“As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this.” – Dave Winer

Just last week my team at Resurrection and I were joking about exactly this idea. (We support both PCs and Macs.) The Apple commercials are terribly funny, no doubt. But Apple would have you believe that their stuff never breaks. In our parody commercial, Mac would be broken and a poor, hapless user would be striken by the question, “How do I fix this thing?” PC would answer, “I don’t know.” Then the user would ask, “Who DOES know?” Followed by nothing but dead silence.

When PC is broken, we call our friendly Dell service person, who comes out a day or two later and fixes it. It’s painless and nearly effortless. When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell. Surely Dave Winer and us aren’t the only ones who have faced this issue. Does Apple care?

I’ve posted before about the importance of visual communication in our world. Unfortunately, I’ve spent my whole life honing my ability to communicate with words. That skill will be nearly obsolete by the end of my life. Seth Godin points us to an example of how ordinary people can use video technology to communicate. Wouldn’t it be cool to use this video to teach church staff about web technology? Would it be even cooler for all of us to learn how to communicate this way?

We got out of the office for a day-long retreat yesterday. Most of my IT team was there:

Clockwise starting from left (goofy guy with Texas Tech t-shirt):
Chuck Russell – Internet Communications Director
Jeremy Grabrian – Desktop Support Specialist
Ian Beyer – Network Administrator
George Smiley – Desktop Support Technician (part time)
Brian Slezak – Software Developer
Leo Johns – web consultant (part time)

Oh yeah, and the end of the table with a laptop, a flat-panel monitor, and no one sitting there – that’s me. 😉

Who out there is using the upgraded version of Blogger? Is it cool? Should we upgrade?

Last week we finally had time to focus on our spam problem. With some assistance from our friendly SonicWall tech support person, we installed a software update and tweaked our configuration. Turns out that at some point we white-listed everything from cor.org, no doubt to address a false positive situation, but that was a bad idea – too much spam is spoofed to come from your own domain. With the new software and the tweaks, we’re back to nearly perfect, and just in time for the long Christmas-New Year’s break when many of our staff take vacation. Almost no spam is getting through to our users’ inboxes. Wee hoo!

SonicWall, I owe you an apology. When properly configured, SonicWall Mail Security is every bit as good as the spam filter built-in to Outlook 2003.

In case you missed it, I found it very interesting to see Guy Kawasaki reveal a bit of his personal faith in this recent blog post. In the post he includes this link to presentations at a church leadership conference in Hawaii this Fall. I’m glad to know Guy is interested in the original meaning of evangelism and not just his borrowed use of the term.

Now that Web Empowered Church (WEC) has been underway for a couple of years, Mark Stephenson has come to the belief that it won’t reach its full potential without Church Management System (ChMS) functionality, or at least deep integration with an existing ChMS. I totally agree with that assessment. So Mark and I thought it would be a great time to get together with Rubin Perry to discuss how ChMS fits with WEC’s vision and strategy. Like my meetings with Fellowship Technologies and Shelby Systems, our conversation was detailed, candid, and thought-provoking. While I’m not free to disclose everything we discussed, I can say that WEC has deep pockets, a passion for helping local churches use the Internet effectively, and a long-term view.

I’ve noted previously that combining content management (CoMS) functionality with ChMS and Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) functionality in a single, integrated system would be ideal. Most forward-thinking church IT leaders I know agree with this. WEC is looking for churches and church IT leaders who will partner with them to build just such a system based on the LAMP stack and TYPO3. As I mentioned, another possibility would be to do a deep integration of a market-leading ChMS with TYPO3. We’re in the process of discerning whether it makes sense for Church of the Resurrection to be one of those partners.

WEC is fully committed to open source software. By that they mean basing the software on the LAMP stack, licensing the software they develop using the GPL, and employing open source development methodologies. The advantages of this include risk reduction, ease of integration, competitive diversity, and distributed innovation. Already WEC is being adopted by churches around the world that have the technical ability to make use of complex technology. Such churches appreciate the fact that open source means WEC doesn’t have the licensing cost barrier associated with commercial software.

For churches that lack technical skills, however, adoption is challenging. TYPO3 is more than powerful enough for even the largest churches, but it is quite complex, it is difficult to learn, and it suffers from poor usability in some areas. Accordingly, addressing these issues represent top priorities for WEC.

1. WEC is actively working with the TYPO3 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) team to improve usability.
2. WEC is developing TYPO3 training videos.
3. WEC is working on improved processes for providing tech support.

So that’s a summary of how WEC fits into our ChMS analysis. I’m praying for clarity.

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of visiting Ben Hill United Methodist Church, just a few miles from the airport in south Atlanta. The Foundation for Evangelism’s technology leader, Rubin Perry, is a member of that storied church and one of its hardest-working unpaid servants. After 100 years of ministry, Ben Hill is still learning, growing, dreaming, taking risks, and serving. It has purchased the former headquarters site of Delta Airlines, a large acreage with a number of corporate-style buildings that have been sitting vacant for 20+ years. The site, adjacent to the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta, has huge potential but carries many challenges. With Rubin helping to manage the project, the church is in the process of remodeling and renovating the first building, which will be used as a worship center when completed. The Holy Spirit is moving at Ben Hill and for that I say, “yeah God!”

The New York Times confirms that spam is getting worse, due primarily to two factors: 1) spammers are using farms of spambots running on insecure computers, which are abundant in homes with cable modems, making it ineffective to identify spam by originating IP address. Distributed security threats are always more difficult to block than localized threats. 2) A new type of spam with the message in an image that’s changed slightly each time it’s sent, making it impossible to recognize spam by a checksum on the contents.

I mentioned that the effectiveness of our spam filter, SonicWALL Email Security (formerly MailFrontier), is declining. On the other hand, it seems that Outlook 2003’s junk filter is keeping up. Since I began my experiment the week of Thanksgiving, I’m seeing 94-99% daily effectiveness from Outlook 2003 alone (with MailFrontier disabled on my mailbox). Yesterday it was 100% effective. Other staff we put on Outlook 2003 for our test have given similar reports.

What does Microsoft know that SonicWALL doesn’t know? Why would we pay SonicWALL thousands of dollars per year for filtering that is LESS effective than the filter built-in to Outlook? Jerry, my SonicWALL reseller, has tried to get their attention. I also e-mailed one of their product managers nearly two weeks ago, with no reply at all so far. Jerry says we should hear something on Monday. Grrr.

Look out for a flurry of posts from me. It’s amazing how much writing you can do in an airport and on a plane with no Internet. 😉

Speaking of the airport, this is what greeted me when I tried to check the price to get WiFi today in Atlanta …

Note: Because you are using an outdated browser, you may only view the raw textual content of this site. In order to view, use, and enjoy this site to the fullest at the maximum security level, please refer to our Browser Upgrade page to view a list of browsers that support web standards.

Let me see if I have this right, Sprint. I’m using an OUTDATED browser (IE 7) that should be UPGRADED to something that supports WEB STANDARDS (such as IE 6)??? You guys have had months to fix this page. Doesn’t anyone at Sprint use Sprint’s WiFi in airports? Haven’t at least some of them upgraded to IE 7? Even if they were asleep, it’s difficult to understand how they could have missed this. (Yes, Sprint is our friendly, neighborhood, telecom company located only two miles from Church of the Resurrection.)