Cloud Services
discussion led initially by Tim Whitehorn from http://www.ServiceU.com

SignUsUp.com going out of business.

Wireless syncing to phones: https://www.nuevasync.com/

Issues with single sign-on:

ServiceU looking at OpenID

Online Storage:

S3

Waula – Video

Smugmug (they were comped a pro account as a church) site matches church site

    Microsoft SkyDrive and LiveSync

GDrive potentially leaving Rumorware status

Podcasting:

    Off site servers with iTunes

    AMSI – http://www.flycast.fm

Mosso.com – allows multiple server technologies (Windows/Linux) for ASP, .net, PHP , etc on same service

Dreamhost.com – Lots of storage and some good features. Free for non-profits, I can get you a discount if you are interested (post in comments)

site5.com

—–

Church Management Software

We sort of drifted into this topic as the next time period started up

ACS Technologies – See Jeff

http://ArenaCHMS.com – My church is using ArenaCHMS

https://www.fellowshipone.com

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Firewalls

Focusing primarily on free options, but some mention of other options.

Christ Fellowship is doing a Round Robin connection through 2 Comcast accounts and reliable AT&T connections.

FreeBSD

• Packetfilter
• Squid Proxy (Dan’s Guardian)

PFSense http://www.pfsense.com/ – FreeBSD based firewall system

SonicWall http://www.sonicwall.com/ – not free.

OpenDNS http://www.opendns.com/ – Free options available. Not really a firewall, but provides DNS filtering.

Others mentioned: Cisco PIX and Astaro (Astaro has a free version you can install to test on your own hardware or you can get one of their appliances)

—-

Open Source Software Discussion

Impromptu Open Source Conversation and IT Management

Asterisk (SwitchVox) PBX phone system (Christ Fellowhip starting to use), there is a church tying Asterisk to Arena and other church management systems for call center style autodialing.

http://www.spiceworks.com/ IT Management

http://www.sysaid.com/

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Crafting an IT Strategy

Getting IT connected into ministry

• Making staff comfortable
• Making staff competent

Getting the IT in the church connected

• Breaking down silos to make teams work together

Strategy is hindered by a firefighter situation

Strategy is not looking at a tool, but going toward a goal.

• What is a proper IT goal?

[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13]

Unfortunately, Chrome has some issues with the wordpress post entry text box, but it is more of an annoyance that a big problem and they are very annoying.

It is fast, but not smooth. It is more stable than Safari on Windows (as far as I can tell), but not great. It does at least work with Arena (which Safari does not).

I brought it down to a lack of responsiveness trying to download 7 podcasts from Bloglines, I dislike the tabs on top of the address bar, the download page cannot be cleaned up (as far as I can tell), New Tab is not letting me open my homepage instead of recently visited pages, and it is lacking important features (I really miss my FF extensions too).

Something interesting, about:memory brings up a lot of memory information. I found this by middle clicking on the top bar, selecting “Task Manager” then “Stats for nerds.”

I may use Chrome for GMail or just another browser option, but it is not ready to replace FF or IE (well, duh).

UPDATE: I won’t be using it for Wordpress posts any time soon. I am editing it in Firefox because Chrome completely goofed the posting.

In other news, churches use plumbing to provide water supplies to attendees and HVAC systems for climate control.

I thought this was an interesting article highlighting Fellowship One, but a good view of how technology is seriously affecting church connections. For the record, we are currently “growing into Arena.”

We are going to Arena!

Unfortunately, our Shelby database was corrupted two weeks ago and the most recent “good” backup we could find was September (oops). Fortunately the Arena announcement softened the bad news.

I am registered on the ArenaCHMS.com forum and ready to go. There is also a  new Arena posting category here, so I need to tag previous Arena posts tonight.

Have you wondered just what Arena ChMS is? As far as I can tell, it is really a container for nuts. Well, at least that is what they sent us. They were some very large cashews, and my daughter thought they were yummy. I took a picture to commemorate the nearly empty container.

Maybe the jar is accurate, perhaps we are full of nuts. However the problem is that we aren’t full of cash. The presentation was good, and we are convinced, but pulling the money together for a system this expensive while our money is tied up in ministries is a bit difficult. It’s too late to call off the building projects here in the US and in our missions.

Reasons we are interested in the Arena system:

• We have been using Shelby for ages. While many other systems have come and gone they have reliably stuck around.
• Many of the headaches we experience with Shelby look to be overcome in Arena. No more updating every client system when the server is updated.
• More usable
• More features
• I like the community of developers they are trying to grow in order to expand the system in ways a company going it alone could not. I love Open Source, and even though this is not Open Source it is close enough to get some of the same benefits.
• We hold the data. Sure, it would be nice to not have to worry about the server, but it is nice to know that our data is within our reach.
• Arena and Shelby are conjoined twins when it comes to their databases. It seems a bit awkward at first that they are completely separate, but joined via APIs, but it does add a secure feel that should we stop using Arena at some point we still have Shelby. Conversely, if and when the Shelby Classic is dropped then Arena will be able to continue running without the old legacy code (just cap off the system hooks).

There is a definite perceived need for Customer Relationship Management tools for churches, and as more geeks get influential in ministries there is more openness to technically sophisticated systems. We have been approached by numerous churches offering similar systems developed in house. I even went to college with some of th people involved with them. Nothing has given us the fuzzy feeling like Arena’s partnership with Shelby Systems though.

Now, I am going to hit a few highlights of things I have not been hearing around the net very much.

The client systems can be low powered. I checked with them about the system requirements and it sounds as though you can run the check-in clients on pretty much anything that will comfortably run Windows XP. We are already socking away systems that were on their way to being decommissioned. Add on a $350 touchscreen from TigerDirect.com and a printer and you have saved enough money to build a nice kiosk to hide the ugly computer.

It maps, and it has Geocoding! I was commissioning a Google maps based system for our Small Groups ministry when this news came around. Definitely a very needed feature.

Linkage to web site. I don’t believe the staff at our church really takes the web site seriously, it has had a horribly mismanaged past and our communication structures are functionally non-existent. Hopefully this link will encourage the staff to put stuff online and then people will visit the site.

A Health Meter. Arena looks at the involvement of people in the church based upon their attendance at events and their volunteer positions to give them a HealthRank (not the actual term). We supposedly have something like this in Shelby, but if it isn’t used properly then does it really exist? I wonder if we could use this number like Google PageRank. Maybe we could get people to attend and volunteer simply to get their number higher. Then we can give out lapel pins.

Other Tracking. Spiritual gifts, number of places they are involved, personal notes, attendance, and event participation (so long as there is a kiosk handy).
Once we scrape together the money I’ll know more about the details.

Update: Jon Edmiston has announced the Release of Arena.

I have been watching it for a while and even subscribed to the Yahoo! Shelby User Group to keep up with any details. There haven’t been any from there.

I have also been checking out the occasional posts from David Turner (his old site has info too).

The ArenaChMS site has been updated with more information as well. Although, if someone connected with the site reads this they need to look at it in Firefox, there are some issues.

All of this to say that I am getting questions together for November 15, so if anyone has any information that would help in my questions or questions they would like me to ask then post a comment.

Update: I forgot to add the link to CCV’s Arena page.

The new system is called Arena, and it will be released generally on January 1, 2007. http://www.arenachms.com/

I have been following the development of the system through Jon Edmiston at CCV and he hinted to me a few months that they were in a deal with an established company, I’m glad it was Shelby.

Here is some information on the system starting first with the announcement last night and then following through the series of updates on the system.

We can finally announce (July 26, 2006)

1. Check-in System Part 1: Introduction
2. Check-in System Part 2: Requirements
3. Check-in System Part 3: Kiosks
4. Check-in System Part 4: Cards and Codes
5. Check-in System Part 5: Application

Additionally, Tony Dye at Perimeter Church was shown a demonstration of the system last month and liked it: Shelby Demo.

This looks much better than the Shelby Chek-In which looks a lot like, well, Shelby (link thanks to Brett Anderson).

Also, thanks to Jason Powell for kicking Jon back into posting.