Email is to missionaries as blood is to the heart.
It carries our messages throughout the world and it communicates to us from our families.
For this reason, the #1 priority of the network staff here is to keep email up.
Processing email, protecting email, quarantining email, forwarding email, takes up a HUGE portion of our time.
Believe it or not, missionaries move around a lot! (-;
So then their email has to follow them.
We came up with a vision "what if your email worked, wherever you were, without having to change settings?"
We began this project months ago. Pecking at it over time, with technology I was not fluent in, completely ignorant of, or simply had never even heard of before.
I'm a unix guy at heart, but we use Microsoft mostly here.
So, today, I'm pretty excited and mostly only geeks will understand why.
I got exchange email to work securely through a netscreen firewall via ISA2006 publishing!
What does that mean? It means that email won't break when people move around.
It means that very soon (when we go live with it) the missionaries here won't have to have their workstations re-configured when they get here before email works.
This means a drastic reduction in the amount of work we have to do daily, which means that staff can spend time on all the other things there are to do,
and it also means that there will not be the odd, 3 day window where someone gets here on a friday and their email doesn't work until Monday because CTS is closed.
I'm pretty excited about this success.
One of the things I want to do here is not only keep things running smoothly, but improve systems so that there is less time "in the shop" so to speak for the folks.
So far, I believe we're doing a pretty good job of it.
Thanks and praise to God for somehow giving me the smarts to solve the issues we ran into.
