Church office software solutions

[bingyao]

I am doing a re-evaluation of my church's software toolset for the office staff and in the process am interested in what other churches are using to make life easier for the office staff (and perhaps other ministry leaders as well). I am looking for more collaborative features in email, calendaring and event/project management. And somewhere in there, I would hope, would have a good room/resource reservation feature.

We also have the unique requirement of asian text/font support.

We are what I would consider a medium-sized church for an Asian American church. Weekly attendance of about 1000. Office staff of about 15, including the pastors, and most of them non-technical. we currently use the standard Office package, POP3 email with Outlook clients, and have some homegrown databases to track things like room reservation and such, which have such awkward interfaces that only the church secretary uses it.

Regardless of our asian text/font support, I am interested in hearing about what kind of software solutions your church offices are using and whether you are happy with it or not. And while we're at it, who has in-house IT support and who outsources it?

Thanks,
Bing

[Creonus]

Hi Bing,

Just want to welcome you to CMN!

We're not quite the size of your church. As for how our IT is handled... our IT support is provided mainly by volunteer members -- we got plenty of professional IT folks. We also use MS Office... but not Outlook. Online access to Yahoo and G-Mail is the norm.

Room reservations... how about one of those large calendars with fill-in the blanks?

Alex

[Sysmom]

I'm going to just monitor this thread ... we need some good ideas on how to solve some of these issues, too.

deb

[brenthomer]

I have visited about 10 churches over the last 12 months. They all varied between 500-2500 members. Not one of them had a working I.T. system. They all where a windows flavor with outlook and a computer with a shared drive that they called a server.

Most didn't have proper security, anit-virus, or data sharing capabilities. They where all held together by glue and volunteers.

My church also falls into this catagory. If someone here wants to make a lot of money, they need to come up with a working plan that churches can afford. They need to have a backup solution/hosted exchange/spyware/anti-virus all available by subscription over the internet.

I have found plenty of products that do all of the above, but it would cost $25-$35 a month per client. If someone could do all of that for about $15 per client per month, they could probably have 1,000's of churches subscribe to their services.