watermarkgeeks.com

We’re in the middle of building a new worship facility here at Watermark to go alongside the 9-story office building we currently occupy.  Up until now, we’ve utilized consumer-grade access points but are planning to move to an enterprise level solution. 

We’ve taken at look at the product offerings from Cisco, Aruba Networks, and Trapeze Networks.  I’ve found it difficult to find resellers from Cisco to even talk with about the product line.  Both Aruba and Trapeze have been very helpful through this process. 

We’re essentially looking for a solution that provides central control over multiple "dumb radios" that talk back to a central controller.  This should give us the flexibility we need to add access points in the future without having to configure each one individually.  The bottom line is that we need a secure and guest wireless network, without having to hire someone to run it.

I’d love to hear if any other churches have experience in the wireless area and have stories to share.  I know my good friend Austin out at Irving Bible Church just went with the Aruba product and looking forward to see how that works.

Recent post from the Google CHMS group…

We’re a prerelease Arena customer and had a fairly successful
implementation so far.  Fortunately at least for now, Shelby has the
manpower to keep up with what will probably be a custom conversion for
each customer.  This is not a "right out of the box" installation.
What I can tell you is that as of the prerelease version, both the
Shelby V5 database and the Arena DB need to live on the same physical
box, which is a good thing for the triggers, but a bad thing if that
box ever loses the data.. in which case both your databases are gone
(so have good backups!)  What we have done is placed the web front end
on a separate box, and pointed everything to the DB server.

The triggers had some initial problems which resulted in data being
duplicated, fields not moving correctly, etc, but the Arena folks are
working through those.

As far as our users, who disliked even using Shelby at all, they love
the interface.  Easy to learn and use and I feel like the overall
usability gained is going to be well worth the cost.  Looking forward
to the next version of the Kiosk software, as the prerelease was a one
to one deal (one checkin station per room, which is cost prohibitive).
The V1 software has been completely rewritten to allow full families to
be checked in at once, as well as individuals and is no longer 1to1.  I
hear that it is now also setup with a wizard, which should be much
better than the pain of the prerelease settings.

Most importantly, I LOVE having our data here.  I’ve been able to use
third party tools already to mine the data, and we are working on some
survey imports in the near future (to keep our data on one central
repository… something you can’t do with the other solutions.)

More later as the story develops.

As of today, we are still waiting for version 1 of Arena (the production version).  I was told last week that we would have it today, but just heard that we won’t have it until Friday.  The critical issue here is the kiosk system, which we need to configure so that our ministries can begin using.  The kiosk software has undergone a major overhaul, which makes it incompatiable with our pre-release version of the database.