This is what I’ve been waiting for and my guess many others have been as well.  Google Apps is releasing a plugin that will allow Apps to act/replace your exchange server with Calendar, Contact, and email syncing with Outlook. Looks.  Hopefully this is included in the Education edition which is free for non-profits.

See it in action in the video below:

Find out the latest and download the plugin here.

As always the easiest way to get these and all other of my blog posts is to follow my RSS feed here, and of course to keep up with all that’s going on in my life follow me on twitter, I’m @djberg.

Our Senior Pastor at Woodland, Tim Passmore has started a video blog and I thought his first post was pretty fun, at a minimum he made an excellent choice for his first guest.

I recently rolled out 4 checkin stations for our Daycare, which will be used for checkin and checkout 5 days a week for about 350 children.  Two of these are also being used for Childrens checkin for their weekend service time and the other two will be used for the preschool area at the same time on the weekends.  These will also be eventually used on Wednesday nights for the Student Ministry.  As these computers will be on most days all day in open areas that everyone has easy access to it was important to me to be able to easily secure these computers and make sure that no matter what happens that the next time they are turned on they’ll ready to go same as the last time.  As usual I posed the question to the CITRT IRC chat and quickly was given the answer of Windows SteadyState. It’s a free software available as long as the Windows you are running is legal and legit.  I’m always a big fan of free! The homepage says exactly what I wanted it to:

You can’t always prevent problems during a user session, but now you can undo the whole session. Learn how Windows SteadyState can return your computer and hard disk to its exact condition before the user touched it, simply by rebooting.

It’s pretty simple to setup, just check boxes with all kinds of options that you can turn on and off.  After you get it set-up just the way you want the settings are exportable and importable so you can just load to other computers and have everything match-up just the way you want it.

The last couple days I seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, well technically I tried Live Writer months ago it just never seemed to stand out to me.  Not sure if there were updates(i’m sure there have been) but I really like it.  Now to see how it compares to the new WordPress 2.5 that is supposedly coming out on Monday. But the biggest difference I’ve seen between Live Writer and posting directly through Admin is the speed of it getting to the feed reader.  I use Google Reader and it was there in less than 5 minutes and at times with WordPress it seemed like it was the next day before it showed up.

Hot off the press from Techcrunch is the news that Microsoft will be giving it’s development software to college students for free! Read about it straight from Microsoft over at Channel 8. If you’ve got a college around or students interested in Church IT what a better way to get them involved the playing around with some free develpment software as you mentor them (and they probably teach you a thing or two). If you don’t care about all that and you just want to get to the downloads you can do that here, but remember I said this was for college students and you can be sure they are checking.

I’ve never been much of a Mac fan, no apparent reason I’m just not familiar with it because I never have used it. In the corporate world that I was in before coming to Church It it was all numbers and ASAs, no creative happenings around there, so it’s never been something that felt “right” As with most new things you want to make them feel like the old things, Web Worker Daily recently had a post on just that “7 Tools for easing the switch from PC to Mac” there’s some good stuff in the comments to.

I’m sure no one missed it but this is in fact a day late. I took yesterday off as my wife is still recovering from surgery and I just had to wait on the Dishnetwork guy to come and install HD before MNF. But what we’ve all been waiting for…..My weekly post of my 5 favorite posts across the blogosphere that showed up on my Google Reader.

As many of you have already seen “24″ the lost 1994 pilot

Areas I wish I had mastered — Past IT Roundtable Topics from Jason Powell

The full details are over at Jason Lee’s blog. Follow these for the breakdowns:

Anyone planning on coming from Florida – Tampa Bay area? Plan on flying in Sunday and out Friday. Wonder if there might be the option for transportation to and from the church? Also anyone intrested in splitting a hotel room? Trying to be as frugal as I can with the budget.

From Google CIO Douglas Merrill:

“I can let an employee work on a Mac because it makes him 10 percent more productive. That outweighs the cost advantage I get from uniformity

from CIO magazine you can find the article online here

My weekly Monday morning post of my 5 favorite posts across the blogosphere that showed up on my Google Reader.

Must have skimmed the feeds a little too fast last week, cause I didn’t start many posts. I’ll leave the last 2 up to you, what we’re you’re favorite two posts from last week internet wide?