We are having a meet and greet dinner the night before (Sunday the 25th) for people that plan to come into town early. Be sure to indicate that on the registration so we can plan accordingly. There is no additional charge if you are coming the night before.

So, now you are thinking, what is my part.  Right?  Well I’m glad you asked…  The goal of the Church IT Roundtable is to further community, relationships, and information sharing among IT folks in the church.  So your part in all of this is to spread the word.  Get in touch with the IT folks at churches you have relationships with and let them know about the event.

Register at dc.citrt.org.

May08 DC-CITRT

• 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.

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

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.

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.

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!

• 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.