As you may have read on vaious other blogs, Northwoods was the place to be the week of Jan 7. Bill English, the man who wrote the book on Microsoft’s Sharepoint led 35 or so Church IT workers through the ins and outs of Sharepoint.

Fady got the ball started rolling on this one, and things progressed quickly after that. A location was chosen and registration opened. Once we had the time, the place, and the people it was time to get ready.

The big players on the back-end:

Linda Cleveland - Instrumental in the registration/preparation process for the attendees.
Melanie Gray - Made sure there was room for everyone, and that everyone had what they needed.
Linda McMillen - Kept us fed like noone else could.

The training was a great success in my opinion. My mind was filled to capacity and then some. I went into it thinking that sharepoint was just a simple collaboration/portal. But I have seen its true colors. Photo dump to follow.

Thanks again to everyone who came out, and a special thanks to Bill. Its not often you find someone in the private sector leading a Christian business.

Since Jason just posted a photo dump of pics, hopefully I can expand on the events of recent, with some new pics as well.

January 4th: Around 5pm
We begin the relocation by shutting all systems to be moved…and as a show of power, every desktop on the network.(We had a real reason, just some sensationalism)

After everything had been powered down as needed, naturally it was time for a break.

 Now on to the work. There were several reasons for our move. We were growing to big for our current space, our servers were just stacked on top of one another, our backup situation needed help, and it was in a remote part of the building.

After the taco bell settled we started disconnecting the servers and sorting the cables. I documented the process while Jason handed heavy things to Jim.

  As I mentioned before once we got the servers moved we had to sort out some cabling.

The move was on. When I said that our servers were stacked on top of each other there was a system of separating the physical boxes. Here is a shot of our previous rack system.

On to the Datacenter! We prepared for our move by putting the rails in the rack so we could get the servers in quickly. Here we are putting in the first server.

One server down, now its time for a break! We just happened to get a special visit from our favorite CFO Linda. She knew we would be working hard so she brought us some treats.

After that short interlude it was back to the servers. We happened to look at the server we just loaded and realized it wasn’t correct, so we did it again.

The rest of the move went pretty well. No large hurdles, a snag or two maybe. We were able to get everything up and running. We had a little pool between us as to what time we would finish. Jim had 10pm I had 12am and Jason had 2am. While there was some controversy involving certain parties ‘padding’ the time, our finish up time happened to be somewhere between 4 and 4:30 am making us all losers. Here are a few final pics of the move.

After some cleanup were were ready for the week. It’s been a long process, starting back in October, but it feels good to have it completed. Particularly because two days after our move, 35 Church IT guys from all over the country converged on Northwoods for Sharepoint Training.

It’s Here!

We happen to have in our racks the hottest piece of server equipment released this year!

Check out a few pics, more info later!

This is my first post from my phone! I somehow was able to login and access the backend of my site.
I have wanted to try and better utilize my phone this may be how it happens.
More to come.

Evidently my post about our APC Backups from before wasn’t appreciated and its daddy showed up.

This thing is a monster. Total freight weight of over 1900 pounds and too big to fit in anything but a semi-trailor. We had our work cut out getting this thing installed. Basically all we do is put it where we want it and APC comes and does all the hard work. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow.

I just hope that 2008 can be as great as 2007 was for me. The Lord has been good and I am constantly reminded of that. Here is a quick look at how I rang in the new year.

 If you ever have the opportunity to go to a ‘Rock Band’ party (or host one) I suggest you jump on it. Great times were had by all.