Low Budget IT

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting about where Crossroads is headed with IT and Web infrastructure. I’d like to get back to it. Here’s a start.

The economic situation in Michigan has really hurt Crossroads’ finances. We used to be able to throw money at stuff to solve problems. Not so anymore. We’re on a budget. A couple of years ago I had visions of a full-time IT staff (we’re still volunteer run), a server room, and all the usual things a guy like myself would have visions of. None of that came to pass.

I have fretted about disaster recovery, dependence on our internet connection, collaboration, maintenance, support, and numerous other problems, but most of those problems seem to have been solved by our webification strategy (except our dependence on our internet connection). What that boils down to is that if we can use an online application to solve a problem, we do. The ball started rolling with Fellowship One and hasn’t stopped.

Here’s a list of the online applications we use so far.

• Fellowship One – church management, check-in (not really low-budget)
• Google Apps for Domains - document storage and collaboration, calendaring, chat, email
• ScrubIt – content filtration (I’m currently evaluating OpenDNS since it has more fine-grained control).
• Google Groups – Project management. We were using Basecamp, but realized we weren’t using the milestone and to-do list features and found that Google Groups fit our need for less money (i.e. free). To-do lists and such were being managed mostly by staff and they found that the next item on this list fit the need better.
• Vitalist – “Getting Things Done” style list management
• Planning Center – Worship service planning software
• Celtx – pre-production planning. This is a hybrid, not 100% online. There are clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• GoDaddy – file sharing and domain hosting
• Jott – personal secretary. Jott in conjunction with Vitalist is pretty darn cool.

We do use a number of other applications that simply can’t be online – primarily media oriented applications. Pete Bishop will know more about those applications (e.g. Final Cut, Photoshop, MediaShout, Audacity, Gimp, etc.).

One other dirt cheap package we do use is F-Prot anti-virus. It’s not necessarily the most polished package, but it does the job for peanuts.