Here's some notable take-aways from the 2011 Spring National Church IT RoundTable

1)      Listen to Christ, everything else can wait

2)      What part of my life do I need to change?

3)      The need to be able to say no in terms of being asked constantly to do tasks in place of going to worship

4)      Anger, bitterness, and bad attitude can develop when you don’t have good boundaries and aren’t able to say no

5)      Allow yourself to be used for ministry

6)      Let God stretch you

7)      Greatcommission2020.com web site

8)      Non-secular differences versus the secular environment

a)      Volunteer management

b)      Funding

c)      Mission

d)     A sense of purpose

e)      The ability to share information and solutions

9)      Spirituality; as an IT staffer, does being part of IT make worship in your church difficult?

a)      Prayer in your work place is a unique thing about being in the non-secular environment

b)      The spiritual battle exists, especially in the church

10)   Documentation

a)      Use of Spiceworks, Solarwinds, BigBrother, Lastpass, SharePoint foundations (free) and Secret Server  (www.thycotic.com ) for password storage

b)      Monitoring: Spiceworks, Solarwinds, Nagios SNMP monitoring

11)   Crashplan for local backups (http://download.cnet.com/CrashPlan/3000-2242_4-10629045.html)

12)   Zaggmate w/keyboard for iPad, $99

13)   Forms

a)      Use Google Apps to create forms that’s web based that’s tied to an account

b)      Benewise.com is a time and attendance system

14)   Volunteers

a)      Look for leaders as opposed to just volunteers

b)      Ministry fairs

c)      Focus on small groups of volunteers, possibly unemployed or under-employed

15)   Multi-site, what works or doesn’t

a)      Staffing indecisiveness or lack of clarity is bad

b)      Branding, what name are you using, is there any association with your church

c)      IT staffing is not scalable due to detailed knowledge and coverage requirements, the soft costs like staffing for IT is a problem

16)   VoIP

a)      Use VLAN tagging to separate VoIP from the other network traffic

b)      All switches should use power over Ethernet

c)      Microsoft Lync is their unified communications package, got to have a PKI internal certificate system to support all the communications, which is encrypted, also need a good reverse proxy server, Lync needs at least 4 external IP addresses and need 3-4 servers, very resource intensive, but it offers a great solution with many features

d)     HP5400 series switches support Lync, allows a PSTN gateway, called a branch office appliance

e)      Lync does not use UDP, it uses TCP

f)       MS 2003 server DHCP issues, probably fixed in 2008 server

g)      Shoretel and Teleadvantage (www.televantageonline.com ) are two other brands, RingCentral is another solution for small environments, bandwidth.com, Phonebooth is another provider

17)   IP Security Cameras

a)      How do you manage the cameras and video storage

18)   Everything now involves IT; HVAC, phone systems, security, fire alarms, etc

19)   Need to build relationships with facilities and other departments in order to facilitate IT operations

20)   Malware  

a)      Use of Malwarebytes on each device

b)      Reimage each box as a matter of policy when a computer is infected with a virus or malware

c)      Privilege authority by Scriptlogic www.scriptlogic.com

d)     Windows 7 has made antivirus issues disappear as long as the users don’t have admin privileges

e)      Assign a unique admin password for each laptop, maybe use two admin accounts, one for the user and one for the actual IT admins

f)       Every 30 days all laptops are checked, a health check, takes >1 hour each

21)   AV Computers

a)      Have IT buy them and maintain the OS

b)      Some have the AV computers on a separate domain

c)      Charge back to AV for IT equipment and software

d)     Use a more frequent budget cycle to keep up with mission changes

22)   IT Management

a)      Align IT objectives with the spiritual mission

b)      IT associated efforts should be funded by the department that is requesting that service for the initial stand up of the service or product

c)       IT picks up license management and future software and hardware upgrades as it now becomes part of their assets or resources

d)     Use of consultants to offload some tasks without staffing changes, can be effective if addressing specific areas such as the transition from 2007 Exchange to 2010 Exchange, use managed services contract for unique tasks, managed services partner

e)      Use of volunteers when tasks does not require timely attention

f)       Volunteer management is difficult and time consuming if there’s lots of turn over

g)      FreedomProfitRecovery.com to do analysis of leases for products and consumables