Conference Staff Attending The Leadership Summit

The event was nicely done from a technology standpoint. It was an interesting experience to know that we were participating in the same event with United Methodists in the Congo, Germany, Zimbabwe, Liberia and elsewhere all over the world. We all sang the same hymn and prayed the same prayer, regardless of timezones. It was a great experience. I hope we do more presentations like this in the future.

This is one of the reasons why I think that all of our churches should create a technology budget for their leadership. All of our pastors need access to modern computer equipment and smart phones. These devices will help our clergy become more connected with each other, the annual conferences and the general boards and agencies.

Hootsuite.com is one of my favorite online apps by the way.  You should check them out when they have finished resolving this problem…

There’s nothing better than a dose of high octane stress to kick off a week just right.  I came in this morning to find out that no one could connect to the server anymore.  Our office was flooded with calls wondering what was wrong with the e-mail server.  In the past people could have clicked past the expiration error and kept on trucking.  I quickly renewed the certificate, downloaded and installed it.  Then the real problem started.  All of our clients could now access the server but they were getting trust errors.  Turns out the new Thawte certificates need to have an intermediate CA certificate installed.

Thawte uses Intermediate CAs to enhance the security of SSL and Code Signing certificates. Installing the correct Intermediate CAs or CA bundle for the certificate being used is absolutely essential to ensure that users don’t see certificate errors when visiting a website or running software secured with a Thawte certificate.

I didn’t know about this since it had changed in the last year.  After running it by their technical support (they give great chat by the way) I was pointed to an article discussing the issue.  Turns out this new requirement was implemented on June 27th, 2010.  I downloaded the required certificate and added the following line to ssl.conf:

SSLCACertificateFile /usr/local/ssl/crt/cabundle.crt

One quick Apache restart and all is well.  Now it’s noon on Monday.  Time to get the week started!

Beware the security devils!

This is the graphic that you now see when you are visiting a website with a valid certificate that is loading page elements that are not encrypted.  It’s not a terrible thing security wise but nevertheless, beware the red skull of security!  Even though I know it is going to generate support calls I still love it.  Well done Google!

Don't expect any help from the Roadrunner.

The Roadrunner delivery issue at work has been resolved.  I waited all weekend to see if our e-mail would deliver.  Roadrunner’s block on our IP address was never removed.  I sent an e-mail address to postmaster@rr.com with no luck.  There isn’t even an autoreply configured for that account.  All of the other major ISP’s resumed service with us after a few hours on Friday afternoon.  Once I was desperate enough I had to eventually change the IP address of our outbound mail delivery.  Thanks for nothing Roadrunner, I fixed it myself.

Scotty, we need more power!

I particularly enjoyed working with my co-workers in the News Room this year.  Since we had the extra day the entire operation had a significantly lower stress level throughout for everyone.  Some things broke and had to be fixed.  Some things had us running in circles for awhile.  We had our challenges like we do every year but this year has to stand out as one of the better ones.  We had time to actually talk to each other during the week!

Derek and I get stoked at the Media Center booth.

One of the big new items to come out of this year’s work is that we will be meeting at the Raleigh Convention Center for the next two years!  I am excited about being able to sleep in my own bed for part of the week but I will miss Greenville.  From an operations standpoint the Greenville Convention Center fit our needs quite well.  It remains to be seen how things will work in Raleigh but I’m not worrying about that this year.

Bishop Gwinn’s State of The Church Address stands out as one of the highlights of conference in my mind.  He delivered a powerful message to the people about a variety of topics including cross racial appointments.  I have never seen him get so emotional before.

State of the Church Address – Bishop Gwinn from NCCUMC.org on Vimeo.

Another of my highlights has to be the African Children’s Choir.  What a joy they were!  This group of children from war torn Africa inspired and moved everyone in the crowd.  How can anyone watch this and now smile?  I shot this video from backstage with my Droid.  Apologies for the poor quality…

That brings us to the end of the 2010 North Carolina Annual Conference.  I look forward to seeing everyone next year.  Now it’s time to break all of this stuff down and head home.  I’m going to take a day of rest tomorrow and then dive right into the building move.  June is a busy month!

Gmail interface - Work e-mail address!

Who could say no to an offer like that?  We are looking at the collaborative possibilities of having over 2,000 active accounts in one Google Apps system.  Our current e-mail infrastructure is a mixture of Microsoft and open source products.  We started off with a small Windows e-mail server and have grown over the years to support over 2,000 mailboxes.  We decided to go with a few different solutions for different segments of this user base over time as needed.  In the end we have five servers all working together to run and manage our communications infrastructure.  It’s a mess.  It’s also rather burdensome to administer.  Enter Google Apps with its unified management system, familiar end user facing interface, compelling and easy to use overall setup and the choice to switch is fairly easy.  We started off with about 10 beta users and then migrated the entire Communications and Information Technology offices.  Once we were convinced that the system was working well we began the roll out process to internal staff.  We are up to about 150 active accounts now but we have a long way to go.

What are some of the major benefits of switching to this system?

• We reduce our support surface from five different servers, operating systems and mailbox formats down to one integrated interface.
• We will have access to an whole host of collaborative tools that was not previously possible.
• Our end users will have reduced confusion.  Many times they call us and have forgotten which server they are hosted on (so do we!).
• We don’t have to write documentation anymore.  We just link from Google’s support website!
• We no longer have to constantly maintain our e-mail gateway anti-virus and anti-spam scanners.
• Microsoft Outlook integrates into the Google Apps system.  We have a good number of users that wish to continue using Microsoft Outlook instead of the web interface.

Google Apps allows a custom logo for each organization.

What kind of things can we do with this new system?  Here’s a few ideas:

• Easily share user calendars so that co-workers may know when they are available for meetings.
• Set up shared documents, spreadsheets and presentations for collaborative work within offices.  These documents can also be shared with the entire Conference or with all visitors to our website.
• Set up Google Sites for project based collaboration (rather than just individual documents).
• Easily manage e-mail and make use of the labeling system for filing away old messages for later retrieval.
• Easily set up a system group that I can use to communicate with all of my end users simultaneously.

What other ways can we use this?  We are concentrating on the migration from our existing systems now and will move on to feature implementation later.  I’m curious to hear other ideas as to what we can actually do with this system once we have everything in place.  I’ll post updates as we move along in the implementation process.  We are very excited about all that we can do with this new system!

Subject: Introspection Online
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 11:12:25 -0400 (EDT)

Introspection Online

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