Tony Dye

Atlanta NAISG Kick-off Meeting, Nov 12

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National Information Security Group (NAISG) Atlanta, Ga. Chapter
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In this newsletter:
1. What is NAISG
2. November kick-off
3. Things to come
4. Chapter Leadership
5. Spread the word
6. Looking for Presenters and Sponsors
7. Online Resources
8. Network with other NAISG members on LinkedIn
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1. WHAT IS NAISG

The National Information Security Group (NAISG) is pleased to announce that it will be launching a chapter for the metropolitan Atlanta area.  NAISG is an information security association with members and chapters around the world and which offers security presentations, networking opportunities and other resources.  Unlike other security organizations, there are no dues, fees or qualifications associated with membership.  Please join us at our chapter's kickoff meeting to learn more about our group and the valuable resources that it can offer you.  Oh, and did we mention the free pizza?

2. NOVEMBER KICK-OFF

The Atlanta Chapter of NAISG is proud to announce our kick-off meeting. It will be November 12th at 7:00 PM. Pizza and refreshments will be provided from 7:00 to 7:30. Then Bradley Dinerman, President and Chair of the Boston Chapter, will be giving a talk on Employee Monitoring and Surveillance. We look forward to seeing all of you.

Location:
Upgrade IT Consulting Services
3030 Royal Blvd. South
Suite 220
Alpharetta, GA 30022

3. THINGS TO COME

The members of the Advisory Counsel and I are very excited about some of the future presenters and topics. We are looking forward to having some of the top talent from the Atlanta area come and present on topics ranging from Compliance issues to Encryption.

4. CHAPTER LEADERSHIP

Ian Philpot - Atlanta Chairperson
Andy Willingham - Advisory Counsel
Renault Ross - Advisory Counsel

5. SPREAD THE WORD

If you know of individuals who would like to join our chapter or form new ones in their area, please point them to http://www.naisg.org for signup information. 

6.  LOOKING FOR PRESENTERS AND SPONSORS

The Atlanta chapter is looking for people interested in presenting to our group. The presentation must be vendor neutral and is not an opportunity to promote one vendor or solution over another. We are also looking for Sponsors willing to provide us a permanent Location to host the meetings. We're expecting this group to grow and attract many of the best security experts in the area and will be great exposure for any company. We anticipate 20-50 people to attend regularly based on other groups performance.

7.  ONLINE RESOURCES

NAISG has just reformatted its Resources page, breaking it down by category such as antivirus, antispam, firewalls, etc.  We are soliciting white papers, blog URLs, products to list and more to add as resources to these pages, so please send these our way and we'll add your listing.  (And of course, we continue to maintain the Internet bandwidth test utility as one additional tool available to our membership. This tool is hosted on our own server and provides accurate readings of upload and download speeds. Just click the Start button on the page to initiate the test.  http://www.naisg.org/Resources.

8. NETWORK WITH OTHER NAISG MEMBERS ON LINKED-IN

Join more than 1,230 other NAISG members on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/43269/7DC2303017E0.
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Flash Reports

What are the key metrics you use to know how well your operation is doing?  For the typical church, this might include things like attendance, giving, number of new visitors, rate of turnover, etc.  But what are the key metrics for IT within the church?

So...two questions here: 1. What are key things you do (or want to) measure related to Church IT?  2. How do you keep those in front of your people all the time, in a way that they are very noticeable?

Kind of related: I visited with Dean Lisenby at ACS a while back.  He's got a huge display that all his people can see that shows a few key things they care about -- server up/down status, data traffic, and even the weather (as in hurricane concerns).  I wish I'd taken pictures -- I want to "steal" his ideas!

Live Church's ChurchMetrics would seem to help address the overall church needs.  I wonder how well it will work for Church IT stuff?

Tom Rogers Replaces Hal Campbell

Well...the announcements have been made (BusinessWire), and it's rather public via the newswire services, that Hal Campbell is no longer president and CEO of ACS.  Best wishes for Tom Rogers as he takes the reigns, but I have to say that it's a sad day for me.  I've known and respected Hal for a long time.  Hal, I hope you're not stepping too far outside the ChMS world.

UBox

Thanks to Derek Schwab for showing me this simple solution to having USB connections for your virtual servers.  Simple.  Even affordable!

LanTronix UBox

tag: vmware, usb

The Reference Point for Excellence

My wife, Trisha, is a teacher at Bridgeway Christian Academy.  Recently, Jeff Henderson, campus pastor at Buckhead Church, did a presentation to the staff at Bridgeway. 

I wasn't there, so this is my take of my wife's take of Jeff's presentation, so there's a lot of room for transmission error.  But the story is so simple.  When you're looking for excellence, or best practices, what is your comparison point?  If it's other schools, or other churches, then you're not setting your goal high enough.  Look to the best of the best in other industries and compare yourself to them.

Jeff made reference to Chick-fil-a which, despite being rated very high on menu offerings, never-the-less completely redid their menu to improve it!  I think there was also a reference to somethig like less than 3% employee turnover.

One of my favorite reference points is Quick Trip.  I'm consistently impressed with the cleanliness, the service, and the extras like having fresh coffee of many varieties all day.  I want to work for Quick Trip just to figure out how they do training!

Who do you compare yourself (your church) to? 

Reference: The talk is apparently titled The Breakthrough Principle of Irresistibility

Six Things I'd Like to be Involved With

(for the grammar police: "yes, I know")

As I'm looking at employment options, six different things keep "showing up," professionally, at least in my mind. 

1. IT Tools for churches of all sizes
(previous post)  Inventory, license management, intranet, knowledgebase, helpdesk, group task management, and on and on

2. Church IT Best Practices
Talked about often.  Where are any documented?  (David Drinnon has at least started this process)

3. Project/Task management tool that works for church staff
MS-Project is NOT the answer.  What's a tool, or set of tools, that would work for people who don't really understand all the complications of Project Management?  Can normal people manage big projects without being project managers?

4. Find a good solution for document/data storage & management, including search solution
(previous post) Storage sprawl is only part of the problem.  Backups, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery are other pieces.  But what about the more basic data cleanup -- getting old/unused stuff out of the way, then giving people a good way to find the stuff they need?

5. ChMS needs for the top 100 largest churches
(100 may not be the right number, but it's a stab) (a related, really old post) What an improvement there has been in the past few years, but there's still a big gap.  What if one of the ChMS vendors (or several together?) were to focus on just the really big churches?  Would we all benefit?

6. Taking the "next step" with CITRT
So many great things have happened since that first fall, 2006, roundtable at Granger.  Still, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who should be connected have never heard of CITRT.  Plus, we still can't answer the simple question "how many members does your organization have?"  Can we keep the benefits of our un-group, yet ever-so-slightly formalize it (like a membership database)?

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One recurring theme in these six items is the phrase Blackbaud likes to use: “one source of truth.”  How often do we have multiple, overlapping, differing, partial solutions that don't connect together well?  The answer: WAY too often!

A second recurring theme is the issue of being Microsoft/Outlook-centric, or not.  Does every solution need to have TWO choices?  Does "Mac support" imply a third choice, or is that just a special case of non-Microsoft?

How many of these things are not “just Church?”  Is there a secular value to almost all of these same issues? (OK, except the ChMS spec)

How in the world could I be involved with all of these different things?  Oh yeah...and make a living at the same time?

The Fiber Pull

Still wrapping up some old stuff related to the new Perimeter construction.  Here are a few pictures from mid-August when the fiber was pulled between the buildings.  Conduit had been done several days earlier, and the 100-pair copper pull was just a day, maybe two, earlier.  Also, for anyone who might be wondering, this post also answers the September 30th question of "What is it?"

Here's a look in one of the pull boxes.  100-pair copper on the bottom, the "flexible innerduct" is in the top one.  That's the answer to the previous challenge: Maxcell Innerduct.  Pretty neat stuff.

A slightly closer view of the same thing:

Here's the end in the wiring closet, before any cleanup:

Getting ready to make the 180 degree turn in one of the pull boxes:

And yes, despite what you hear on the news about "water shortage," we managed to have a little more than we needed on this particular day:

Just a quick follow-up on the innerduct.  If you're doing conduit work, and need to plan ahead, this flexible innerduct lives up to it's name.  It's flexible going in, but it also leaves you flexible in what you pull through it in the future -- you don't have to pre-guess the sizes you'll need in each chamber.  As long as your total set of cables will fit in the outside conduit, the inner chambers will flex as needed.  Good stuff!   

 

What Causes These Grooves?

Driving home after fall 2008 #CITRT, Gene Dunn and I where noticing these grooves in the pavement.  Pretty much all the way from Charleston to Atlanta, generally in the right lane, generally continuous for miles and miles.

Reminder: Atlanta pre-Roundtable Events

A quick reminder of two Atlanta-area events happening before the fall roundtable in Charleston:

1. Monday evening, a tour of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.

2. Tuesday morning, a tour of North Point Community Church.

If you'll be in Atlanta for either of these, join the fun before heading to Charleston for the big event.  Clif Guy and his team will be here.  Will you join us?

Five Sentences

As seen in DJ Chuang's email signature.  http://five.sentenc.es/  What a great concept!