. It’s new for us, I’m not sure all about it.
Sp
You have this third party product that users build their whatever in and there’s no way to get it out. We’ve standardize the Office Suite, we’re looking to go with Sharepoint for some stuff, so for me, it’s not leading a horse to water that they can’t drink, so by giving someone PaintShop Pro, it’s a way to give them image editing, but I’m taking them down the wrong road because it’s not compatible with the rest of your organization.
Sp
Do you ever work with PSD [?] files?
Sp
Independent of any particular application, yes. You go down this road and suddenly you are at an impass and you may have a user that has their entire child baptism 50-60K document and it’s not a lay-out tool, and now my music director needs to be able get it off. That’s the struggle for us, it’s not the level of access and those things, it’s when you go outside of that Microsoft stuff, my fear is, oh dear, it’s not compatible. I have to go to the user and tell them they have to re-create in Publisher. That’s heart-wrenching.
Sp
We just lost one really sharp guy to a start-up firm in California who is doing Excel like Google spreadsheet, it’s Microsoft Excel stuff, you can save it back to your local machine or leave it up in the open environment so multiple people can collaborate, and I believe that if they are successful, they will do Word and PowerPoint and all that. www.expressocorp.com sign up for free trial
Sp
For anyone using Fellowship, [Time Stamp00:27:17] is that one of your concerns?
Sp
I think every church is going to have their database solution and it’s going to be proprietary, I think that’s one thing you’re going to have to bite the bullet on.
Sp
I just didn’t know what the features were with Fellowship.
Jason
We pull it out and use an api to figure out where our small groups are, so pull the data out, shove it into an api with Google Aps and so we’re looking at multi site using, the other thing with collaboration, it works against this. It’s [Time Stamp00:28:44] great because the leadership here is very technically savvy, they give me a lot of pushback on things which is great. So one the things we’ve been trying to do is create one giant storage solution. Google is outside of that, and now we’ve created something outside of our storage system, juggle that and juggling a couple ministries that are using Basecamp which doesn’t do anything with Fellowship One. Same way with Planning Center online, you don’t want to create these silos of database information, if a new family comes in or family changes their address, you have to update it in multiple places. So where do you balance productivity versus IT control.
Sp
If you choose Sharepoint as your solution of choice, I can understand the file server structure and I can go get a document and restore the document, we’ve even dialogued about setting up some of the sites and I’m worried about what if we’re setting them up the wrong way because if I put too much investment in putting this particular site together then I decide I want to move it up a level, I haven’t figured that out yet. Because of the new way of utilizing and accessing the new technology, I struggle to embrace it, how is all that living in the database, we have a volunteer who is a SQL guru and he says the risk is less because it’s in the database and I’m going help me get there.
Sp
I think we have to embrace the fact that we can no longer say to our users and volunteers that you have to come to the office to get to that document. That’s just not realistic to a volunteer who works in corporate America, so they’ve got these tools available and they’re asking when is the church IT department gonna get with the program so I can download my service order or my whatever before I get to the office. [Time Stamp00:32:47] The other piece of the Sharepoint puzzle is permissioning and active directory versus the other. The licensing is not as big of a monster if you’re using just services, the catch is how do you authenticate those users without the overhead of adding them to active directory? All that to say, we can’t not do anything. We are doing a disservice to our users by not facilitating this tool. It is powerful. We can’t let our fear of it do a disservice.
Sp
We are in the process of going with InfoRouter for storing all the Senior Pastor’s files, it’s gonna happen and we’ll clean it up later if it gets to that. Like you said, they could wait on us forever to get the ideal solution, or we say go with that one for now.
Sp
How polished does a production environment need to be?
Sp
We want it to be perfect but I’m learning they don’t always care, except for when it doesn’t work.
Jason
So, we figured that out – ha ha!
If we can get these church management solution guys to create some things for us, life would be good.
Do we dare, we’ve got a few things still sitting there. Do we want to go down the Mac integration route, or what? We had a Mac guru but he moved to Chicago, not too far from Willow.
The Macs are here, we have to think about how to manage them without being IT Nazis. I’ve said this before, one of the best thing that happened to our church was that Tech Arts and IT share the same office space. You need a Mac if you’re going to do heavy-duty video editing and that sort of stuff.
Sp
For just a brief second, I thought he was serious.
Jason,
We want to figure out how to integrate these guys so we’re saving stuff in the same place, gets backed-up like it should so we’re [Time Stamp00:37:36] making the most of resources.
Sp
Again, that’s building that relationship, understand your users. Understand why the Mac we bought six months ago is now antiquated?
Sp
What do people do with Mac having their release schedule not being easy to work with, gotta upgrade and pay every year?
Sp
We have a couple of different platforms in Mac running at the same time and we just let it run and we don’t have many problems.
Sp
We can talk later about printing.
Sp
Is there like software assurance [?] at all in Mac?
Jason
Yes, you can buy software maintenance.
Sp
Apple has taken a good step with us at least, if you’re looking for an Apple rep to ask questions, I’ve got his contact info, let me know.
Sp
What do you doing with Apple?
Sp
We’re using Apple mail or Apple Entourage or whatever people want to use.
Sp
You’re not running your own server?
Sp
No
Sp
Jason are all of your Mac users doing parallels?
Jason
This is the first year IT has purchased any Mac stuff. In the past it has been under somebody else’s budget, we’re trying to figure out the whole piece, basically next year I want to say we officially support Mac. I don’t know what that means exactly. Ed and I bought Macs back in the spring, I’ve been trying to use it as my main machine for everything, it has caused me a lot of pain, there has been some joy, parts I like, parts I want to just push my hand through the screen, probably because I’ve been using Windows so long. So we’re trying to figure out how it all works, I think the fact that we bought these made a huge impact on our Mac users, there’s kinda been this head-butting here, Mac vs Windows, so we bought these things as a sign that we do care and we [Time Stamp00:41:56] want to help, so they’ve also tried to help us figure out. We also bought a Mac server, trying to make this work really well. Our Mac volunteer moved to Chicago. Next year, we want to get out to the Apple training on this server.
There are only a few Intel Macs, so we were the first ones to play with parallels, so now that the Apple people have seen that, the biggest hiccup here is Exchange and Apple.
Sp
Entourage leaves you without the ability to do calendars. That’s the one weak part we have right now is Mac playing well within the corporate environment, no decent email. You can make file-sharing work.
Sp
We’ve had other issues with Entourage.
Sp
We’ve found that Mac users are celebrating the fact that 2008 coming out with it and I’ll believe it when I see it, but we’ve pretty much standardized every Mac we put in now we put parallels on it, which means that user has to be competent enough to understand a VM and what that can feel like and theoretically if they are getting a Mac, they are savvy enough to digest that. For us it is cheaper because of licensing. It simplifies it in a way. Our users have been excepting of. We standardized our parallels because it was the industry first, and now, if it ain’t broke, we’re not going to fix it.
Jason
So my Mac is probably wide open to do whatever I want but probably I’m assuming your Windows side is locked down. [laughter]
Sp
We have a user group that we have put in active directory, that is an administrative user group on the Mac, we’ve given administrative privileges to the local Mac and also the same thing for administrative group for the work stations so we can toggle users in and out of that. We give a little it of latitude, most of our Mac users know enough or more, it’s a mutual [Time Stamp00:46:43] trust. If you hang yourself, I can’t help you. It takes several hours. Overall, it’s a cost factor. The groups have worked well for us.
Sp
But the cost factor of buying the Mac and then buying parallels or whatever and then buying XP to drop on it, it really expands the price of the Mac.
Sp
That’s where we dialogue with our team, I can put three desktops at every desk for the cost of a Mac so for our organization unless you are doing music editing, video editing, or some photo editing, that’s how we draw the line. So the user has to come and validate the need.
Sp
We do a thing budgeting-wise and we haven’t seen it all the way through yet of we budget a set amount of hours per staff hire and that is budgeted in, and if that person needs a Mac, they have to come up with the money. That way, hopefully at the end of the year, we’ll be able to look back and say because you guys went with Mac, you got out of your budget this many dollars.
Sp
I would send a word of caution, I wouldn’t brow beat them with that.
Sp
But we don’t have any way of tracking it.
Sp
We want to stick with if it’s a need, go with it. The problem is sometimes we get overruled and they keep getting more and more that aren’t really needed.
Sp
Who is overruling you?
Sp
It’s the politics of it.
Sp
I relish in the fact that I didn’t have to make the decision, but I struggle with letting go when the decision is made. We can often drag ourselves down about things that we didn’t decide. Let it go.
Jason
Four minutes left. We got the tour at 4:15. Thanks for coming. Hope it has been helpful.
