Michael Smith posted his notes from the May 2008 DC CITRT.

May08 DC-CITRT

We had our best turnout yet for DC CITRT, thank God and thanks to our hosts at McLean Bible.  I apologize that I am not the best at taking notes and have a weak memory, so if anyone would like to add to this please feel free.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) - SiteOrganic was definitely the crowd favorite, Drupal and Joomla! were mentioned.
• Wireless - Cisco recommended, Proxim mentioned.
• Helpdesk - ServiceDesk works well, Spiceworks not bad for the price.
• Multi-Campus - McLean went with satellite video, large up-front cost, small recurring cost and scaling (adding sites) cost.
• Work/life balance - Read Boundaries.

DC CITRT, tomorrow 11:30am at McLean Bible.

Fall 2008 Church IT Roundtable, October 8-10 at Seacost Church, Mount Pleasant, SC.

Rob Thrush, the Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible Church.

Marvin Haines, the Assistant Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible Church.  Looks like Marvin has been blogging for a while, but I just discovered it now.

Welcome Rob and Marvin to the Church IT Blogging world!  Make sure to add them to your RSS reader.

Catch all of us at the upcoming DC Church IT Roundtable.

Rob Thrush and his team at McLean Bible will be hosting the next DC Church IT Roundtable on Thursday, May 22nd at 11:30 AM.

McLean Bible Church Tysons Campus - 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, VA 22182
Room 1410 (off first level entrance by the water falls)

Please comment below if you will be joining us and if you have any special requests for topics.

What’s a Roundtable Discussion? (Taken from Jason Lee’s Blog)
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.

Please see citrt.org for additional church IT community resources.

We had a great roundtable at Fairfax Community Church today, thanks to John Falke for some great smoothies, blueberry pomegranate anyone?

Here are a few of the items we discussed:

• Spring MinistryTECH conference and adjoining roundtable.
• Free Sharepoint training.
• CITRT IRC Channel
• Spiceworks - free, ad supported help desk and network management software.
• GenControl - desktop remote control program for Windows networks.
• Google Apps for Your Domain and Microsoft Exchange (emphasis on calenders/resource management)
• FellowshipOne - John showed us their home grown check in station.
• Storage solutions for Mac/Windows - Anton suggested a box running Centos/Samba or Openfiler with 2 GB of RAM and 16 x 500 GB raid edition SATA drives in a 13+2+1 configuration gives you 6.5 TB usable and will run about $4800.

John Falke will be hosting a Photoshop CS3 for Ministry Seminar on November 8th. Our graphics guy attended the last one and is going to this one - he tells me that it is definitely something you don’t want to miss!

Thursday, Nov 25th, 11am at Fairfax Community Church, John Falke will treat us to espressos and smoothies from The Great Room.  We’ll probably head out to lunch afterwards.

We are planning our quarterly local CITRT for this upcoming Thursday, October 25th at 11 am.  John Falke at Fairfax Community Church has graciously offered to host the roundtable.  Please comment if you have special requests for topics.

A few highlights from the DC Church IT RoundTable last week (I am doing this from memory, so please feel free to chime in).

• National Church IT Round Table - October 2-4 in Leawood, Kansas.
• Firebug - Firefox extension for tweaking CSS and more (Thanks guys for the help with fixing missionlifecenter.org).
• SSL-Explorer - open source SSL-VPN solution that can authenticate against Active Directory.

Download the Audio

We are hoping to meet again in October and are open for someone to volunteer a space. If you are interested, please let me know.

Just a reminder that the DC Church IT RoundTable will be meeting tomorrow, August 24, noon at St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax. VA.  Lunch will be provided.