IT Panel Discussion
Posted on October 7, 2006
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.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Other posts by Jim Walton
»
