Changes...for the better

Inherently there is resistance to change. Changing things requires work.

Recently, our department has become somewhat unpopular to some because we've asked people to make changes to their email settings. Nobody likes it when email doesn't work. Things should simply work.

Months ago, I had a vision. I had a plan and I sold people on it. The plan was for email to simply work. Wherever you go, it worked. It worked securely, it worked quickly and it didn't require any changes or forms.

People here are on the go, they go on trips, they go to villages, they go around the country and out of the country and until today, when they would go, it would be a small mountain of paper work accompanied by the hassle of changing email settings, and possibly losing email.

Today, after months of work, puzzle solving, trying to figure out how to get around different requirements, I was able to announce that as a team, we have made email... WORK from Anywhere.

The announcement has been out for ten minutes, and already the praises are flooding in. People going to Australia to have babies are happy, people going to the village are happy, people going on medivac's who don't have time to fill out the forms are happy.

It's a happy day. And I'm glad we were able to make lives easier, even if it meant, for the last month, people have been upset about the changes... now that they see why I think they will glad they did.


ALSO,..
today we did a short computer orientation for the new arrivals here. This is something that wasn't previously done, but was an idea me and another guy had to reduce the amount of confusion that people have when they come here, and thus reduce the amount of unnecessary work our dept. sees.

It felt good to see the fruit of some of the labor. The last few months have been tough because a lot of things have been not working right, breaking, etc. Hey, that's why I'm here!

Still, it's really nice to have a success that everyone can enjoy from time to time.

The short version: - After a lot of work, trials and failures, I was able to make things better.

Success

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.