September 18, 2007

Topics for the RoundTable

The RoundTable is in two weeks! We need to start collecting topics now so we can get organized a bit in advance. Give me your ideas by commenting on this post. To jump-start your thinking, here are some posts by Tony Dye about what was discussed the last time:
http://tonydye.typepad.com/citrt/2007/04/hot_roundtable_.html
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/04/cit_roundtable_.html
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/04/more_roundtable.html

What burning questions do you have for your fellow church IT people?

6 comments:

Clif Guy said...

I'll start:
1. What's the best way to optimize SQL Server 2005 in a VMware ESX environment?

2. Any ideas about how we can find an initial group of IT volunteers? What kinds of projects/tasks should we give them right at first?

3. Do you have a disaster recovery plan? What subjects does it cover? What scope of disasters does your plan cover?

4. What is your offsite backup process? Do you use an outside vendor, if so, what vendor?

Anonymous said...

Wow you guys may be way over my head. :) I plan to listen much more than I speak at the roundtable.

I think your #2 is a great topic applicable to orgs of all sizes. It would be interesting to hear how others have delegated relatively complex tasks to teams, and what sorts of projects/initiatives work well with volunteer teams versus staff/deacons.

Hardware/connectivity/software recommendations or experiences are good across the board -- not only backups (offsite and on) but things like network security, virus protection, network hardware, all the way up to ChMS solutions.

Website development and maintenance is a big one, that may or may not be connected to ChMS discussion; I suppose that depends on how integrated you are. Maybe an example of Typo3? :)

Unknown said...

Per some other discussions many of us have had off an on, I'm hoping maybe we can drift over to the "soft side" of IT Management, including things like:
1) Where is the spiritual part of your IT department?

2) How do you separate out "planning" time from "doing" time?

3) What does your calendar look like? [very related to #2] How much time to you spend with people instead of computers?

4) Hiring and using volunteers is a good fit as well.

Unknown said...

Let me add one more to the list from above.

5) How do you do planning and prioritizing? Do you have any tools that help? (especially anything that's free!)

Unknown said...

Now a technical topic. What types of information do you get (or try to get) from your firewall? Do you monitor usage? Badwidth? Top addresses accessed (or blocked)? How do you look for exception conditions to whatever is your own normal?

Unknown said...

Another semi-technical topic: staff anouncement. How do you get "whatever" information to your staff? How do you avoid spamming your staff? Do you let anyone on staff post/email to everyone on staff? Is there a simple solution?