I got home from the Fall Church IT Roundtable last night about 10.  It was good to be home.  Today I’m back in the office and I only had 6 messages waiting for me.  It appears I’m doing my job well because I wasn’t really needed while I was gone.  That’s a good thing, especially considering the environment I walked into when I started this job.  All my planning and scheming and behind the scenes “stuff” seems to be working.

Things to think about from the RoundTable:

My plans to use Asterisk were confirmed by people currently using it who were at the CITRT.  Specifically Andrew Mitry and Justin Moore.  Both are currently using Asterisk and are VERY happy with it.  And they suggested the plan I had been working on as a means to slowly replace an old PBX system.  It was good to have these things confirmed and hear from people who actually have Asterisk in place.  My reservations, and the reservations of my superiors have come from the fact that we didn’t know anyone who was successfully using Asterisk.  Now all of that has changed!

I discovered during the CITRT that we can upgrade our free Standard Edition Google Apps for Your Domain to the Education Edition, which has all the features of the Premier Edition for FREE because we are a non-profit.  I also heard from others who were successfully using Google Apps in their organization.  So I’m rethinking whether we should using Exchange or not.  If I can convince our staff to stop using Outlook and to take full advantage of Google Apps than we have no need for Exchange. The only missing component is PDA syncing.  I’ve been looking at ScheduleWorld.  It seems like a good option for syncing PDA’s with GCal.  I just need to convince my superiors, and our staff.  I think I’m going to use our Senior Minister and his Administrative Assistant to beta test the project.  One of the things I’m looking forward to trying once we’ve upgraded our Google Apps account is trying to integrate it with Samba.  I believe I should be able to create, and control accounts via Samba, and I should be able to provide single-sign-on functionality for our users.

We’re still looking for a new ChMS (Church Management System).  More on this later.