At the moment, I’m sitting in the IT Panel Discussion at COR Leadership Institute. 13 states are represented by 19 of us, many are in new facilities and quite a few are one man/woman IT shops, as I used to be. That’s a huge task, in itself.
Our intention is to just have a conversation about what many of us are doing in the church IT world, sharing thoughts, ideas, etc.
DISCLAIMER: These are very raw notes, unedited.
Standardization
- Since many churches don’t have the capital to buy new PC’s, churches look for donations.
- Consumer grade is not worth it.
- Clif says standard software load, using ghost, still using Office 2000. reluctant to upgrade to 2007 yet, let it get out in the culture and be familiar.
- Publisher kind of expensive, only installed on a needed basis
- McAfee for antivirus, Norton sucks a lot of resources Norton does not have charity licensing but McAfee does.
- Exchange concern, if email goes out, it’s critical hosted email may be a better option, also check Google Apps for your Domain, for hosted email, calendar, IM and page creator on your own domain
- HP ProCurve 4100gl and 2600 series switches (used to use 3com) COR has a fiber backbone due to the size (>100m)
- One church uses IPcop (open source) also SmoothWall (open source)
- MailFrontier(SonicWall) for spam
- Intellicontact for mass outbound email (ConstantContact competitor) COR email subscription list = 10,178
- Keep mass email separate from regular email
- mass email is a hot topic
ChMS
- Briefly discussed various ChMS
- Bill shared ChurchInfo, a web based, open source ChMS, looks alot like Church Community Builder
End of discussion, everyone is heading out. It’s all good stuff.