Gwinnett Global Methodist Church - Current
Chris LaFay: It.
Charles Kirkman: There he is.
Chris LaFay: Say again? Sorry?
Charles Kirkman: I said there he is.
Chris LaFay: There I am. I am here, alive in the flesh. Did you have a good Memorial Day weekend?
Charles Kirkman: Relatively uneventful.
Chris LaFay: It's not bad.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah. Didn't feel real good on Sunday and it's pretty much slept all day and today feels like Monday.
Chris LaFay: Slept all day Sunday. Today feels like Monday. We're in a good spot.
Charles Kirkman: Right?
Chris LaFay: Because it's not Monday, it's Tuesday, which is great.
Charles Kirkman: You know, when I was working, that was a good thing.
Chris LaFay: Yes, sir. Exactly.
Charles Kirkman: Another day closer to dead.
Chris LaFay: Oh, that's hysterical.
Charles Kirkman: How much we're going to be able to prove today because apparently the people that were supposed to set up Google Works over the weekend got a message this morning saying, I'll work on it later, so.
Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Okay. But the whole domain name with the website piece, that's something that we can tackle still, right?
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Do you have. Let me actually rearrange my screens here a little bit. Do you have documentation. Did you find any documentation on your church management system? And then do you also have cloudflare pulled up?
Charles Kirkman: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Can you go ahead and send me that if you have a link to that documentation? If you just want to email that to me, I can go ahead and take a look at it and then we'll hop into the church management software as well.
Charles Kirkman: Okay, hang on a minute. Let me shrink you down here. And. Why is this not playing nicely? For some reason, it doesn't want. Since this is in Google, it doesn't want to let me get over to email.
Chris LaFay: That's odd.
Charles Kirkman: That's what I thought. This is very weird. Not that folder. It's that folder.
Chris LaFay: It.
Charles Kirkman: I'm working on the Google workspace right now. I need the.
Chris LaFay: Great timing.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah. Yeah. Let's see if I can just copy this and go over here. Why will it not let me open email? Oh, there we go. No. How come I can't open email?
Chris LaFay: I don't know. I don't know. I wish I could help you, but I don't know what. Hardware and. Sorry, software is not my specialty. But. But I'm assuming you have Microsoft Outlook? If I had to guess, I don't. What do you have?
Charles Kirkman: I'm pretty sure everything I'm using is Google.
Chris LaFay: Oh, so you just have a tab and you have a. You have a tab in Google Chrome open that has your email pulled in.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So then it should just work then? That. I don't know.
Charles Kirkman: Why? Yeah, I just can't get to it. I can't find it. I mean, when I go. When I click on my Google icon, I get you, which is not a bad thing. It's just only you.
Chris LaFay: It's just you don't. Don't want anything. You want. There's other pieces to the puzzle I can pull.
Charles Kirkman: I can. If I can. If we can share, I can pull it up here.
Chris LaFay: Let me do. Yeah, so if you want to. Hold on, let me see. Can you share your screen with me? Maybe can you go. So go back to my screen and then click on. In the middle and the icons at the very bottom. Yeah, there's a little rectangle with an up arrow.
Charles Kirkman: When this share screen.
Chris LaFay: And that's the share screen button. And then you should be able to share your screen. Yeah, you'll. It'll let you pick one. It'll be. It's very similar to Zoom and Teams. You'll just pick one of the screens that you want to share and then it should pop up.
Charles Kirkman: Window. Entire screen. Let's do window. Here we go. Share. Okay.
Chris LaFay: All right. So you just shared one of your folders with me, your technology folder.
Charles Kirkman: There's the.
Chris LaFay: So that is just the. When you. What I would actually recommend doing. You actually just shared that one window with me, which is the folder of technology, not your entire screen. So I think you just open up a word doc. I can't see that. So I would go back to the. Go back to the screen share and cancel it out.
Charles Kirkman: Stop sharing. Okay, now go back to here and let's share again. And do the entire screen.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, do entire screen.
Charles Kirkman: Okay,.
Chris LaFay: There we go. So if you're trying to get to your email, the very top, right where the little meet tab is, if you click the. There's a Gmail tab to the left of it. So far left hand side of your screen, top left, you'll see Gmail up there. Keep going up with your mouse a little bit.
Charles Kirkman: There you go.
Chris LaFay: Right there. Yeah, that's one of your. So that's your email tab. Okay, there we go.
Charles Kirkman: And I don't. Do I have your. Guessing that your email address is in here somewhere.
Chris LaFay: There it is.
Charles Kirkman: Actually, I can just reply to this, can I. You can reply and attach. Setup. Let me look and see if I have. I did his dag gone. Am I good or what? Okay, I have sent you two documents. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Let me refresh over here. Okay. Cloudware, Mx. I don't. Cool. That all makes sense. Getting started. Okay. All right. Can you go ahead and. Oh, you already did this. Fantastic. Look at this. Lovely. Okay. Okay. Gwenette gmc.org is your domain name Gwinnett gmc.org.
Charles Kirkman: I think this is interesting. I'm not quite sure what to do with that.
Chris LaFay: Which one?
Charles Kirkman: The one that has just. I've just highlighted the information button.
Chris LaFay: The senior record is normally not be. Okay, cool. Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay, so when I go to. Let me just make sure that I'm looking at everything correctly here. When I go to gwinnett gmc.org There's a website that pulls up with a navy blue banner with three interlocking circles and across with a logo, mountains in the background, et cetera, et cetera. Does that all sound correct?
Charles Kirkman: Yes.
Chris LaFay: And is that the correct web? That is the correct website? Like that is the website that is on Church Tracks management platform.
Charles Kirkman: Awesome.
Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Okay, so. Okay, so. I'm reading through some things. Give me one second.
Charles Kirkman: Okay,.
Chris LaFay: That's all fine. Can. Yeah. Okay, so in this browser, in the top bar, where you see cloudflare Dashboard with a bar, there's a little plus sign to the right of it that'll let you open up a new tab. So very.
Charles Kirkman: I'm sorry, where are you?
Chris LaFay: So the very top there, where the tabs are. Yep. Click that plus sign. That'll open up a new tab, a new window. Can you log into Church Track? Do you have access to it?
Charles Kirkman: Let me do that a different way. It's just easier for me.
Chris LaFay: And awesome. Okay, so, okay, now this is the.
Charles Kirkman: This is the administrators, which is what you want to get into.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Click on Church Connect there where your.
Charles Kirkman: Mouse is doing it the other way.
Chris LaFay: You're good. Click on Church Connect there on the left where your mouse is already. I think that's the website. And then in that top bar that's light blue on the far right, it says Connect Settings. Click on that. On that left hand menu that just appeared. Click on Domain Setup kind of towards the bottom. There we go. Setup is complete. Perfect. Okay, that's what I wanted to check out. Can you hover? So below the gray box where it has Gwinnett gmc.org There's a blue box that says, your setup's complete. Click here to see your Church connects. Go ahead and click. Yeah, perfect. Awesome. That's good. Okay, so I have good news for you. Your website setup is pretty much done. You did everything right. Because when we were. When I was driving last week, one of the things that. The primary thing that I was concerned about, you had mentioned that you're. When you typed in Gwinnett gmc.org and like the address bar, the do like the URL switched to something like churchtrack.com GMC or something akin to that. I don't remember what it exactly was. Yeah, that's not happening. Your, your DNS records are on Cloudflare. Fantastic. Your DNS records look like they are pointing to Church Track Check. And your domain name is up in the address bar and it's staying up in the address bar Check. That's it. Nothing else needs to be worried about. Your website should be as, as much as I can tell, I'm not familiar with Church Track or not, but for my 20 years of website experience, your website looks good. Your website looks technologically correct.
Charles Kirkman: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So that's all I got for you. I think you did everything right.
Charles Kirkman: So I just went in on my phone and I put in Gwinnett Global Methodist Church and the first thing that comes up is gwinnett gmc.church track.com.
Chris LaFay: So when it comes to Google, that's going to take, that's going to take a while to change over. Google is on its own. Google is on its own timeline. Gwinnett gmc. It's, it's plenty of all the GMC dealerships.
Charles Kirkman: Okay. Underneath that there is gwinnett gmc.org. So apparently it's got the old one and the new one.
Chris LaFay: It's the same. But Google doesn't know that yet.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah, I think that's what you were just saying.
Chris LaFay: Yep.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And I do see the, I do see when I Global Methodist Church, I do see Gwinnett gmc.org in the Google listings after scrolling past all the big trucks. Yeah, I actually on my Google results, when I typed in Gwinnett gmc, I actually don't see the other, the Church Track URL. But Google also knows that you've gone to the Church track URL a couple of times. So it might be popular that a little bit higher up as well. So I only see that. But everybody's going to be a little bit different and Google will take some time to figure it out.
Charles Kirkman: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. You've done what you needed to do.
Charles Kirkman: All right.
Chris LaFay: Not to make it like super duper fast and anti climatic, but hey, I'd rather it be working. I'd rather there not be problems.
Charles Kirkman: So yeah, the other sheet that I sent, the other thing I sent you about setting up the MX records for Google workspace, it has something in there that I have not heard or seen or not sure what to do about. Where am I?
Chris LaFay: Which one? I'm looking at the doc. Oh, there's, there's multiple page. Oh, I thought those are the one pager.
Charles Kirkman: No, on the top of page two. It says to send and receive emails you need an SMTP provider. I assume that's Google. Then it says create two DNS records. One of them is the MX record and the other is an A or quad A. And I've never heard of having to create the A or quad A record.
Chris LaFay: Before this in the, the doc that you sent over. Hold on, let me do a search. Yeah, I don't. I think we might be looking at different doc. I have the, the Cloudflare MX record setup. DocX pulled up that was attached in your email. I don't see anything about the quad A in here at the top of page two. Yeah, I don't see it. Well, how to set up records. Step one is backup record. Step two is remove old mx. Step three is add Google workspaces mx. Step four is verify the admin console. That's page two.
Charles Kirkman: I have no idea what you're looking at.
Chris LaFay: Go, go back over to your Chrome Google Chrome where your email is. Yep, there we go. And then oops. And then click that left hand. Click that left hand window there. So yeah, you clicked on Chrome. Then click on that left hand window invitation from. There you go.
Charles Kirkman: That one.
Chris LaFay: Click that. So that document file. Yep, that's what I'm looking at.
Charles Kirkman: Oh, okay. This is what I took excerpts from.
Chris LaFay: Okay,.
Charles Kirkman: Well that was just the wrong thing. I didn't even remember I had that. Let's do something a little bit different here. Here we go. This is what I'm talking about. And this is from the Google setup, I believe.
Chris LaFay: I've never, I've never seen these before. Stay there for a second. It.
Charles Kirkman: Love this line up here. It says go to vendor specific guidelines. When you go to it, you get this document.
Chris LaFay: Oh man. Don't you love it?
Charles Kirkman: It's great. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Here we go.
Charles Kirkman: Okay, Well I think once we get it set up, we'll try it. If it works great. If it doesn't, then we'll try to figure out what the app for address is.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I've so I've never had to set up an A record for mail before. I do know that there are.
Charles Kirkman: You.
Chris LaFay: Set up the 1mx, the 1mx record and then typically Google will give you a custom like I think they're text records Txt records. That is basically a security measure to make sure that you that they can validate that you own the domain name. It's called SPF and dkim and there's all these acronyms. I'm actually not super aware of exactly how they all work together. But you typically have your 1 MX record now, not the 5 that you used to have then I think you load in either one or two other. TXT records that are like the lock and keys if you will, that basically when you send out an email from Google it goes and checks that lock and key and it's like, oh, it came from a legitimate work Google workspace account, not somebody spoofing it. And therefore the likelihood of it going to spam is a lot lower. Those are things DKIM and then spf, those are the. I do not know what those acronyms stand for. That's out of my, that's out of my purview. But be on the lookout for those. So that's all that's from, from what I'm aware of doing this about two years ago the last time. Those are the three records that you have to touch and that's it. And then Google Workspace should just work.
Charles Kirkman: So this is pretty much. Except for that one MX record.
Chris LaFay: Oh you already, you already have the mx record. There's one MX record already there with the smtp.google.com.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah, everything other than that one record is exactly as it was transferred over from GoDaddy.
Chris LaFay: Okay, well then once your workspace account gets set up then it should just work.
Charles Kirkman: I'm just wondering if there's anything here extraneous that isn't needed.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that I would not be able to help you with. Okay, so actually scroll down a little bit. Keep on. There you go, right there. So that second, those last two text records you see DKIM and then spf, I have no idea if those came from an old Google one, if they were from other email providers, etc. Etc. But that's an example of what a DKIM and SPF are to going record look like. They're just long winded pieces of text there, nothing spelled like you don't have to know what they are. But that's just what these other records are for. I wouldn't know what, I wouldn't know what to tell you. I can perceive some of them but there's really no reason to just go through and deleting records willy nilly for no reason. They don't. You're not running a mega corporation with millions of hits going through your DNS, so it doesn't really matter.
Charles Kirkman: Okay,.
Chris LaFay: Now some of these are bad ones. I couldn't. I Couldn't speak to those either. But the likelihood of them being malicious or bad is highly unlikely and probably not worth the hours of recon work to like, find what each of them mean and figure out whether you should delete them or not. So I will say make sure that you have, on this Cloudflare account, make sure you have two factor authentication turned on. That's where you get like, you have like an app on your phone that'll have different like six or eight. Yeah, that's honestly one of the best things you can do for security is have two factor authentication on. I know a organization who their domain name, where their domain was registered at, got hacked. That hacker canceled the domain name, repurchased it the same day on a different registrar. Because they owned their domain name, they were able to point all Google Workspace to their own owned account. And inside that client, inside that person's Google Workspace folders were a list of all their passwords, which again, don't recommend that either. And then their Instagram was taken over, their Facebook account was taken over ever. They had literally the entire company's presence held hostage. And if they just had two factor authentication on where their domain was registered at, all of that would have been solved.
Charles Kirkman: So I have just gone to a part of that document that I didn't send you.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, this is the dim and SPF stuff. Yeah, Google will give you all of this. So when you go and you're in Google Workspace and you're setting up the account and, and it's like connect your domain name to Google Workspace, it will give you these records to put in. Okay, not to under complicate things, but that's pretty much how it works. And honestly I think that if, if you're the one that has Google Workspace logged into and you're setting it up, I think Google Workspace, as you're going through the setup process, might have a like dynamic connection with Cloudflare that says, would you like me to just go in and like put these into Cloudflare for you? And you can say sure thing.
Charles Kirkman: That might be the reason that they need to have the access to Cloudflare.
Chris LaFay: Now it's been a while since I've set these up, but I do know a lot of email providers and a lot of domain name providers have connections to where they'll just plug in all the records for you.
Charles Kirkman: That would be very helpful.
Chris LaFay: But if you're giving, if the people that are setting up your Google Workspace or people that you do not want to have access to your Cloudflare long term, you either need to do the setup process yourself so you don't have to give them your password or change the cloudflare password to something else that you're okay with them having, and then as soon as it's done, change the password and add that two factor authentication back on.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah, I was actually planning on changing the password after I give it to them.
Chris LaFay: Most people say that they're going to do that and they never do. And so just as long as you actually do it, I'm not judging you. That's not. I don't say that to be like a judge. So just.
Charles Kirkman: We do actually need to set up another administrator cloud player though.
Chris LaFay: You can also, I think you can, you can also do that too, to where you can add separate. You might actually be able to do that. Add separate accounts.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Rather than giving them your password, just give them access to it and then be done. Then you just have to remove them afterwards.
Charles Kirkman: At my age, I'm very curious. I'm very concerned about things like business continuity.
Chris LaFay: I don't care what age you are, you should always be concerned about business continuity.
Charles Kirkman: Right, but that makes it more front of mind for me a little. But. But yes, you're right. There should be at least two people can get everything. Actually, I've been reading something about that lately and you know, I made up a whole List of IDs, passwords and things like that for my family if something happened to me, which is good. But here's the downside to it. If you have two FA and they don't have your phone, having that information is useless.
Chris LaFay: Oh, the world we live in. It's like, let's add some more keys and locks to this thing. But oh wait now, instead of just having one key, now you have to have a whole key ring wherever you go.
Charles Kirkman: Huh.
Chris LaFay: But then on the flip side, like with two factor authentication, a lot of it's on your phone. So like if somebody just like, let's say somebody like this is a stupid example. Like let's say somebody comes behind you and knocks you out with a frying pan, grabs your phone, they turn your phone on and then they face ID you while you're like laying on the ground.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And then they just go in and turn off face ID and then now they just have your phone.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah, I thought through that and I concluded that having that is kind of pointless. I don't even have a password on my phone. Why?
Chris LaFay: There, there are different way. Like I will say that when it comes to business related stuff, having two factor authentication is fantastic. Like you should have that. And in fact, like I have one other person that knows my. Like I have a password manager. I have one person that's not in my family that knows that password just to be on the safe side. He is, he is my two factor authentication. If something happens to me, he has it. He can do whatever he wants to with it. But the thing is like if you didn't have access to that password vault, the only way to get into it would be to face ID into my phone and then face ID into the app. Like you have to actually face ID me twice to get in. Yeah, I think for business that's important. And then multiple people having access to that is also important. But also when it comes to personal stuff, it's like if I'm literally not here anymore.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: How? It's, it's more about like the. I think it. I, I don't know what. I think I, I know what you're saying and I think it's not a. It's not a good idea to just have all your passwords listed out like in one thing over here. Like then you have get completely compromised. I think it should be separated in some way, shape or form. But at the end of the day, bad people are going to be bad people and bad people are going to be pretty savvy and swift on what they're doing. So you add a layer of security or two just to be on the safe side. But.
Charles Kirkman: And they're a whole lot smarter about this than me and they make money at it. I'm just covering my butt.
Chris LaFay: So it's a great way.
Charles Kirkman: They have a lot more incentive.
Chris LaFay: Well, I do need to go ahead and run. It is 2 o'. Clock. I'm glad that we were able to confirm that your website is locked and loaded and good to go.
Charles Kirkman: Okay.
Chris LaFay: If you have any other questions and stuff comes up, you have my email,.
Charles Kirkman: You have phone number, text me, email me, whatever, send me a bill. I will be happy to pay you for your time because I appreciate you doing this and taking time out of your day for us.
Chris LaFay: Not a problem at all. So you are not going to get that at all. Be more than happy to help you all out. If you need anything else, just holler me and let me know.
Charles Kirkman: I will do it and I do appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Have a good rest of the day. Take care. Take care.
Charles Kirkman: Thanks. Do you have any idea how much you remind me of Rod Hames?
Chris LaFay: Nobody has ever told me that. But I will also say that nobody else that I typically talk to on a regular basis knows who he is. Most of the people that I know through him are passing passerby for lack of, not a negative way.
Charles Kirkman: Similar mannerisms to him.
Chris LaFay: That is a very large compliment and I very much appreciate that. I, I talk with my hands a lot. He does as well too. And he's very, he's very complimentary, very encouraging, the whole nine yards. And I also, when I'm on video with people, I typically over exaggerate a lot of that stuff of myself. Because I know when you're on video, it's very easy to be excited about something, but also look like you're not paying attention, not excited. Like, when you're on video, you have to be a little bit more enunciating or else you just kind of come across monotone and that's boring. So by default, I do, I do things like this when I'm on video, but I don't do that as often when I'm like in person with people. So it's amazing the training that you go through by just. It's like, how do you appear excited and genuinely happy? The same level that you actually are in person, but through a video camera.
Charles Kirkman: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And when you watch yourself enough for 10 plus years and the little picture in picture preview down there at the bottom, you learn things.
Charles Kirkman: Yes, you do.
Chris LaFay: Oh, man.
Charles Kirkman: I know you've gotta run, but I did want to tell you that and I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Chris LaFay: I appreciate that, Charles. Have a good rest of the day, man. And I'll catch you later.
Charles Kirkman: Bye now.
Chris LaFay: Bye.