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. ...

Mundane Ideas and Their Usefullness

I have read a lot of blogs.  I love to read Lifehacker, Gizmodo, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and several of the christian hack sites including Mister Nifty.  They have all been great about helping me discover new applications and the latest tech news, but some of the most helpful posts that I have read are about simple workflows that have great utility.  In this spirit, I plan on including these mundane and simple ideas that have been highly useful for me in hopes that they would also benefit others.  I am also hopeful that there would be critique and ingenuity that would move us all forward.  Please comment with your thoughts. While pondering the mundane, it would also be good to note that absolutely no one reads this blog now.  I do mean NO ONE.  While I hope that there will be others in the future that would find these thoughts useful and that a community of people with common interests and vision would collaborate here, I am under no illusion that these entries are for anyone other than myself at this time.  If and when this blog finds followers, I hope you will also offer your suggestions for improvements or how you have found this to be...

No, Really, Hello world!

Hello world is the phrase commonly used for beginnings in the tech world.  Of course anyone who has ever created a blog finds this as their first blog post.  If you write a program, one of the first objectives is to have the screen show the phrase, “Hello World!”  As I begin this journey as a Ministry Technology Advocate, this seemed cliche’, but appropriate for my first post. If you’ve read this far, it may be because you are wondering what a Ministry Technology Advocate is.  In short, it is a passion that I have to empower better, more efficient ministry by using technology as a tool.  Without going on a rant, I do think that it is important to point out that technology is not the end, but only a means.  Technology cannot DO ministry, it can only help empower ministry.  Just as a wise pastor recognizes that they are not capable of “saving” anyone, rather they are best used as a conduit to God’s saving grace. To better understand the role of technology in ministry, let me offer a few examples and then bring this post to a close so that we can begin a journey together of exploring different ministry technologies. Technology empowers ministry by . . . . . . helping visitors to focus more on a worship experience than finding a hymn or liturgy through the use of projecting instructions and lyrics on a screen. . . .  using social media to meet people where they are. . . . targeting emails to keep members informed of service opportunities. These make good sense, but...