Over the past few years, my paying job has exposed me to lots of open source software that makes sense for business, but honestly, many of those same solutions dramatically help churches as well. And, while it takes some level of expertise to install and manage them, most churches can take advantage of very nice software for little or no money at all. While this post does not directly impact our jesusexperiment group, it does speak, I think to our overall goals, so those of you who are not interested in such, you can skip along past this post.

I thought I might give a short list of solutions that can be downloaded and installed that can dramatically help the church:

Desktop software:
Podcasting and digital recording:
Audacity (I have used an edirol usb adapter to connect to an analog sound board and then connect to the PC)

If you are ambitious, you can save yourself from Microsoft Vista and load Ubuntu Linux. If you do, be sure to special order a PC without the operating system, and save yourself the cash. Also many of the open source solutions will come preinstalled on ubuntu.

Office software
Open Office (all of the basic functionality of MS Office, not quite as robust, but getting better)
Thunderbird for email
Firefox for web browser

Now for the biggy, Server software:

Server itself: Ubuntu Server all the way!

Website Content Mangement:
Wordpress
Joomla
Loudblog (for podcasting both video and audio)

Zimbra (Email server to replace exchange)

That’s the core…if I think of others I will update, and if there are any questions, just post here and let me know!

HERE IS ANOTHER GREAT POST on the subject

-DQ