Katharion usage?

I remember at the Spring IT Roundtable in Houston the discussions about Katharion as an option for spam filtering. Who is using this service and what is your impression of it? We are not getting killed with spam but just enough to be nuisance.

Shelby Check-in

We currently are using Shelby's Check-in module for our Kindergarten-2nd grade age group as well as for our Hospitality Team. The way Shelby has the module set up now, we have to use a dedication station for the Hospitality Team because the program is not capable of working with multiple organizations. We are tired of waiting on Shelby to deliver the promised fix for this weakness to their product but have been waiting for at least a year. Does anyone out there know of any type of workaround for this problem? We are getting ready to implement check-in for more grades this fall and eventually for all the children's groups within the church.

Thanks for any input you may have!

Who has access through VPN?

Just curious what criteria anyone has for allowing access to your church network drives through a VPN connection from a home computer. Currently we have very few staff who need access after hours from home. I am trying to establish standards for determining who can access network drives from home? Do you allow any volunteers to have access from home? How to you make sure your VPN users' home PCs are sufficiently up to date to protect against the nasties that abound on the internet? Any feedback you provide will be much appreciated!

Quick Wireless Access Point survey....

We currently have a very low cost wireless solution in place at Pleasant Valley using basic off-the-shelf routers and access points. I would like to budget for a more commercial grade system and would be very interested in finding out what hardware other churches are using for their wireless networks. I have also thought about implementing a Radius server into the mix but need to do more investigation into that. So...what have you found to be useful in your church's wireless implementations?

Thinkpad wireless connection problems

My Sr. Pastor has a Thinkpad X41 tablet that has recently developed wireless connection issues when connecting to a WPA secured network. He has no problems connecting to open free networks such as our guest network and the networks at places such as Panera's etc. I have tried just about everything that I can think of trying and was wondering if anyone has experienced similar problems. We are primarily a Dell shop so most of my experience is with their laptops but the other Thinkpads we have are not having any problems. I have updated the driver, tried a rollback system restore to a time when he had no problems connecting, I even reinstalled the network drivers. The secured wireless network is identified and it says it is connected but it never does authenticate and issue an IP address.

Any ideas about what else to try to fix this problem?

Thanks!
Mike

Mailbox storage quota???

Just curious....would anyone want to share what size limits they place on their users' Exchange mailboxes? We have not had quotas before but are needing to implement them next week. We have a couple people with nearly 1.5 GB of stuff in their mailboxes. Just wondering?????

Cool Tool found

Don't know if any of you have found ManageEngine's ADManagerPlus but we recently discovered it and it looks like it is going to be a very useful tool for us. In a very easy to use GUI, you can view and edit your Active Directory and pull some very helpful reports such as Passwords soon to expire, inactive computers, recently modified computers, etc. You can even create and modify the users and their attributes within AD. There is a free version and a paid version but right now we are just playing around with the free version because, it's free, and it appears to have all the functionality we need at this time.

I would love to hear if anyone else has any knowledge or experience with this product whether good or bad.

Spring IT Roundtable Day 1 Part 2

The remainder of the day was filled with presentations by Scriptlogic, Datacore/Fairway Consulting Group, Service U, and Web Empowered Church. Scriptlogic demonstrated several products including Desktop Authority, Active Administrator and a Server management utility. All of which would be a definite asset to help in the management of any network. They are fairly expensive but they offered charity pricing equal to their educational prices. Fairway Consulting Group is partnered with Datacore to help organizations partner together for data recovery using asyncrhonous IP mirroring and storage virtualization. Tim Whitehorn, the CEO of ServiceU just had a Q&A time with the attendees and then shared some of the things in the works at his company. One thing that he is working on that would be a great addition is integration with HVAC controllers. He is currently working with tridiam.com and xcicorp.com to make this happen. He also shared some information about some legal implications for anyone who accepts credit cards since the recent news of credit card fraud involving TJ Maxx. After dinner, the final presentation was Mark Stephenson with the Web Empowered Church. His information was very informative but having started my day approximately 16 hours earlier, I don't have insightful comments related to his project.

Day 2 sessions are today from approximately 8-8 so it will be another long but very productive day. I will do my best at conveying the highlights in the future.

Spring 07 Roundtable update

Day 1 - Part 1

I arrived in Houston at 8:00 a.m. but by the time I got the rental car and drove to the meeting site, it was about 9:20 a.m. Vendor presentations were the agenda for the day with a lot of great information presented. Jason Powell of Granger Church and John Dolan of Perimeter shared their experiences with VMware. This is a product that is definitely worth an indepth look! The next presentation was from Xcentric which dealt with outsourcing/hosting. It was very informative but not something I would be interested in at this time. Jeff Paz of Katharion gave a very thorough description of the types of filtering his company provides. Their suite of services include serving as a: web filter, IM filter, Spam filter, Anti-virus, fraud detection, archiving, etc. This seems to be a great solution for an all-around filtering solution. I will be checking on charity pricing in the very near future. The remaining presentations highlights will be discussed in my next post.

Tomorrow the whole days discussion will be on the actual roundtable agenda to be covered in future postings.

Church Managment Software Solution

After spending the better part of the past 12 months researching church software packages, our team of volunteers headed up by myself and my DB manager, Ron Jobe, the decision was made to stick with Shelby Systems for the remainder of 2007 and look at moving to Arena in 2Q08. Arena was determined to be the best software package to meet our needs but several things factored into our decision not to "pull the trigger" at this time. While Arena currently seems to be a quality product right now, there is some hesitation being an early customer when potential glitches are still more prone to occur. We are also very interested in seeing other products that are currently under development such as Proclaim. I will be at the Spring Church IT Roundtable in Houston next week where some new software packages will be unveiled. I will be blogging about what I find out and learn at this roundtable event.

Disk to Disk Backup Software

We have decided to go with Disk to Disk Backup based on the fact that we can get more bang for the buck for our needs. Now the issue becomes, what software to use to create the backups. There are multiple options out there but we have not found one that stands above the rest in functionality or reliability. We are looking for software that supports general file backup, exchange backup and SQL backup. We are looking for software that also supports bare metal backup and recovery as well. Some of the software companies we have run across are Vision Backup Server with Exchange and SQL, Symantec Backup Exec, Backup Assist, Acronis, Paragon Drive Backup Enterprise Edition, etc. Does anyone have experiences with any of these products? Any recommendations? Suggestions?

Tape Backup versus Disk to Disk Backup

We are in the process of updating our current network backup system and are looking at either the Exabyte VXA Autoloader or a disk-to-disk solution. Right now we are leaning towards the Exabyte solution. It appears to be much easier to restore data than traditional tape systems. The only hesitation is that we have read that Longhorn will not support tape backup...only disk to disk. Realistically, it will be a probably 3-4 years before we move to the new server platform based on Microsoft's history of releasing products before they are truly ready for market. Does anyone have any experiences either positive or negative related to Exabyte VXA backups?

Welcome to the PVBCIT Blog

Well....Here goes, I have been kicking the idea around about starting a blog. I am the IT Director at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Liberty, MO. We are in the process of researching church software programs to determine which will best meet our ministry needs. We have been with Shelby Sytems for 8 yrs. I recently saw a demo of Shelby Arena and was really impressed by what I saw. Does anyone have any comments about Shelby Arena?

Mike