Tiny Church on Budget #3 - MobileMe

MobileMe is a huge gift to churches. Really it is.

Most churches cannot afford the thousands (or possibly tens of thousands) it costs to put in an email server that can synchronize your contacts, email and calendar and provide the means so that you can access it via your Mac or PC, your smartphone, or online. 

Usually the standard is to put in a Microsoft Exchange solution but with the cost of seat licenses for all your users, the cost in hardware and maintenance, not to mention the security measures, switches, etc. it can eat up a budget.

And be impossible to attain for all except the larger churches.

Or the alternative is to manually synchronize that information finding ad hoc ways to keep all your information the same so that you have the information you need to respond to your ministry's needs.

Now enter MobileMe which is the next evolution of Apple's .Mac service which they are now branding as "Exchange for the rest of us."

What that means is that without buying any hardware or software, you now have a solution that can synchronize your email, calendar, and contacts across your devices, whether it is a Mac, a PC, an iPhone, or accessing this information online.

You're at a coffee shop and an email comes in with a request for a meeting. You reply and confirm a meeting time, enter the event in your iPhone. Your Mac or PC back at the office that is on updates its calendar with the same meeting moments later. 

Or you're at the in laws on the computer and want to check your schedule for the next day, you log onto www.me.com and check your calendar to see what the day looks like. Because you want to spend an extra day with your family, you drag the next day's scheduled events to other days to clear out your schedule. And your church secretary or administrative assistant can check your updated calendar in seconds.

You also have up to 20 GB of online storage so you can store your critical documents online and securely access them from any Mac or PC with an up-to-date browser. You can even use it to share files with others that are too big to email without giving away access to the rest of your documents.

MobileMe also has a photo component so that you can share your photo albums

What makes MobileMe so great to use is that the online applications for email, calendars, and contacts are so good you might prefer using them than your desktop application. And you get "push" technology as well - which means that changes are pushed out to devices that are to be synchronized rather than the device polling a server on a periodic schedule.

And all this for $99/year (or less if you can purchase discounted MobileMe memberships like you could with .Mac).

At the time of this writing, I believe that MobileMe requires you to have an @me.com email address.

Check it out at www.apple.com.

iPhone Sacrifice

In my continual effort to support those in ministry, I purchased an iPhone so that you could have the skinny on this device before taking the dive. (Actually, it was a semi-complex transaction between my employer and I but those are just details).

First of all, the iPhone is a great device. The thing works as advertised. Having used two other smartphones in the last couple of years, it clearly is the best when it comes to interfacing with the device. It seems to have an uncanny way of just knowing what you want to do.

The Mac philosophy is clearly in play here. Whereas Windows often makes people cower into corners because it presents a "press this button and every thing will go wrong" interface, the iPhone invites touching. See a button, go ahead and press it. It's there for you to use. Come out of your shelters people, it's safe to compute again!

Although the EDGE network that AT&T uses is not the quickest for browsing, having just come back from a business trip in Ft. Lauderdale, I was impressed with how many places I could use the available Wi-Fi (and free at that) and speed things up. Call quality was excellent. And the ability to dynamically enlarge text in emails and in the browser was phenomenal. This feature alone bypasses the typical compromises that other handset makers have when you have a system wide font setting with only 3 sizes, too small, small, and cyclop-sized.

If your church uses Microsoft Exchange as your email server, you will have to turn on the IMAP email protocol and open up a port in your firewall to allow the email traffic through. Some administrators may not like that because of security concerns but I hope to see a resolution to that soon.

Otherwise, most email setups should work just fine for your iPhone. The ability to stay connected when you're physically disconnected is an awesome and liberating feeling. No need to carry a laptop everywhere you go just because you need email and browser connectivity. Not to mention that it feels not much bigger or heavier than my previous Motorola RAZR V3 so I carry it often just in my pants pocket, leaving the belt clip behind.

The iPhone isn't perfect but it's better than all the other devices I have worked with and with the impending software development kit (SDK) that Apple will release shortly, a lot of that will be alleviated when third party developers can create applications for it.

If you have a Mac, the setup should be fairly seamless. If you have a recent PC running iTunes, it should work too but I haven't tried it.

If you're not a Mac convert after using the iPhone, you probably will be after using it. Might be a great conversation starter and entry way into the gospel too because strangers will ask you about it.