Jason Lee

Limited seating…REGISTER NOW
VMUG Agenda
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6:00pm – Welcome
6:10pm – vSphere (with demo)
7:10pm – Break
7:25pm – Site Recovery Manager (with demo)
8:30pm – Breakout sessions
9:00pm – Adjourn
Location
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Illinois State University
Alumni Center
1101 North Main
Normal, Illinois 61761
Directions: http://tinyurl.com/osb26y

• Building closes at 4:30pm, but will reopen at 5:30pm ****

Church IT, Tech News CITRT, VMware

News today, confirmed by reliable sources inside ACS, is that the Board of Directors of ACS Technologies, our trusted ChMS partner, has released CEO and President Hal Campbell.

Significant leadership changes always generate waves, so here are the thoughts and questions that came to mind in conversation today with my colleague Kirt Manuel, communications director at Northwoods.

• We have been very pleased with the partnership that has grown between us and ACS, even to the point of “Woah!” when ACS told us they were reorganizing their entire company to better serve megachurches like Northwoods. A sudden leadership change like this makes me think that the board of directors doesn’t approve of the company’s new direction. As our ministry operations are tightly wound up with ACS, we’d like some comment and explanation.
• ACS has earned some recent “street cred” with the introduction of iPhone and Windows Mobile applications as well as talk of widgets, gadgets, and such. With Facility Scheduler and AccessACS , they’ve built on a modern, robust framework and released sweet APIs. They’re building hooks, links, and syncs with third-party tools such as Outlook/Exchange, Planning Center Online, Constant Contact and the like. We’re putting a lot of eggs in those baskets, but now we’re feeling a fear getting scrambled. What can you say to reassure us that ACS will continue this forward-looking, leading edge work?
• From out here, ACS seems to be performing well in terms of product development, customer service, etc. Is that same performance excellence not carrying over to profitability? Is this decision a financial one?
• If this is a difference of vision between the now former president and the other primary shareholders, perhaps, we the customer base, can clarify things and help you craft a vision that serves us well.
• Who will take over this critical leadership role? Will you seek to hire from within or will you search some new outside expertise and vision?

Church IT, Tech News

Our Zones Account Executive, Nathan, tipped me off on this event… I don’t think we are planning to attend since the price is way too high, but if you were near Vegas this might be something to check out.

Church IT, Tech News

I just got this information from our Dell Account Manager and he ok-ed passing this info along…  If you are planning for a hardware refresh, consider this offer from Dell.  A Buy 2 get 1 Free promotion between July 16 – July 30.  This offer applies to : Select Latitude™ Notebooks, Select Optiplex Workstations, Select PowerEdge™ Servers, Select PowerConnect™ Switches, All PowerVault™ Storage Products and Any 2 Networkable Laser Printers Get 1 FREE!

If you are interested in the pricing leave a comment and I’ll shoot over our Dell rep’s contact info, he indicated the normal Dell sales won’t have a clue what this offer is about.

Tech News

The FBI is looking into fraudulent the selling of Cisco gear from China via Ebay.  The phony gear is reported to include hidden backdoors leaving huge security holes in the networks in which they are deployed.

Seriously… I have to wonder, wouldn’t it be a resume generating event for even thinking "Hey I just found a great deal on EBAY on a "NEW" Cisco router for $1,100 less than list price".

I love the Problems and Examples slide that the FBI included in the presentation:

ZDnet has all the slides from the FBI giving specifics of the operation.

Tech News

For all you in central Illinois this may be the moment you have been waiting for, this is the official announcement of the first ever (to my knowledge) Central Illinois Church IT Round Table.

Here are the details of the event:

Central Illinois Church “Computer Guy” RoundTable

(Computer gals welcome, too!)

June 12

Dinner at 5:30pm

Roundtable Discussion at 6:30pm

(until the Mountain Dew runs out)

Hosted at

Northwoods Community Church

10700 N. Allen Rd., Peoria

Cost

$5 includes dinner

RSVP, Online Payment

Register Online

Questions, etc., to

Jason Lee (j.lee at nwoods dot org)

What’s a Roundtable Discussion?

A roundtable is a peer-learning event where the participants are both teachers and learners. A roundtable is small enough to emphasize interactive learning, led by a facilitator and peer, includes participants who have an affinity with each other, and does not include a strong agenda beyond sharing knowledge. The participants set the agenda, and interaction among participants takes precedent over presentation by “experts.” In fact, in one-way or another, most of the roundtable participants are already experts. In this group, we intend to learn from each other about how to better resource, equip, and train ministries in the areas of computer hardware, networking, server support, web services/sites, telecom services, etc. It will be geeky and fun. 

Church IT, ChurchIT RoundTable, Tech News Central Illinois CITRT, Church IT Round Table

The EU is allowing Airlines starting this summer to permit customers to use their cellular phones on airlines.  I don’t expect airplanes to start dropping out of the air because of the phones interfering with the electronics, but I wonder if this won’t be a little annoying? 

I know when I am on the phone my conversation volume is louder than my normal talking volume. So think about adding airline engines to the mix isn’t that just going to create some bad situations?  Will customers be allowed to request new seats if they are sitting next to Chatty Kathy?

Could cell carries disable calling but allow for data or texting?

Tech News

I have found a few more items to add to my RSS reader…. and I thought I would share:

Mindsharp Blogs: a compilation of the whole Mindsharp team.  I couldn’t publish this list without including a new Ministry Partner: Mindsharp, INC and its owner Bill English.  This blog has more than info on SharePoint than every could dream of digesting.

Microsoft Exchange Team: More than I ever wanted to know about Exchange (In insane detail)

The MSDN SharePoint Server Blog

Woot, One deal one day: I have to admit I have ordered a couple things including $10 1gb mp3 players for our children’s ministry team… You can’t beat some of these deals and $5 shipping.  What did I do before the fun of wooting?

Any new feeds you can’t live without?

Tech News

Well the news spread like wildfire today… Apple announced their iPhone will have ActivSync in conjunction with Exchange…  and the release of the update is expected to hit in June… One of my huge issues with Apple is their continued unwillingness to play nicely with the enterprise environment; Specifically playing nicely with Exchange.  But all that may change which might also change our mobile device policy we established just a few months ago….

Our current mobile sync policy states:

If you intend to synchronize your PDA/Mobile device with Northwoods’ email, contacts, tasks, etc. that device must support Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® (For Exchange 2003 or later). 

Well I’ll tell you I haven’t signed up the Enterprise beta Program … yet, but I think for now we may come to new conclusions on which devices we ’support’.  I reserve the right to change my mind especially if the Apple ‘flavor’ of ActiveSync isn’t true ActiveSync and the OTA sync functions aren’t the same configuration as Windows Mobile 6 devices.  One interesting note.. will the iPhone support wildcard SSL certificates?

 So now, we only have no love for Blackberry… is that fair?  No, sorry but that’s just our support limitations.

Church IT, Tech News

For the past 12 months I have been saying that Vista was going to be the next Windows ME, granted I haven’t used the OS much.  But my hunch may become more of a reality now that Service Pack 1 is out and includes a upgrade of the kernel. 

APCMag.com reports:

One of the “big” features discussed in early speculation of Windows Vista SP1 was the kernel upgrade, which was supposed to bring the operating system into line with the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. And yet with Vista SP1 going RTM, there hasn’t been so much as a peep from Microsoft about the mooted kernel update. Has it happened?

Well the answer is yes it has, and presumably the main reason for Microsoft’s silence on the subject is that as they’re keen to promote the improvements and enhancements to Vista, rather than placing emphasis on a kernel upgrade, which some people might see as a risk of newly-introduced instability.

This might be the back breaker for Vista, since many enterprise environments have been waiting to deploy Vista until SP1.  Changing the kernel might be too much for many environments and will further delay the migration from XP to Vista.  Our environment will be one of those waiting, we had waited until SP1, but most-likely will continue to wait.  While the update to the kernel may result in wonderful things… I just wonder if the PROs  might be become CONs for the credibility of MS’s Vista…  So we will wait and see the facts when Windows 7 becomes the successor to Vista in 2009ish; will we look back at Vista as the solid OS, or the experiment by Redmond?

Tech News