When trying to solve IT problems in the church, money is invariably a concern that must be over come. Not that this doesn’t plague other organizations, but in a church their is always the concern of good stewardship of the church’s money. So when is a good time to spend money on a commercial product instead of a Free or Open Source Solution (FOSS)? A lot of that depends on how you answer the following questions.
1. Who is going to use it? The level of direct contact that the office staffhave with the solution is a large contributing factor in any FOSS implementation. Putting an open source spam filter on the server has such a low impact on the day to day users that this should be an easy answer. Projects like ASSP are a great way to clean up the user’s inbox with little to no user interaction with the program. This was my first experience with deploying FOSS in a office environment and the results were well appreciated by the users. Even those that did not participate in the retraining process. The closer you get to the user’s desktop though, the more you have to look at what your users are doing and how adaptable are they to something different. At Lakeside we are exploring the possibilities of users having Ubuntu desktops and others having Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. You will want to take your time and do your homework before you rush these solutions out. Our big issue with Open Office is our dependency on PowerPoint and the massive library of songs that we have created. We need to be sure that we don’t rush into the migration and have to recreate everything.
2. Is it compatible with the rest of the world? Or, no man is an island. You don’t want to have the best FOSS setup in the world and not be able to share files with people in your congregation or any outside services you may use. Imagine your graphics guru making up that sweet Easter invitation and your print shop only accepting Photoshop files. You will need to talk with your users and get a good understanding of what they do and who they share their files with.
3. Who is going to support it? Many churches don’t have a staff IT guy, it’s just a fact of ministry. You may contract an outside service or have a volunteer IT team. This will be your most deciding factor when it comes to deploying FOSS. Deploying Ubuntu on all your desktops may be a great idea. You have done all your homework, researched your users file sharing and work styles. But when something doesn’t work the way it was supposed to, who are they going to turn to? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that FOSS are buggy or inferior, it’s just a simple fact that they are different. GIMP is an amazing alternative to Photoshop, but if your users are shortcut junkies, they will be lost. In short, plan out your FOSS deployment and it’s support plan.

There are probably a few more things that should be concidered, but these are what I consider to be the essentials. A FOSS implementation can help your church manage its IT budget, but don’t get stuck with expensive support costs.