The Raleigh Convention Center (RCC) is a beautiful facility. We were used to filling the entire building where our conference was held in the past. This building however, was so large that it dominated us! We could have easily fit two or three more conferences our size into the same facility. That in and of itself was quite an adjustment!

Raleigh Convention Center Shimmer Wall

The RCC has a much more formalized Information Technology (IT) infrastructure than I am used to working with. They had their own internal IT staff that worked with us all week. There was plenty of bandwidth for all of our attendees as well as the video streaming application and internal staff needs. I worked with the Minutes Room staff this year due to personnel changes resulting from the death of one of our staff members (and personal friend). All of the minutes for the 2011 Annual Conference were recorded using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The system served us well and the minutes folks were able to complete their work for the week on time.

Everything is better with balloons!

There are several different ministries that take place during the week of our conference. One of these was done in partnership with Stop Hunger Now. Volunteers gathered during the dinner break one day to assemble food packets that will eventually become meals for hungry families in North Carolina. The small (smaller than you would think!) group managed to assemble 150,000 packets that will eventually become 90,000 meals! My friend, Steve Taylor, wrote an excellent blog post on this event.

Where the rubber meets the road!

One of the big parts of annual conference is the business sessions. There are at times quick votes and at others seemingly endless debate. Resolutions are offered, discussed and voted upon. Rules are changed, removed and created. People are generally civil with each other as large and small theological issues are debated.

One of the many business sessions.

Through all of this I am responsible for setting up the initial staff IT operations including the News Room, Minutes Room, E-mail Station, Registration area and all of the staff members scattered across the building. Once everything is set up and running I sit in the News Room and help out with the various social network feeds that are covering the event. I enjoy the work but using the social networks to communicate with people out in the conference is the most fun part of the week. Who is looking forward to next year already?

It’s been a very busy month at the office. I can usually guage how busy I am by looking at how high the credit card bills and invoices pile up. Yes, even the IT Office generates paper sometimes. I spent most of today catching up. I hope this brings me back into the good graces of the Treasurer’s Office! The next project is tackling the out of control Inbox!

Multiple routers providing internet access.

We run a pretty wide range of hardware in the News Room.  You can see anything from Linux netbooks to Mac and Windows laptops.  We also support an e-mail station of several Ubuntu 10.04 workstations. Throw in about 15-20 employees, several wireless networks, 2,000 attendees and one large facility and you have a complex project!

George Speake and Derek Leek work together on a project.

This year the set-up time took about as long as I expected it would.  The nice thing we have this year that we have not had in previous years is an extra day to prepare.  Now that I have most of the major work finished tomorrow should be a fairly light day.  I’m hoping to catch up on some e-mail and continue coordinating vendors for the building move in two weeks.  We’ll see how it goes though.  As of right now all systems are green!

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!

Grant Writing Workshop

One of the nice things about my job is that I often get to participate in events that are not always held in our main office.  Technology doesn’t always stay bottled up in the Methodist Building.  One of these remote events is a Grant Writing Workshop.  Dr. Annette Greer is hosting a workshop for people in our local churches who are interested in learning about best practices and methodologies for successful grant writing.  This event is being hosted at Westminster UMC in Kinston, NC over three successive Mondays (this being the second day).

We are responsible for providing audio/video/web streaming support for the workshop.  Derek Leek (Conference Webmaster), Steve Taylor (Missions Director), Bill Norton (Communications Director), Dennis Peay (clergy volunteer) and I are running all of the different equipment necessary for pulling off an event of this size.  We have approximately 20-25 people here on-site and another 10-15 watching remotely via the web stream.

The technology behind this event is fairly straightforward.  Steve and Derek are running our two cameras.  Bill is running the sound board and video switcher.  Dennis is running the Powerpoint laptop and I am watching over the video stream and handling incoming e-mail questions/comments.  The video switching equipment can display video from the two cameras, the presenter’s laptop and the Powerpoint laptop.  The audio board is handling input from four wireless microphones and a lavalier microphone (worn by the presenter).

640 x 480 Video!

We have also made significant changes to our web video stream.  We have been streaming our major events on-line for several years now we have always had to work around a nagging Mac/Linux incompatibility.  We were also streaming out a high bandwidth and a low bandwidth stream simultaneously.

Since our dial-up usage has fallen to almost zero, we decided to do away with the low bandwidth stream altogether.  We changed our outgoing video stream from 320 x 240 to 640 x 480.  We also changed the streaming coded from Windows Media version eight to version nine.  Mac/Linux users should be able to use this newer codec without any of the issues that they encountered when we were using the older one.  We upgraded the audio output to 192 kbps (cd audio quality).  All of these changes were squeezed into an extra 100 kbps or so of upload stream bandwidth.  Today is the first day that we have tried streaming live with these changes, so we’ll see how it goes.  I’m looking forward to great results!