Tony Dye

Adequate

How often do you settle for "adequate?"  Not great, not bad, just "adequate."

There's a restaurant very close to Perimeter Church that I wish I wanted to go to all the time.  It is close by, big tables, pretty good service, and sometimes they even have wireless.  But, the food is only "ok."  It's not bad...just nothing to get excited about.

As we've been working on our new Intranet plan, Scott Logan challenged me with "let's not settle for adequate."  That's a great idea! But...what does it mean?

We've been working hard to use SharePoint.  After all, it's the obvious "easy" answer.  And...we've been tremendously underwhelmed.  Talking to others, they've had a similar experience.  SharePoint works, it can do all kinds of things, but it's not easy, and frankly, it's somewhat ugly!  So..with a lot of work, we could have, yup, an "adequate" solution.  Let's not settle for adequate.

We  have a media archiving solution that is, um, adequate.  We have an internal workflow  system that's...adequate.  We have a purchasing process that's..ok, you guess.  How may other "adequate" systems do we have?  Why don't we have excellent?  Perhaps three reasons: 1) We don't know of excellent solutions.  2) If they existed, they'd probably be very expensive. 3) Most of the time, we wouldn't know excellent if it hit us in the face!

What do you have that's "adequate?"  What would it take to get to excellent?

Disk Quotas, Controlling Disk Consumption

Waco Muse recently posted looking for tools for duplicate file management.  Let me just say "ME TOO!" but I want even more.  There was similar discussion at the Central IL Church IT Roundtable last week.  Here's the problem, as I see it. 

1. The goal should not be to save *everything*.  The key is to save what's important, either for now, or for the future
2. At least as important is to be sure that what's saved can be found.  "Findability"
3. Some tools are need that help find (and remove, or archive) files that are not important
4. And, of course, security and backup need to factored in

This is all part of the bigger Information Lifecycle Management topic that I've been so frustrated with over the past few months.  Is it really this hard to find tools to help manage documents, messages, media, and disk?  What rock have I not looked under, yet?

Vacation is Over

Trisha and I are back from our "brief" 1800 mile trip.  We made a very brief stop in Berea Kentucky to look at the college there, then spent a day in Dayton looking at various exhibits at Carillon park plus the Air Force museum.  Then over to Peoria to meet up with Jason Lee and his team and to attend the Central IL Roundtable.  Friday we visited Springfield and saw a good bit of the Lincoln exhibits there, then down to Nashville overnight, and finally back home by Saturday night.  Whew!  Great trip, lots of good memories, but next time, we'll put more time on the schedule for each of these stops.  Dayton and Springfield are each suitable for multi-day visits!  (Probably Peoria too, but that's now what we were there for)

It was a good trip, but I'm glad to be back home.

Heading for Peoria

Today starts the drive to Peoria, via a rather random route.  Thursday is Central IL Church IT Roundtable.  I'm excited for the chance to be there!

Not Your Old Stodgy Perimeter!

My, this is not quite what you think of if you think  Perimeter is a conservative, traditional, church.  You might be surprised!

Subject: Struggling with an addiction...?

Try to guess what it is.. 

Video (it's only 1 minute, 39 seconds, and worth it)

What Can You NOT Live Without?

My wife was listening to some radio program a few days ago where people were answering the question: "If the economy goes sour, what is it that you absolutely can't live without?"  People were giving answers like manicures, and double lattes, and spa treatments, and Jet Ski outings and such.  Oh my...are we really that spoiled of a society?

Of course, *I* would only mention reasonable things.  Beyond food, clothing, and shelter, my first two thoughts are:
1. Air Conditioning
2. Internet connectivity

Then I had another thought.  If I didn't have air conditioning and Internet (and implied, electricity and a computer) who would I be?  I know this, I wouldn't be any fun to be around!

What's on your "can't live without it" list?

Switchvox Gathering Confirmed

We are confirmed for the Switchvox presentation/demo/discussion.

What:    Information on Switchvox, a commercial version of Asterisk by Digium
When:   July 2, 2008, noon until about 3:30PM
Where:  Perimeter Church
RSVP:    Please let me know if you are coming.  Post a comment, or email me: TonyDye [at] Perimeter [dot] org

Randy Bell is the Channel Accounts Manager for Digium|Asterisk.  He will begin with a brief overview of “What is Asterisk” and “Who is Digium”.  There won't be time for an exhaustive demo, but we will have the chance to play with it.  The discussion will include how the Asterisk Ecosystem works and the difference between community supported and commercially supported versions of Asterisk.

There will be plenty of Q&A time

TXT to Email Converter?

Have you ever had a text message you wanted to save, in some other form?  On my WinMobile device, I can copy the text, open an email, paste it in, and send it to myself, but what a pain!  There must be some easier solution.  My very quick search didn't find it.  Anybody else have this need?  Any good+easy+free solutions?

The Backup Dilemma

Perimeter has been using BackupExec since before I came on the scene.  I don't even remember the first version we used on our original NT 3.51 server, but as our network has grown, we've continued to add servers and licenses, go through upgrades, upgrade tape devices, and generally just keep on doing more of the same.

We've been looking at other pieces of the larger ILM picture.  But, backup is such a key.  We have several vulnerabilities right now, or places where we can't move forward until we make a backup decision.  So, here are some of our challenges:

• Our current version of BackupExec doesn't support Exchange 2007, so we're delaying our upgrade to 2007 - that's painful!
• We'd sure like a solution that handles entire VMs (vmdk files) for rapid disaster recovery, as well as individual files within the VM, for incremental restore purposes
• We want something that has a good "understanding" of SharePoint, especially if we ever move forward with using SharePoint as an alternative file store
• Our backup program must understand and inter-operate with whatever archiving solutions we come up with (Moonwalk, Archive one, etc.)
• And, of course, we have to live on a budget

VisionCore's VRanger product, and Bakbone's NetVault have each made it to our list of "interesting" products, and we've been seriously thinking about going that route.

Now, back to my opening statement, we've been using BackupExec for a long time.  Why would we NOT just go ahead and upgrade it, and at least keep on with what we're already familiar with?  In the world of backup (and anti-virus, and even Church Management), where the question is often "which product do you hate, least?," I'm having trouble choosing to make a switch to something new, when we at least sort of understand the issues with what we have.  And, staying with BackupExec has the benefit of some cost savings.

So, am I nuts if I don't make a change?  (go ahead, I can handle it)

Wireless Safety: the VPN Question

In response to my earlier post about wireless security, Stuart made the comment about using VPN to enhance security.

I’ve heard this many times, and it makes sense.  I’ve also heard that it actually creates an even greater risk!  The thought is, if you have a VPN connection, then you have a "trusted" pipe into your network.  But, if your local Internet connection isn't safe, then have you just created a pipe from danger into the guts of your network.  The question (to which I do NOT know the answer): if your notebook is on an unsafe network, how does a VPN connection make it safe?

I've heard the analogy: VPN is like a clean pipe with one end in the middle of a cesspool!  Please tell me how that's wrong.