Day of Learning Links

Here’s the first draft of the links from today’s seminar. Ministry Technology Resources — The Links I will be posting links to the Google Group and updates to the list.  Please leave comments with suggestions, corrections, and what has been most useful for...

Day of Learning

Thanks to all who attended the Day of Learning seminars today. You have probably come in search of the list of materials. I’m still in transit, but will post as soon as I get home. Check back in at 6:00pm.

PUMC Mobile Chimes

I just received word from the app store that my first iPhone app has been approved for distribution in the App Store. It’s free so search the app store for PUMC Mobile Chimes and let me know what you think.  The link to the App Store listing is http://itunes.apple.com/app/pumc-mobile-chimes/id414835399?mt=8. The app lists links feeds from the PUMC Facebook Fan Page, Church Calendar, Sermon Audio Podcasts, Photos, and Twitter Feed.  The next stage of development will include prayer requests, and visitor...

The Joy of Google Apps

This is no trade secret, but this is a powerful tool that is FREE.  If you aren’t using Google apps for your ministry, you should.  Beyond really good email, there are a variety of benefits to organizing your group. In a nutshell, Google Apps is a bundled product offered by Google to institutions that handle a number of their basic web needs.  The flagship product of Google Apps is their email service, Gmail.  The immediate benefit is having Google’s hosting your email service for your own web domain.  For example if your church has the domain of myexamplechurch.org, then you could have email addresses of thepastor@myexamplechurch.org and musicdirector@myexamplechurch.org. Google will host your email with lots of storage (about 7 GB), provide a powerful interface to manage users and groups, and give you great options to access your email including webmail, pop3 and imap services. We’ll talk more about these in the future, but the big picture is that non-IT folks can easily manage a powerful email and user management system through google apps. In addition, they also throw in a number of collaboration tools including contacts, calendar, word processing, a presentation editor (like PowerPoint or Keynote), a spreadsheet, and the recently revived “start page.” Here’s a video to better explain what this is all about: Disclaimer:  The video talks about the premium version of Google Apps which includes a fee per user, but a free version is available with most features highlighted in the video.  If your ministry is a non-profit or educational institution, you can upgrade to premium for free. Don’t be discouraged if it seems too complicated. ...