the way i see IT

Spam solutions – especially w/ hosted solutions like Postini or Katharion, you have the power to negotiate prices and switch relatively easily, as opposed to physical appliances.  “What about internal spam?  i.e. I’ve got a car for sale, etc.  Granger’s Executive Director (not the IT guy – it’s a personnel issue, not a technology issue) did a study and concluded that it cost $26 every time someone sent out an all-staff email.  Offer an alternative – ACS does an actual bulletin board – possibly a cork board in the break room.  Stop internal spam!

Another issue is storage space.  A good first step solution is to enable single instance storage in Exchange.  Emphasize that this is a personnel issue that needs to be supported by management/executives and enforced by the same.  Jason Lee’s leadership team agreed to block all social networking sites.

Content filtering – before any appliance or filtering method is put in place, you have to decide what your policies will be.  This should highly involve upper management, not just IT.  Some places block almost everything, and others like Granger leave many things wide open and just block the worst of the worst.  Nick mentioned www.covenanteyes.com – accountability software for web surfing. Sends web history report to accountability partner(s).  What about software for laptops after they go offsite?  Someone (corporate user) is using Websense, although it’s very expensive.

Wireless – Granger uses 2 SSID’s – 1 for public, 1 for private.  Public is on a VLAN, and private is WPA w/ preshared key – also using Nomadix gateway.  How to determine coverage & capacity – can do expensive site surveys, or just walking around w/ a laptop.

What is IT’s relationship w/ leadership?  It’s very important for leadership to realize IT is important and plays a key part in supporting the ministry of the church.  As an IT representative, we should be facilitating relationships with each department and ministry so we can know what they need and support them and their ministry.  Jason Lee (Northwoods in Peoria) was told IT is not a ministry – people are ministry.  IT supports ministry.  In fact they decided that it was acceptable for IT to be down for 7 days in the wake of a disaster.