Teaching!

Our school, Rhema Bible Training Center, has three years, two being the normal length and an optional third year. I have the privelege of talking to the third year Pastor and Missions groups. The third year is more hands-on then the previous two years. They get to work with other churches and participate in weddings etc.

I am going to be talking about technology in ministry, specifically for new church plants and new ministries. I’m coming with the mindset that they don’t have resources for a tech staff and aren’t extremely proficient in technology anyway, beyond normal surfing and word usage.

I want to provide them with a good overall view of some areas of technology that could help them in productivity and accessibility. Some ideas are hosted applications (Google Apps, 37signals), the use of blogs, hitting the idea of ChMS, free hosting (dreamhost.com)..

I don’t want to overload, but I don’t want to let them go away without some great resources.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Side note: Cat chases bear up a tree! Thanks to Jeremy Marx for the link… go encourage my fellow Database Admin to start blogging!

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Goooooooddddd evening blogging land… (in best Robin Williams impersonation)

Well today I started the dwindling down of the Help Desk Software. I had installed OTRS and Spiceworks, but wasn’t completely satisfied.

Step in Church IT Roundtable and Jim Edwards’ recap of Help Desk mentions during the conference.

I have started demos for both ServiceDesk and Kayako. I have to say I like both! The ServiceDesk was easy to install and setup and configure(granted very limited configuration for now). They both seem to handle tickets and email capturing very well. There are a few things I wish were combined from the two..

ServiceDesk Plus Pro

• Easy Active Directory Integration
• Asset Management + User Attachment of Assets
• Purchase Ordering Managment

Kayako

• Web Portal - Don’t have to authenticate to view KB or Troubleshooting
• Predefined Templates for replies
• Live Chat ability

My thoughts are that Kayako would be great for external facing sites and users while ServiceDesk would be good for internal use, though I wish it had the predefined replies and easy-linkable KB articles.

More testing tomorrow.