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.