New Email Server

We plan to replace our email server this year and I feel like we are at a crossroads. We currently use Microsoft Exchange for our email server and it is on version 2003 sp2. We also have the licensing to upgrade to 2007 with software assurance. While we are completely satisfied with Exchange I still feel compelled to take a look at some other solutions.
Some of the available solutions that have beckoned me...

1. Zimbra - Seems to be a fairly flexible message and collaboration suite that was just recently purchased by Yahoo!. It was written with open source but there is a version available that has a support option. The native interface is a cross browser compatible ajax enabled web client but you can use Outlook and most other common email clients including those for Apple or linux. It can run on Unix or Linux. It integrates with Active Direcory or other LDAP enable directories.
2. Go completely open source with mail and server. I am no where daring or knowledgeable enough to implement this but for some reason I'm always drawn to the idea. But with the importance of email these days it needs to be a guaranteed.
3. Go totally with a hosted solution. The options for hosted solutions are almost endless. You can have a hosted Exchange, Zimbra, Sendmail, or anything in between. This gives the responsibility to someone else for disaster recovery. Google mail looks the most cost effective and the integration of other google apps it increases the functionality. Hmmm, very tempting.

Sad to say that after it is all said and done I'll most likely stay with MS Exchange. Why you ask? Well, it is what everyone is used to. We are almost exclusively a MS shop so why stop now. The price point is good. I'll keep you updated on the new install of my exchange server. I plan to do a migration from 2003 to 2007.

Storage

As I look into the future to try and anticipate what our organization's greatest needs will be for the next few years one of the topics that always floats to the top is storage. In the short time that I have been involved in Church IT I have found that people use as much storage as they can get. Granted our storage strategy has been fill it up and we will go find some more. We currently have a little over 1 TB of storage spread across several servers. Currently we are a single site church and we even have the luxury of housing our administrative offices on site as well. This means that we are all on the same switched network. My mind keeps pointing me toward some kind of large storage device such as an NAS or even a SAN. I would like to provide enough space to the users that is easily expandable so I can get the storage problem off my mind for a while. The only problem I keep running into is once I have this massive amount of storage how am I going to back it up and get it off site.
Sorry but that is the end of the thought and instead of something insightful I leave this post with a question: How do you get offsite storage of multi-TB's of data? Even better how can users classify their data so we are not backing up the stuff they don't even remember what (or where) it is?
Tricky.

Jott

I just ran a cross this great new utility called jott to be found at jott.com. It allows you to use your cell phone to send e-mails, text messages, and even update your blog. I am doing it right now from my cell phone. Don't be jealous. listen

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Saga: SPAM!

All organizations are targets for spammers which most definitely includes churches. There are many different ways that you can get into the crosshairs and you can do everything in your power to keep your email address from falling into the hands of the spammers. But try as you might without some kind of spam filtering you will receive spam.

If you are like me these types of emails are a gnat that never goes away and it keeps getting bigger. We have a very nice amount of spam that is directed at our domain and I would estimate that we get on average 60 spam messages per mailbox per day. Since tomorrow is only a day away and we have about 100 mailboxes it adds up quickly.

If you look across the market there are many different products available in a wide array of packages. When you take a big step back everyone is essentially attempting to do the same thing: identify the messages that are spam. There are a myriad of techniques to do this and a vast array of what to do with messages once they are identified as spam. This explains why there are so many products available. Wikipedia has a great article explaining Anti-spam techniques (e-mail). It is a cat and mouse game between spammers and anti-spammers (very similar to the virus protection market). Anti-spammers try and determine what methods that spammers are using to get past the filters, and spammers are trying to figure out what is blocking their messages and how to get around it. In my mind it is a continuous battle that is difficult to avoid. In some cases I remember reading an article where the CEO decided to rid their organization of email completely. While that might sound nice for an instant, for most people doing away with email is just not practical. Email has become a widely used form of communication and we become dependent on it more and more every day.

When it comes to email and spam our end users really don’t care how it works they just don’t want to have to waist anytime looking at crud that they don’t want.

In the past our church has employed a couple different spam filtering solutions.

1. When I first started at Crossings we used a product from Sunbelt Software called iHateSpam. This product was replaced with the Messaging Ninja which functioned well for us and had little maintenance. While I really liked the name the only drawback to the message ninja was that (due to a configuration on our email server it kept crashing all mail related services) it had to be loaded to the exchange server and was configured as an SMTP synch which crunched our server resources.

2. After I was tired of calling Sunbelt Software support and listening to them blame Microsoft for the problems we were experiencing I decided to cancel my subscription and move to a free solution: Microsoft’s Intelligent Message Filter.
For a while it worked great but updates came bi-weekly and it also ran on our Exchange server using precious resources. Plus there was a period of several months where MS took a break on the IMF updates. I finally got tired of all of the complaints and decided to get something dramatically better

3. I was able to convince administration that you get what you pay for and we were able to divert some monies to our huge spam problem. We are now using a product called IronPort which is an appliance based technology that was just purchased by Cisco. We have a hosted solution for IronPort through a company called MxToolBox. We chose this configuration for two reasons. (1) It wasn’t even close to being cost effective for us to purchase the appliance, and (2) having someone else host the solution removes the administrative overhead from the responsibility of the IT staff allowing them to focus their efforts in other places that cannot be outsourced.
Overall we are very satisfied so far with this solution. Reasons…

a. Someone else manages the device

b. There is no lag in message delivery

c. No overhead on mail server

d. Mail Server independent

e. Virus scanning (inbound and outbound) is included along with message archiving

f. There is no quarantine folder that must be checked periodically

g. The false positive ratio is 1/1,000,000 and I believe that I would agree

The only drawback is the rules are ridged and we have an organization that emails us frequently that got the mark of shame and was on a RBL which keeps us from receiving email from them.

Overview:

Spam is bad but the tool are getting better. Whether you organization has software, an appliance, or a hosted solution to combat spam never be afraid to check out new technologies or have innovative ideas. Spam is here to stay but we don’t have to see it.

Favorite time Savers

I wanted to jot down a list of some of my favorite IT time saving applications/utilities/technology. What better place to keep it than here.

In no particular order

• UltraVNC
• Allows to remotely share same computer space as the person that needs assistance
• Uses encryption for username and passwords
• Active Directory security enable
• Microsoft Group Policy
• Implements changes based on groups and computer types
• Gives the ability to deploy software based on security
• Database of Computers
• using a vb script file that runs on log in we gather information about each computer and dump into a database
• records info about hardware, software, and user log in/out activity
• Remote Desktop Connection
• Based on Terminal Server technology RDP allows you to connect into a server or workstation from a remote location.
• It's great because it comes on all machines after XP and is very helpful since it allows remote users to login to their normal computer giving the a familiar work environment.
• VPN
• We give a select few work-a-holics the ability to get into the network from home with a VPN client.
  
• This works great in conjunction with RDP but does increase the calls that I get at random hours of the day (or mostly night).
• Volume Shadow Copy
• Windows Server 2003 comes with a service available called a Volume Shadow Copy.
• The way that this works is you can turn on Shadow Copy on a drive volume and it will make scheduled "backups" of the files that are located in shared folders on that particular drive
• This enables a client to be give to users and they restore their own corrupted, deleted, or damaged documents with out having to visit any tapes or backup programs.
• Helpdesk Software
• We use a relatively low tech Helpdesk application. It was a free web app that I served out on a linux box called MyHelpDesk
• Reasons why I like MyHelpDesk: Free, fairly flexible, can be updated and maintained.
  
• It allows us to keep track of the needs of our organization and update the priority of what is coming in.

This list is not exhaustive but it a good start. If I think of some more I'll make a new thread

Collaboration and Sharing

Over the past several months I have had a few opportunities to become a part of a larger community. After signing myself up for the MinistryTECH conference in April I started thinking about how beneficial that it would be if various people going through the same struggles (in my case: IT) could meet together and share their successes and failures.
I think about how other industries have conferences that are designed to better each organization and the industry as a whole. Why not for Churches. In fact, as members of the same Kingdom I feel that we are called to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ and I am very thankful for the people who have already thought of this and spend a lot of time and effort facilitating the sharing of their ideas and experiences.
Another opportunity that we have been able to be a part of is the Church IT Roundtable. In fact our church will be hosting this event April 5th, 2008. It will be an opportunity to have people who work in church IT get together and have open discussion about the things that most applicable to them and others. The Roundtable purposefully coincidently falls the Saturday after the MinsitryTECH conference so if you will be in town for that why not stay an extra day in Oklahoma City.
All that to say: I'm super excited!