Jason Powell, IT Director, Granger Community Church, Granger, Ind.
Q: What is the most difficult ongoing support issue you face in your organization?
A: One word: Macs. As our organization grows and becomes more heavily media-driven, we have more staff with Macs, and they need access to network resources. We don't have an official Mac support policy yet, but we recognize Final Cut [an Apple application that runs only on Macs] as the software of choice for our video editors. We have only a dozen Macs, compared to nearly 175 PCs, but they create elements that are critical to our weekend services, making integration crucial. Our IT staff has little knowledge about Macs, and we're a nonprofit with a very tight budget. But we've managed to take some steps toward Mac support. Last spring we bought two MacBooks and a copy of Mac OS X Server and we've learned how to work with OS X and Active Directory integration. We've found that getting Macs to play well on a Windows network isn't simple, but we hope that Leopard will make integration much easier.
