Today at 2:17pm, A. Rick Anderson said:
About a year ago, when Salt Lake took over the Internet service to the
meeting house family history library, they paid a guy to install a wireless
network in the ceiling. Not surprisingly, it requires propriety software to
access it. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever used this thing.
Does anyone any actual facts (the speculatory reasons are obvious) on what
the intent of this thing would be for?
We have such an installation in our stake, with which I have been quite
deeply involved. Paul's comment about the FM group is correct in our case,
they're the ones that run it, and know the people to talk to.
In our case they got a DSL line, ran wires to the Family History center,
and set up wireless throughout the building and put wireless cards (and
installed the proporietary access software and magic keys) in all the
clerks' office machines. (This building has a stake, two wards, and a
branch with offices there.) They also installed a Cisco PIX content
filtering firewall on the network for all the traffic to pass through.
If I recall correctly, the access protocol is AEGIS, and the software and
the magic keys are available from the FM group. They even gave us an
install CD upon request, so we could rebuild it on one of our machines
that was having trouble.
However: with that said, the policy clearly stated that only church-owned
computers were permitted to connect to the network. So no laptops or other
computers were allowed to connect via wired or wireless connections in the
building.
As a relevant side note, the last handbook I saw (current version of Book
1 as of about 6 months ago) said that internet access was not allowed from
the computers in clerks' offices and such. It didn't specify a yes or no
answer regarding Family History Center computers, and it makes sense that
it would be allowed there. The best answer I ever got to the questions
about the apparent conflict was that since the Church installed and
maintained the internet connections for our Family History Center and our
clerks' offices, they had approved it for use there.
If anyone is in a position of any influence with regard to these policies,
it would be really great if there were some authorized way to allow
internet access from a clerk's office computer in a more general way. The
church is advocating the use of the Stake and Ward Websites, but when the
only place you can get to them is from home, it really makes things
difficult. It was very nice to be able to pull up MLS and the web site on
the same computer at the same time, and synchronize (manually of course)
the lists of callings and such, or work with calendars, or view and print
out materials from the church web site, but when you can't have MLS and
internet on the same computer, it really makes things difficult.
The other question we never got a good answer to was when MLS will be able
to synchronize with church headquarters over the internet (with a secure
SSL connection of course) instead of those lame and slow external modems
they pass out. Our MLS would not infrequently sit there for the better
part of an hour downloading over the modem, and sometimes fail and have to
start all over, saving data at 50kbps when we had a connection 30 times
that fast available on the very same computer. Not only would it work a
lot faster, but then the Church wouldn't have to maintain a big modem
pool, and could just let each unit/stake/fmgroup do their own thing for
internet access at whatever speed they needed. Or perhaps the church could
even bargain with one of the nationwide providers for a deal for all the
relatively low use church sites to get access for less than normal. Who
knows. But at least having it available to the sites that have internet
access anyway would be great.
One thing I'm a little curious about is how widespread this practice of
installing DSL internet (with or without wireless) in church buildings has
become. I was under the impression that our location was a test site in a
pilot program (this was probably close to 3 years ago), but since then
I've heard of several others that have similar equipment now. How many
other stakes, wards, or family history centers have this now? How many of
those are in Utah, and how many are elsewhere?
Thanks,
Mac
--
Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/
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