In the last post about our 2007 Goals I was going to touch a little bit on all of the goals we’ve set for this year so far.  After the lengthy write on backups, I figured I’d put the other goals in a separate post.

•  Set up a secure VPN solution for our network.  - More and more, we’ve got users (myself included) that do things from home.  Right now we have no real safe way of getting them into our network from the outside, and the idea of having an unmanaged WinXP Home machine (possibly loaded down with malware, virii, etc.) connecting directly to the network over PPtP gives me heartburn.  Currently we have SSL-Explorer up and running, and it shows promise.  My only difficulty with it has been syncing to our AD.  I’ve heard that you need to put the domain controller in the hosts file (and I’m assuming that’s /etc/hosts) but I still can’t get a sync.  I may download the Windows version and see how that works out
• Get Outlook integrated into our day-to-day operations. - Currently very few of our employees use Outlook to do any calendaring, much less calendar sharing and meeting requests.   This year it is our goal to start training the staff to fully-utilize Outlook, as it would certainly increase our efficiency.  As such, we will soon be putting together a training program to get users up and running on Outlook.  This will definitely ramp up support calls, but it will be very worth it in the end for us all to be scheduling the same way.
• Train employees to fully utilize our printers. - Like the Outlook training, this will probably be an ongoing endeavor throughout the rest of the year, and will definitely become part of the orientation process for a new staff member.  It’s not that our people don’t know how to print, it’s that we want to train them to utilize the systems we have in place a little better.  Printing lock jobs, for instance;  there are some concerns about printing confidential documents to the public printers because as of 1/2/2007, we have ended support for personal printers (I smile every time I type that).  Up until now, this is something that we have not addressed because our offices were all over the place in the old building.  Now that we’re all together in one space, it makes a lot more sense to just have 1 or 2 printers to service the entire staff.  In fact, the only person who will have a personal printer is the Director of Business Affairs, who will use it to print checks (don’t wanna mess with that printer).  There are other print-related issues that we need to cover too, like using the proper account to print, scanning to PDF, etc.

The more I think about it, it looks like our overall goal for this year is going to be training.  There are a LOT of new things we want to teach our users, and it will no doubt be a stretch for some of them. (and me too… I need to develop my teaching skills!)  But the good part is that once they’re empowered with that sweet new knowledge, they’ll wind up being more efficient then they ever thought they could be… at least I hope so! 
It’s going to be a great year!

Spam has become a major issue in our office for about a year and a half now.  In April 2006, we installed anti-spam software on our Exchange server in hopes to get the issue under control.  It worked for a little while but by fall we were dealing with spam again, and in higher volumes, too.

Fast-forward a few months to now.  The spam issue hasn’t increased, but it sure hasn’t gone away, either.  However, now that the planning/provisioning/execution of moving into the new building is done (or at least extremely close), I’ve finally been able to concentrate my efforts to different areas now that I’ve “found my rhythm,” so-to-speak.
Getting our spam under control wasn’t one of the top 4 goals we set for the IT Department, but it’s been on the table for months, so now it’s time to deal with it.  I’ve been reading other ChIT blogs and listening to the Church IT podcasts that Jason Powell has been recording and uploading (bravo, man… I need to sit in on one soon!) and I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Katharion.

Katharion is a hosted anti-spam and anti-virus solution that scans all your incoming mail (you need to update your MX records to send through their network, of course) before passing it on to your users.  There are quite a few options as far as mail handling and notification, and getting up and running is pretty simple.

I went ahead and signed up for the 30-day trial around 10:30 on Thursday night.  At 9:30 the next morning, I got an email from a Katharion rep.  They’ve got their systems set up for the trial and all I need to do is change my MX records.  Sweet!  I changed my MX records and soon after that I was on the phone with the same Katharion rep that emailed me earlier.  He gave me a guided tour through Katharion’s administrative interface and showed me how to add users and manage mail handling.

Within half an hour I had added our entire staff to the system.  Katharion supports LDAP and AD synchronization, but we have few enough people that I just nabbed everyone’s email addresses with an AD query and pasted them in.  While we were at it, I also had the Katharion rep add our old domain (sugarcreekfmc.org) as a sibling domain, so that all mail sent to that domain could be filtered as well.

We’ve been online with Katharion for just over 24 hours now and here are our stats:

 

Mind you, we’ve got our filter set to “Medium.”  I’m pretty wary about the 1165 messages that made it through the filter.  We only have 31 mailboxes (and a handful of aliases), so I would be very surprised if those were all legit emails.  I’ll probably check in with the top 6-7 spam recipients on Monday to see what’s in their mailboxes.  This week we will also tighten the firewall up to reject all SMTP traffic that doesn’t come from Katharion’s network.

I’ll check back in a few days with more stats on Katharion.  Hopefully this will be a good step forward in getting spam out of our users’ mailboxes.

This past week, I sat down with Todd Colucy (my boss) and Mike Conn (our executive director) and we discussed our goals for the IT department in 2007. This is something that we’ve not really done before because of my involvement in video production as well. We didn’t just “not do anything” in IT, we just didn’t focus on anything in particular. With both of my departments expanding considerably, I felt that this year I definitely needed to sit down with my department leaders and discuss what we should focus on for at least the first half of the year. This helps me not only keep my focus on what my goals are, but it also help me to be able to say ‘no’ to things that don’t line up with said goals.

For the IT Department, we decided that we would set 4 primary goals to start off and then tag more items on as these goals are considered “accomplished.”

The first priority was to overhaul our backup system.  This was one of those “definites” that we knew we needed to tackle. Our current backup scheme is in danger of becoming unusable soon, mainly because of the amount of data that’s being backed up.  My first inclination is to go with off-site backup, whether that be DFS replication or a third-party hosted solution like MozyPro or NetMass.  Both have their ups and downs to them, so that’s something we’ll be bouncing back and forth over the next week or so.

For on-site backup (protection against drive failures and such), we will most-likely be setting up a RAID5 config in each box for now.  I’d love to get a SAN crankin’ in the rack for all our servers, but it will have to wait until next year.  Fortunately, RAID5 implementation will be rather inexpensive because most of our servers are virtual and can share that space nicely.

What’s everyone else doing for backups?  I would be interested to know.

My name is Dave Mast, and I take care of the IT needs at NewPointe Community Church, as well as video production. 

I’ve been meaning to start doing this for some time now.  I have reaped much benefit from other Church IT blogs, and so I would like to do what I can to give back to the blogging community with my experiences.

So after some thought and encouragement from my peers, here I am.  This blog may not always stay strictly on Church IT, as my responsibilities also cover other areas such as video and whatever else I may get my hands into.  Most of the time, however, if you come here, IT is what you’ll see.

So, we’ll see how this goes.  Spam-free comments are always welcome, too.