This article is brief and short and not designed so much as a how to, but more of a you can do it article….

Well our public ArenaChMS site officially went public yesterday! It’s been 1 year in the making, serveral long nights, a little crying, and some heart to hearts with God about why he’s so mean to me…. All that aside I’m really excited about what this may do for our church. And what is most evident to me is the fact that the success of this project has 0% to do with my ability, or my teams. It’s been God that made this happen. It’s unfortunate that too often the IT department seems to be seaperated from seeing God work so much of the time. We don’t see the dingy side of ministry that much, we see things break, we fix them, replace them, at most we pray a little, and it get worked out. But everyonce in a while a project comes along that allows us to see God move on our church. I see the ability for our members to be able to track their own ministry, and keep their info upto date! That’s exciting…But I digress.

So you want to set up an ssl certificate on your website? I’ve been a little freaked out on doing this for some time. It just sounded daunting. But as we were preparing to go live, it became evident that we wanted our people to feel secure and safe entering their personal info. I was shocked to find when I called Arena about setting this up that I am only one of 3 churches that are currently using ssl on their Arena access sites. This confirmed to me that I wasn’t alone in my fears of setting us SSL. So your asking yourself ok, how do I do it.

Well I started at my favorite web enabling webiste godaddy.com now before I get a ton of emails telling me how wrong it is for a church to use a site like godaddy.com that has questionably racy adds I think it’s important to remember that the world is a lost place, and if I only did buisness with Christian companies two disasterous things would happen. One, I’d spend more money, money that was given to us by our members, money that represents their commitment to our being responsible with their money. Two, I wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to influence the lost world around me. That being said, let me move on.

I was able to purchase a 5 domain SSL certificate for two years for about $110. That’s not bad! So lets look at the process.

I was under the impression this would take days, and in reality it took a couple hours! First I had to activate the SSL, and then login and fill in a little info about my server. Nothing major, nothing I couldn’t do at my desk with a Remote Desktop connection to our webserver. After filling out this info, I had to verifiy my desire via email. This turned out to be the hardest part oddly enough. Honestly, it was my own fault, I had used a “register” email account that I never check to setup all my sites on godaddy.com. So when it came time to verify, I had to get creative to login to that email account and access that email. That being done, I was able to download a zip file that was generated as part of the process, and then install a MMC snap-in and then put in my new license.

The Arena setup was even easier. After logging into arena you simply have to navigate to your Administration > Pages section and their is a “Uses SSL” connection option on each page. Activate this, refresh your cache and your almost set. This next piece I assume will only be necessary for a short time. Their was a patch that came out for Arena during the second week of January in 2008. This patch helped improve some functions that weren’t behaving correclty. Unfortunately, a problem was discovered… a much needed .dll file wasn’t updated correctly (or had some issue) and it prevented the SSL connections from working correctly on your sites. So if you read this and decide that you want to go SSL on your Arena site before the next update call the guys over at Arena support and make sure they get you that Arena.dll file so your good to go.

But for the rest of the world, that isn’t running Arena, I’m pleased to announce that SSL isn’t nearly as scary as it sounds. I realize most people in this position already realized this, but for me it was a nice realization in an already hectic week.

A special thanks to Shane Par-due on this project. I’ve been so wrapped up in the details of this project I completely forgot about setting up the SSL access till the night before the letters were to start arriving at our members houses. - Thanks Shane!