techpastor.com

Around July last year, our church made an investment that’s had a huge impact on how staff communicate. We bought a Dell Poweredge SC420 server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

Prior to owning our own server, we relied on retreiving mail from our web server running Linux. We used POP3 or squirrelmail to check our mail. All on a server located in a data centre somewhere in Chicago.

We also had no calendaring and no file server to place files with departmental security.

I knew that a change needed to take place, so I started to look at some options. Calendaring was very high on the list, so that ruled out Linux, there just was no way to store group calendaring information in a central location without resorting to a web interface, and I was loath to use disperate interfaces for team collaboration. Use this for email, use that for calendaring…

Outlook was the key, more of our staff were familiar with it’s interface, and were used to using the calendaring and task list functions.

Enter Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 (SBS 2003)

There are some things that Microsoft do extremely well; they understand the needs of small business. SBS fits our needs perfectly, we had our Dell server up and running with a minimum of hassle, and best of all, I could manage it easily. Management was a key factor, how easy was it to add users, computers and adjust user accounts? Not so easy with Linux. sure, there are great Linux distros out there, smoothwall and Clarks Connect spring to mind. While they affer rock solid stability, do they offer the usability and breadth of features of SBS?

Exchange Server 2003 is a marvelous invention! I can match it to no other for it’s price and features. It has it all, group calendaring, tasks, scheduling, and of course email. Our staff calendar has been vital in keeping staff informed of whats coming up in the life of our church.

Sitepoint is important as well. A company wide intranet for storing staff information and documents. While we don’t use it heavily yet, I can see a day when specific teams use sitepoint for document sharing and colaboration.

Overall it has been a pain free experience. As long as you don’t mess with the machine too much and keep to SBS’s easy to use wizards, you will seldom need to call on an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) to fix any issues.

I would love to hear of any open source calendaring and collaboration options out there, if anyone has any ideas, please contribute by adding a comment!