Well, we met on Friday and it was a success. You may ask, what metrics am I using to measure this as a success? All participants left with more valuable knowledge than they came with, all participants were introduced to someone they didn't know from another organization, and all participants would like to meet again, next month. This, in a nutshell, is the value of these types of gatherings. As long as people would like to meet and are learning something valuable to their corganization, every meeting will be a success!
The meeting didn't go as planned and it wasn't very formal, but both aspects made the meeting more productive. We just had an open discussion. Topics discussed included ChMS, websites and hosting, virtualization, antivirus, upgrading server storage, and desktop security. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone made a comprehensive set of notes.
In the next few weeks we are going to have a "workshop", for lack of a better name. It turns out that Sagemont was the only organization with a successful deployment of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Chris McGuffin had the great idea that we should meet and deploy WSUS. We will meet at Sugar Creek to teach and deploy WSUS. After it is deployed at Sugar Creek, we will get it deployed at Windsor Village UMC and etc. This will help local churches deploy technology and keep everyone from reinventing the wheel every time someone wants to deploy a new technology.
We did not decide on the next meeting date, time or location, other than the middle of June. Who would like to host the next gathering? Post a comment or email me at scott.reichling {AT} sagemontchurch {DOT} org
Isn't it great how "not going as planned" can work out to be a good thing?! I think Clif and his crew are struggling to embrace that for the fall roundtable, yet amazingly, it keeps being the right answer.
Are you OK with us (that mostly means Jeffrey Thompson) reposting your success story over on the CITRT site/wiki?
Posted by: Tony Dye | May 21, 2007 at 11:52 AM
In my opinion it would be a great encouragement to others to repost Scott's comments. The meeting was very informative, but most importantly we had the opportunity to fellowship with and get to know some wonderful folks who share the same struggles and successes. It is nice to know "we are not alone".
Posted by: Chris McGuffin | May 21, 2007 at 05:32 PM