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For a long time we have struggled with iTunes uncanny desire to place the iTunes library files (and artwork, etc) in the “My Documents/My Music/iTunes Music” folder.  While it was very easy to change the file location for the music files themselves, the library still went to My Documents. 

This was a problem for us because we use offline files to map our My Documents folder to the individual’s network drive.  Not a pretty picture having files in two places.  iTunes would often get confused and lose the library altogether.

I found a little tip today that seems to solve all of this.  Let’s say for example you have moved all of your music to your local hard drive in a folder called “My Music”.  Simply find your iTunes library, which is located in your My Documents/My Music/iTunes music folder and copy the iTunes Music folder to your local music folder.  Once this is done, hold down the <SHIFT> key while you open iTunes and it will ask for the location of your library file.  Just point to the new library location, and voila!  You are done. 

No more network and local confusion.  All of your file are in one folder locally. Of course this isn’t really a problem if you don’t have a network setup or offline files configured, but it is a big deal to us.

Texas Ministry IT Guys, mark your calendar for September 19th for our next roundtable discussion.  We will spend all day together sharing ideas, war stories, tools, etc.  For more information, sign up here and let us know you are going to attend.

The Echo Conference just wrapped up a bit ago, and WOW what a great time it was. Very proud of the Echo team for a great job and excited that Watermark got to host it. Seems like folks left encouraged and spurred on to excel still more. Thought all of the breakouts I attended were very well done and the keynotes were varied and full of great content. Looking forward to next year.

“I love it when a plan comes together.”  One of my favorite lines from the 80’s TV series, The A-Team.  That’s how I felt yesterday during the Echo conference that is being held this week at Watermark.  When we designed our wireless infrastructure for our campus back in April of 2007, we had a plan to make it accessible to guests who step foot on our campus.  We chose the Aruba Networks solution and currently have deployed an Aruba 6000 controller and forty eight access points across our nine story office tower and worship center.

Up until now we rarely have a large number of guests connected to the network at any one given time; usually fifteen to twenty folks connected in the coffee shop.  Over the last two weeks however, with Leadership Summit and Echo, we’ve seen anywhere from one hundred to one hundred-fifty clients connected to the guest wifi. We think the number of concurrent clients could hit three hundred today.

What makes the Aruba so great is the ability to do this kind of thing very well.  The controller has a stateful firewall, which makes it easy to control access to specific wireless lans without ever touching your switches or perimeter firewall.  In addition, we are using bandwidth contracts on the controller to give our Echo network clients an eight megabit pipe to the Internet, ensuring that our staff still has seven meg available to them for day-to-day functions.

It’s a great feeling when you finally get to see the fruits of your labor come to harvest.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Staff prayer at Watermark is one of the best times of my week. Great to share what God is up to.