I’m excited to see that ACS is now employing people to focus on software architecture. Due to a number of circumstances, they ended up with about 7 different unconnected calendars across their various products. Now, with the help of architects like Jamey, they are working to integrate their products more and more.

While all the pieces aren’t there, the future is bright, just looking from the calendaring perspective alone, here are some of the ideas that we’re looking to employ in our church.

• Integrating Facility Scheduler (FS) with an EMS to control HVAC systems. This reduces energy consumption and personnel costs!
• Integrating FS with our alarm system to arm and disarm the building on a schedule
• Integrating FS with our door locks to lock and unlock doors on a schedule
• Integrating FS with digital signage around the campus to display coming events
• Integrating FS with LCD screens by the doors of rooms to display what’s happening in that room
• Integrating FS with our Web site to display upcoming events
• Integrating FS with Outlook (where our users spend most of their time) to display calendar events
• Integrating FS with services like Upcoming.org to publicize events

All of these things work to reduce operational and personnel costs, which translates directly to more money ending up in missions and ministries.

For our backup strategy, we rely primarily on our Intel Storage System SS4000-E. I have read a lot on blogs and in magazines about backup solutions and strategies, and I am so comfortable with this solution. Still, I have nightmares about loosing a server. We’re not using tape any longer

See, the SS4000-E is my hero because every night she takes an image of whichever hard drive on the network I want her to (with appropriate client software of course) and saves them on her 2TB array.

We are also FTP’ing the nightly backups of our ACS database to a server out of state. Since that data is really the most mission critical data we have, I wanted to make sure we’re keeping it off site.

What do you think? Is this a wise solution for backups? What do you use in your organization?

On many projects that I have started in my position as the first IT guy at a nearly-megachurch church, I have had the opportunity to experience a shift from understanding the projects conceptually to understanding them experientially.

With our network overhaul, currently underway, I am doing just that. I knew it would be a booger to run new Cat-6 to the entire plant, but now I’m seeing that it’s nearly impossible to get it to happen.

Some of the challenges that we face:

1. 5 distinct different buildings, all melded together into one behemoth of a structure. Each of the 5 were built about a decade after the previous, and built on a budget without much consideration for networking and future wiring needs. Plus, the earliest was built in ‘48 with no drop ceilings and full of asbestos.
2. No current IDF’s are in place, switches are strewn about in various offices and mechanical closets.
3. The room that I have secured for an IDF is centrally located, but is upstairs and requires massive conduit to be placed on the roof to get downstairs.
4. Though the physical distance from the main IDF to the offices in the front of the building is less than 300-feet, the path the cable must take is about 400-feet, which means I need to find room for another IDF - however, 350 of the 400 feet are in the attic above the sanctuary.
5. I’m an IT guy, not a construction expert, and our maintenance guys have been giving me a hard time about that because I think things would work that just wouldn’t.
6. I can’t afford to pay a contractor.

So, this will be a fun project, with a capital F-U-N. You may wonder why I feel the need to rerun the entire network, I’ll post about that soon.

As we’re moving forward in switching over to ACS, we’re learning a lot about our data entry disorganization.

1. Member, Prospect, and Misc. Names - Member, in my mind, means a member of the church. I’m pretty sure that’s the standard too. Not here though, it could be a member of choir, or a member of Sunday School, or a number of other things. I want to clean this mess up before we go to new software.
2. Inactive membership - We don’t have any “rule” on when someone is to become inactive. Further, the three people who inactivate people’s membership all do it to their own, very different standards. Hmmmmm.

Does anyone have good, firm guidelines for data entry in your ChMS? Are you willing to share?

We had an interesting issue come up today in that we got a bill from a hotel for about $1,000 bucks for conference rooms that we had cancelled. I got the call asking if we could get into the staff member’s e-mail box who handled the transaction. She resigned a few weeks ago, and is now working somewhere else. My immediate thought is “no.” I know that I can do it since I never deleted her account or Exchange box, but should I do it?

Typically, I delete the user’s account and Exchange box a week after they’re gone. I forgot to delete hers, so she just happens to still be there. So, the question I’m being asked now is, “Should we dump all of a user’s e-mails into the new staff member’s box when we have a staff change?” My two objections to this are protecting the former staff person’s privacy and respecting the new staff person by not loading them up with hundreds (or in our case, thousands) of e-mails to filter through on their first week.

Our personnel and IT policies give freedom on this, so it’s not an issue of “law,” but more an issue of best practice.

What are your thoughts? What are your practices?