Jon Edmiston

Mac Support

A few weeks ago we decided to fully support Macs in IT.  Some of the factors that lead to the decision were:

• In many ways we were already supporting many of them through questions
• Finance department wanted a better accounting and tracking of them.  They came to us and asked that we start ordering them and tracking the location of them.
• Current Mac users were unhappy with checking their mail using webmail or Terminal Services and wanted Entourage.
• The number of them was increasing especially with the new buildings coming on-line.

So now we officially support them.  We've been working on a process to get them in Active Directory and better managed.  We're now at the point where we have an official deployment process.  I thought I'd share it as it might be of interest to you and perhaps you have a few ideas for us.  So far it's been a fairly smooth roll-out.  The only issue we're having is a bug in OS X 10.5.2 that keeps users from printing to shared printers (authentication issue).  The problem is suppose to be fixed in 10.5.3 and there's a work around (ugly) in the meantime.

CCV Mac System Prep Procedure

Feedback?

AIR Springs a Leak (at least for me... maybe)?

I've been playing around with Adobe Flex/AIR for the last few days.  There's a lot I like about the product and direction.  My favorite feature is that you can create a cross platform desktop application that is a cinch to deploy and is very very engaging from a design perspective.  But...here's a few issues I have....

1. The documentation and samples leave a bit to be desired.  My first app (after Hello World) was to consume a basic web service and display it's results.  There's several ways to do this, but the documentation is a bit weak in showing you all the options.  They give you a few examples, but they never quite do what you want...
2. Bit buggy... in playing around things still seem a little shaky... one example.  I pointed Flex to a WSDL and had it create ActionScript objects for me.  The main object contains custom instructions on how to use it from ActionScript and MXML.  Problem is that custom sample code it provides didn't work (had some case issues with some of the method calls).  I was able to resolve it, but it kinda stinks with the code they generate for you doesn't work.
3. This one might be picky, but it's a deal breaker for Arena development (at least the way it stands today).  Currently, there is no way to call a Web Service that is secured using Basic Authentication.  Doh!  All of our Arena Web Services are protected in this manner.  we could open them up and require that a person's username and password be pass on each call (I've seen a few Web Service APIs do this).  I'll have to talk to David and see what he thinks...

So I we could go back to plan A, Silverlight... but it can't create a desktop application.  From what I've read and seen (and correct me if I'm wrong), Silverlight is meant to be run from the browser.  While this is fine for most things, I was hoping to create a small desktop app that would allow for simple searches.  Something that I was planning on building as a Vista/iGoogle/Widget.  AIR is a much better alternative if being cross-platform is important (and it is). 

I do have to say Silverlight's XAML XML presentation layer is much more powerful than AIR's MXML.

I hope we can still figure out a way to use AIR, I still think it's a viable option.  If not now, perhaps in the future.

That's Cool...

I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  My favorite feature is the ability to share posts you run across with others.  If you're interested in what I think is cool (I promise to do better in the future) you can subscribe to my shared links below.

My Shared Feed

The Little Things

I think I've blogged once about this book already... John Wooden's 'Wooden on Leadership' is probably one of the best leadership books I've read (and I've read quite a few).  Here's another juicy tidbit:

".... that little things, done well, make big things happen for you and your organization."

"There are no big things, only the accumulation of many little things.  Remove enough rivets and the wing falls off."

These two lines summarize a whole chapter on focusing on the little things.  His thinking is that it's the little things and make a big different (he even starts this first basketball practice teaching his varsity team how to tie their shoes).

He goes on to say:

"Your ability as leader to set and achieve high standards in the domain of details - to insist that average will be well above average - is one of the accurate predictors of how effective you will be as a leader, and how productive those under your supervision will be as a team."

Gulp...

This has challenged me to think about what the small, but important tasks we do as a team that need to be monitored/coached to ensure we make the biggest difference possible.

Google Analytics takes to the AIR

Don't tell any of my .Net buddies but I've spent quite a bit of time this weekend looking at Adobe AIR (pretty cool)(competitor to Microsoft's SilverLight).  One AIR app I ran across while looking around is the Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics.  It's not a Google supported application but it ties in with Google Analytics.  If your an Analytics user you gotta check it out.  Very nice!  (If you're not an Analytics user then explain yourself).  You can make the point that for the most part it doesn't add any new features to Analytics, but sometimes it's nice to have an icon right on your desktop that launches and let's you quick view your metrics.

Inspiring Information Graphic

Checkout this dynamic information graphic detailing Manny Ramirez's homeruns.  Spend some time on it. Click the circles to see the distance.  Click the ballpark names to filter hits for each park.  As you do notice how the stats change as does the timeline.

 

A sports fan could get lost in this type of graphic.  Analyzing various combinations of time, ballparks, pitchers, etc.  That's the sign of a good information graphic.  The enjoyment produced by the discovery of information mirrors that of playing a game.

So if one was to apply this to the church office what would it be like?  Attendance from week to week?  Small group participation over time / curriculum?

Church Intelligence

For quite a while we've been wanting to drive into Business Intelligence tools to see how we could harness their power in the church (call it Church Intelligence).  At the Arena Developer's Conference we took on the action item to research the use of SQL Server Analytics in creating enhanced metrics and reports.  Then a funny thing happened... God lead two very experienced BI experts to our door (really... they came to use from our on-line opportunities search).  I've worked here 6 years and never had one person with BI experience sign-up.  Now not one but two... WOW!

Below are a few goals we have for the project and some sample solutions we might tackle. 

Goals for BI:

• In a big church it’s hard to see the patterns of involvement and relationships that are constantly growing and changing.  Yet these changes often times output data that resides in our systems.  What can BI do to bring this data up to the surface in an easy to interpret form.
• Currently, may aspects of the church is lead by gut feel and years of experience.  While this has served us well having better metrics could alert us to trends earlier and provide us increased assurances that our understandings are correct.
• There are trends and correlations in why attendees are attracted (or not attracted) to certain parts of our ministry.  It would be helpful to understand more about who is attending what ministries and what these people all have in common.

Possible Thoughts For Solutions:

• What are likely predictors of small group involvement?
• What are common attributes of: people who serve, give, etc.
• Summer camps – What do families who attend summer camps have in common (other than having kids).  Are they more likely to:  attend a small group, serve, give, participate in some other ministry (like youth sports), etc.

Anyone have some other thoughts?

Pen of the Future

This pen is amazing.  When you write with it on special paper it can not only digitize what you write (text and drawings) but also record the audio and sync it in time.  Forget what your notes mean?  Simply tap the notes and it will play the audio that was recorded as you were writing that part of your notes.  You gotta watch the videos to fully understand.

I'd love to have one of these puppies to help digitize the process of developing new functionality for Arena.  It would be useful in making digital copies of user interface and entity-relationship diagrams.  

If you're ever responsible for taking meeting notes this product could be an incredible asset.  The pen runs $150 for the 1GB model or $199 for the 2GB model (fairly reasonable if you ask me).  See more on their website.

Free Web Conferencing

I ran across this link in PC World last night.  DimDim offer's a free web conferencing solution that includes screen-share.  Participants only need to have Flash installed.

I also heard about Microsoft's Sharedview which is also a free screen-share utility.

Hope they might be of use...

Disclaimer: I haven't tried either of these services yet.  Hope to use DimDim soon.

Metrics: Know Thy Source

We're starting on a project to keep and report better metrics.  David and I have been working on some new reports that will be our first deliverable.  I'll share this report in a later post (soon I promise).  After creating the report we started to analyze the output to confirm it's validity.  Some of the numbers really didn't make much sense.  High School attendance down 40%, Children's down 3%.  I knew these numbers could not be correct.  Turns out that in the High School case we weren't doing a good job ensuring that all students were checking in and that we were using manual head counts as our official count.  In the Children's area our official count of children also includes the staff and volunteers.  None of these things are wrong but the processes rely heavily on human counts and input.  In some cases this is the only way (such as counts for the adult service), but in many areas such as the ones above automated counts could be more reliable, less resource intensive, and quicker.

What I learned is that we're going to have to take a step back and determine and document how each of our metrics should be sourced. Translation: This is going to be harder than I thought.  Kinda reminds me of this cartoon.

Another thought that occurred to me is that there is no consistency among churches on how to gather metrics.  What does attendance mean? Is it bodies in chairs?  Do ushers get counted?  Do child-care workers get counted in the children's count?  I imagine churches are all over the map on these.  We really could use some standard metrics with well documented definitions.  Anyone know of some?

Symbolic Links

Occasionally over the last few months I've found myself in front of a Unix command prompt (helping with our Asterisk server ala Linux or changing file permissions on a OS X machine using the command prompt).  I forgot how ahead of it's time Unix was.  At my previous job at Honeywell I spent quite a bit of my time administrating Solaris, AIX and HP-UX with a little Linux on the side.  It was amazing the environment we had setup there with things like NIS (distributed login), NFS (distributed file system) and functionality in the core OS.

One feature I miss in the core OS was symbolic links.  Symbolic links allowed you to split the organization of files and folders into a logical view (how the user saw the structure) and a physical view (how they were actually arranged on the disk).  Basically, you would link directories (or files) from a physical point to a logical directory structure.  This meant that you had complete control over how you setup your disks and volumes.  Run out of disk on a volume?  Well you could always move a large directory structure over to a different volume and then link it back to the original.  No one (even apps) would know the difference.

Come to find out Microsoft added this functionality into Windows quite a while ago, but they never added it to the UI.  They provided command line tools in the resource kits but they were hard to find in the documentation.  After searching a bit I ran across a utility called the Link Shell Extension.  This tool allows you to create several different types of links: hardlinks, junctions and symbolic links (each clearly discussed on the site above).

So how can this be used? 

• Want to store your pictures on your D drive but access them from My Documents/My Pictures?  Move the My Pictures directory over to the d drive then make a junction back to it's original location (Vista allows some folders to be redirected today, but in my experience not all apps understand the redirect).
• Is your shared drive on your file server getting too large for a single volume?  Do you not want to mess with the complexity of DFS?  You can create a logical view of the shared drive that is physically stored on several volumes.

If you're interested in solving these problems please test before making them in production.  I haven't spent an exhaustive amount of time testing these scenarios.  I did find though that none of the link types work well across network drives.

If you think of other uses for links please share...

Windows 7

Below is a video (looks legit, but you never know) of some of the new features being designed for Windows 7.  Looks pretty good... hope there's more though...  For more reading on the subject check out this blog post at 4sysops.

 

Future UI

The future of the web user experience is changing.  The promise of Microsoft Silverlight and Abobe's AIR are very exciting.  The richness of the interaction and crispness of the vector graphics are a definite  upgrade from HTML.  I'm sure HTML will be around for a long long time, but more complex applications will are moving in the direction of AIR and Silverlight.  To show the abilities of Silverlight Microsoft has released a demo app that models what medical records could look like in the future.  I'd urge you to take a look.  Below is a quick walk through to make sure you see some of the best...

One common UI widget you should be aware of the the rounded square in the upper right corner of widgets.  Selecting these will maximize the widget (see below).

 

Walk-thru Steps

First select the 'Primary Care Demonstrator'

The application will then load with a dashboard for the doctor (If Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 has not been installed it will walk you through that process).  Most of the good stuff is in the patient record so double-click the patient name (highlighted below).

Next you'll see the patient record.  Click around and see all the info.  Especially cool are the charts.

Maximize this widget by clicking it's square.  Note you can drag layers to the front.  My favorite concept is the scaleable slider at the bottom.  You can widen or shrink the scale as well as move it across the timeframe.  The amount of interaction here is incredible.  Seeing the impact of various drugs on the patients stats is very easy to visualize.

 

While the UI could use a lot of polish (can you say subtle gradients) the concepts are really amazing.

unChristian Audio Book

The Willow Creek Association is offering all members a free download of the unabridged unChristian audio book.  Login to the WCA website for instructions on how to download.

It's All About Relationships

Church Management Systems are the Church's version of a CRM (Customer Relation System) system (among other things).  That said read the quotes below from an article entitled "Analyze Your CRM":

"...to many SMBs focus on the C (of CRM) and write off as just another sales tool.  But CRM is really about the R.  And making sure your expensive CRM is pulling its weight means tracking the R." 

"The idea is to flesh out customer relationships with new data points - points you can track from the CRM"

To date most ChMS also focus on the C (member).  They track attributes about the member but never peel back the covers of relationships.  Here's an example.  Every system can track which groups a member is participating in.  But it's not the group that matters it's the people in the group that matter, and more precisely the strength of the relationship within the group.  Yeah you can click to see who's in the group, but that's several clicks (one for each group) and a mental aggregation of all the lists.

That's why the new Arena peers features are so powerful.  We've tried to model the relations people have with those around them.  It's just a start of what we hope to be accurate view of the relationships that occur daily within the church.

(if you're wondering what the picture has to do with the topic... nothing... sorry, gotta have a picture)

Follow-up To Version Control

A few additional thoughts/links on source control:

Don't just think source control is for programmers.  These tools are also very helpful for web site developers and for projects with documents that change often (think Sharepoint on steroids in the area of version control).

If you want more info on the concepts of source control check out this article at Better Explained.  It's very helpful and clearly explains some advanced concepts.

Let's Here It For the Ewoks...

Nice... clap your hands now..

Things must be pretty rough for Billy Dee Williams...

Source Control... There's No More Excuses

If your a developer source control should be a requirement... period.  Even if your only a team of one source control should be a requirement to ensure that your code is backuped and version controlled.  The problem has always been that setting up and managing source control has been a time consuming task. Not anymore...  Check-out Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion service.  You can literally have source control up and running in a matter of minutes.  They even have a free plan that allows 20 MB of storage, 3 users and 1 repository (a healthy start).  So now there's no excuse. 

Well I guess you do need to learn how to drive the car... but here's a few resources to get you started:

• Check-out this article on Subversion for Designers.  It's a very basic into in to source control using Subversion.
• Skim the open source book on the topic 'Version Control with Subversion'

At a high level here's what you do:

1. Get your plan from Beanstalk
2. Setup your initial repository using their wizard (I called mine 'Main'... kinda lame, but I can delete it later if I want)
3. Download a free svn client like TortiseSVN
4. Create a folder on your local computer that you want to be the root of the local copy of your repository (I called mine 'Repo_Main')
5. Right-click on your new folder and select 'SVN Check-out'.  Then supply your Beanstalk repository URL.
6. This process should create several folders in your local directory.
7. Place a file that your want under source control in the 'trunk' folder and select 'SNV Commit'.  Give it a message (which is a description of the action you're taking like 'Initial upload')

Done... you know have a file under source control.  You can now lock the file edit it and recommit to track changes.

You can also get a Visual Studio for Subversion.  VisualSVN seems to be the one most people talk about.  It's $49 which is cheap when considering the alternatives.

Source control is not only for code... think about managing your website assets or even documents that require you to track history.

Arena Metrics

Below are some of the metrics we currently have in Arena.  This is an area that we need to put more work into, but here's what we have so far...

Topic Area	Description
Involvement Critical Contacts	The number of people who have signed up to volunteer in a ministry, but have not been contacted in 7 days.
Gender of Members	% of members who are male/female
Weekend Attendance	Various attendance counts for our weekend services.
Giving Metrics	Various metrics that show weekly giving, including on-line giving metrics like $ amounts and # of participants.
Member statuses	Number of people in each member status
Small Groups	Number of groups, # of people in groups and # of pending registrations
Classifieds	# of new classified ads per week
Serving Tags	Number of new peopled added to tags with the status 'No Contact'
Prayer Requests	Number of new prayer requests and active prayer participants
Class 100, 200, 300	Number of people who have taken Class 100, 200 and 300
Baptism	Number of people who have been baptized.
Serving	Number of people currently serving

We have several new metrics coming... I'll post on that soon.

Evernote vs OneNote

I've been a big fan of Microsoft OneNote for quite some time.  A friend recently mentioned that I should look into Evernote.  I was a bit hesitant at first but I eventually gave in when I wanted a free solution for home.  After using it for the last six months I'm actually quite impressed.  They recently posted a new version as a beta that syncs your notes to a website that allows you to view your notes from any Internet connected PC or cell phone.  This also allows you to sync notes across multiple machines.

The UI takes a bit to get used to but it's much more powerful to find and store notes than OneNote.  As soon as I can find the time (and determine what the pricing will be for the new web features) I'm going to move all of my OneNote notes over to Evernote .  If anyone wants an invite to the beta send me an e-mail (jonathan.edmiston(at)gmail.com).  I have 9 more to give out.

If you have 5 mins to spare check-out their product overview.