Optical fiber circuit complete

Qwest just finished installing a 200 MB circuit from our Mesa Campus to our Gilbert Campus. The Gilbert staff is very happy. This circuit replaces our intial T1 circuit. We will now start testing the circuit by copying SD and HD video files (40-50 GB's) each week between campuses. The big question is how long before I get a request to increase this new circuit?

Ever thought about strategic value?

Do all of your IT projects have strategic value? If so, how much? Do we waste time? I think sometimes we work on too many projects that may not have much strategic value. I think we need to develop our thinking, at times, for the long-term. I think this is very hard for us but very important for the church. We need to make sure everything we do directly aligns with the churchs strategic goals. It's easier for us to fix problems and move on.

I challenge you to make a list of all your current projects and rank them by strategic value, its an eye opener.

Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet coming soon

We have signed up for a 200 MB circuit between our Gilbert and Mesa sites. The build out will take Qwest about four months. We are very excited to move beyond our current T1 circuit.

http://www.qwest.com/largebusiness/enterprisesolutions/products/ethernet/moe.html

Postini - ROI on SPAM protection

We converted from Symantec(Brightmail) SPAM filtering about three months ago with expectations to improve our 70% filtering ratio. I'm am extremly pleased with thier filtering service. We are now filtering over 92% of all our email as SPAM. Unbelieveable! Here is something to think about for calculating ROI. We had a total of 354,078 spam emails deleted over the last 30 days. If a staff person would take about five seconds to view and delete each of the SPAM emails, then we have saved about 492 staff hours or $9,835 in staff productivity. (Using an arbituary $20 per hour per staff) Now that's ROI.

Arena CHMS update

We have been working over the last year or so on migrating from Shelby Version 5 and all our custom .NET applications over to Shelby ARENA. We are making steady progress. ARENA is both elagant and powerful. No software program is perfect but we are very happy with our ARENA decision.

New technology to watch

Microsoft is acquiring Kidaro to enhance thier ability for desktop virtualization. This is exciting technology and could radically change the way desktops are used and managed. Microsoft will be including this new technology in the Desktop Optimization Pack or MDOP. https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/default.mspx

This technology allows a master image to boot clean every time . This technology could dramaticaly change our ServiceDesk operations.

Cisco Wireless controller....awesome

We have the Cisco 4400 Series wireless LAN controller at our Gilbert Campus. We have been amazed at the broadcast range of the light-weight access points.

We are now adding more access points at our Mesa Campus that will be controlled from the wireless contoller at our Gilbert Campus. We are gradually replacing all the standalone Linksys AP's in Mesa that are not centrally managed or monitored. One of our best technology investments was getting a centrally managed wireless infrastructure.