I had an amazing time at the 2007 Fall Church IT RoundTable, connecting on a binary level – we laughed, we cried, we prayed and we were inspired. It was an honor and privilege for me to connect with so many gifted people that are passionate about using technology to reach people for Christ. Special thanks to Clif Guy and his team for the amazing hospitality they showed in hosting the event.

Fall 2007 CITRT Group Picture

We went over a lot of materials in the various sessions at the RoundTable, I’ll highlight here a few of the things that sparked my interest:

  • Nick Nicholaou mentioned that they use ZENworks an automated configuration management solution.
  • While discussing use Google Apps as an Exchange replacement Bryson Medlock suggested looking at ScheduleWorld for mobile calendar and contact synchronization.
  • Justin Moore has a slick Asterisk setup using Aastra phones that he auto-provisions. (This guy is the real deal, he configures Asterisk via command line and edits the configs with vi).
  • I am now convinced that going the SAN route will be the best configuration for our new VMware environment. What is left to decide is which product to go with…Jason Powell loves EqualLogic, Clif and Trace both went with Dell/EMC and Mark Moreno is hawking some pretty slick looking Intel solutions.
  • Mark Mareno told us about a client of his that had disaster recovery insurance and when their RAID 5 disk array failed they were able to get insurance to pay up for the uber expensive data recovery.
  • Brian Slezak turned me on to GenControl, a simple desktop remote control program that can temporarily install VNC and connect to another machine on your domain in a matter of seconds.