ACS Convention: IT Roundtable
It’s midnight, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about the day. It was a profitable day, having the opportunity to network with a group of other church IT professionals as well as the IT-curious. One lady was completely blown away that any church had even one full-time IT professional.
Here’s some of the topics we covered:
- Training - How do you train your users on technology topics?
- Cool tool for training: Sony AirBoard - Get people involved in the training. Write on AirBoard and it shows up on the projector screen.
- E-mail marketing - Constant Contact is coming soon with 2-way sync to ACS. Another alternative solution used is ChurchPost.com.
- Text messaging - ChurchCast was discussed as a solution to send out a mass text to selected church groups. For instance, if the bus brakes down on the way back from youth camp, the youth pastor could activate ChurchCast to send an SMS to all parents telling them, “Flat tire on bus. All kids are safe. Delayed 2 hours.”
- Network monitoring / filtering / etc
- Barracuda 210
- GTA Firewall and GB-Ware
- Wireshark University
- PRTG - I’m definitely looking into this
- What’s Up
- IP Monitor - supposedly better than What’s Up
- Worship Attendance - what creative methods are you using to measure worship attendance? Directional infrared cameras to count number in and out of worship center, pew pads, individual cards, overhead cameras, installing chairs instead of pews in order to more easily count.