Day 3

Today is full of more vendor presentations, but they’re all specifically Church Management Systems. There’s still a few left, but I am certain CHCC NEEDS to change. Our current solution is just getting us by, but I’ve seen several very innovative solutions here that don’t just help us manage information, but help facilitate ministry. The presentations have been brief so I can’t say which would be best, but there are several excellent solutions to look at. I know this year our budget is fixed and there is no room for a ChMS, but I will be researching this year and will fight to put something into next year’s budget. When I say next year I mean July ’08 – June ’09. I know that’s still quite some time off. If we find something terrific that we absolutely MUST have, perhaps the Lord will find another way to fund it.

Here’s some of my goals when I get back to work. First, I need to catch up on some sleep;). Yesterday a couple of people mentioned that they have a technology board of some kind that gets together and decides where their church’s technology should go. Right now it’s mostly up to me. We’ve departmentalized a little with communications, but it’s still basically up to me. Another thing I want to do is work harder at connecting with local church IT people. As far as I know CHCC and Forest Park are the only two churches in the Joplin area with an IT person on staff. So this mean we need to connect with volunteers. While nothing has been decided here the idea of a local IT roundtable is very appealing to me. So why not try to set something like that up.

On a technical side, I’m having some trouble with my VMWare server. It gave me some trouble when I compiled it, and has been eating up too much memory. I know it needs alot, but I’m only running one VM on 2G of RAM and am often at 90% utilization. Somethings wrong! So I’m going to reload when I get back. (This has actually been on my agenda for awhile, I’ve just been pretty busy lately!) Then I’m moving or MySQL DB server to a VM on the same server.

I also want to take a look at the Web Empowered Church. Mark had a great presentation and I was VERY impressed with his product. So I’ve downloaded it and will give it a good look. We’re working on further developing the CHCC web ministry and this seems like a great tool to help.

Well, that’s enough to keep me busy for now, but we also need to work on an intranet and we really need a SAN!!!