Comments on: Fellowship Church Excommunicates Microsoft Server Solution

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:38:02 +0000

While I do a lot of open-source and I am not a MS fan. MS license are NOT very inexpesnive if your a 503c org. Its takes a few hoops and an inital investment to start, but $25-50 for any MS product (windows and apps) isnt that bad.

By: Richard Brown

Richard Brown — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 19:13:01 +0000

Hi
Of course there is also that MS do use dodgy business practices, etc…
This is one of the reasons why our church will soon be going Linux quite apart from the price. For us it is not much of a difference from asking whether we use Nestle or MacDonalds. I know that might be taking it off the point but I reckon there are a lot of reasons why churches should avoid MS.
Now I have to declare that I am a Mac user and therefore people might just point the finger and say, “Aren’t they a multi-national with dodgy practices?” To be honest I don’t know, I haven’t found anything.
Hey to JM – don’t sweat too much. Email me I could always do with a lot of help!
Thanks for the article.
Rich

By: Boy in the bands

Boy in the bands — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 16:27:32 +0000

Church work at home

Regular readers know I have an interest in using technology to simplify or enhance the work of churches. I was reading Heal Your Church Website when I came to this passage by MeanDean (the author)

Together, the need to outsource office work and to…

By: JM

JM — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 16:40:25 +0000

Makes me want to start working on my church’s site again! I did the church site for quite a while and a couple years ago, they ‘outsourced’ me so they could join an associational network/partnership thing. Guess I’m still a little hurt by that. Hmm, thought I was over it….

And I _know_ we could save our church money by using more quality open source apps. The problem is still training: finding time to go sit by the secretary and show her what things are different and how to do ‘this’ or ‘that’ in OOo as opposed to Office.

A while back we upgraded her PC and instead of a zip drive, she had a CD burner. Previously, she had done all the backups to the zip drive. I sat down and we walked through how to burn a CD several times and tried to answer all her questions. She doesn’t do the backups anymore…never got the hang of the cd burner. I suppose I could have made a ‘cheat sheet’ or better documentation or….I dunno. (sorry….didn’t mean to get that off topic…)

Nonetheless, thanks for the great post and link!

By: Tom Shafer

Tom Shafer — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 16:30:46 +0000

Yeah, this is one of the major reasons I chose a LAMP system when I wa hired. I already had a background in both ASP.Net and PHP, but the cost of a W32 system is generally much greater than that of a Redhat variant with Apache, PHP5, and MySQL. Our site is > 2 years old now and I’m in the beginning stages of building version 2, but I’m still programming for a similar setup, just with some minor tweaks for better XML handling and database speed.