The church can have technology needs that are very similar to business needs, however the difference is that the church usually doesn’t have the financial or human resources to pull it off like a large or even medium scale company.  But with the advent of so many cheap or free web services and cloud storage avenues the church need not suffer as a second class tech citizens!

I recently decided to take a test drive of Windows Live services and applications personally because I had spent about a year or so using a laptop with NO MICROSOFT OFFICE .  I did just fine with many of the other free alternatives. Learned a lot about the many faces of Google, got a good education in Open office; but because Microsoft Office is the gold standard in document creation, I was frequently hindered in silly little things like church flyer tweaking.  So, this year I decided that I can’t step away from good old Microsoft forever!  I ALMOST decided to use windows live Essentials and Office Live as my laptop productivity software in order to review it’s ability to work as a reasonable go between…but needed to start evaluating Office 2010 for work purposes.  Had to abandon my plan….well sorta.

Office 2010 works seamlessly with Windows Live, so while I will be keeping a beefed up version of Word and Excel and all those other Office goodies; I have still been able to observe the potential for the Windows Live suite of products to give my church family a similar sharing feel as my work family.

The key is to have all staff sign up for a Live account, probably a hotmail account, and share things out with each other right up front to get the most benefit and get that cool intranet feeling.  And note, it’s that ability to totally control what you share that makes your Intranet needs different from basic Internet needs.  Sure  you have a church website and you should absolutely share as much as you can there; but you don’t share working documents, policy documents, budget documents with the general public unnecessarily.  Those need to live in the Intranet office space where you can invite as many or as few folks as are needed to collaborate.

The SkyDrive, the online document/ image storage spot, offers more than enough space for document sharing. It gives 25 gig of space that can be accessed from anywhere the Internet is available. If each member of a church staff signs up for Windows live they’ll each get their own 25 gig.  That’s a ton of space to save documents too, share them out amongst each other and collaborate on.  It’s also a great place to house all the pictures that we take for church events.  I’ve not really tested out their image sharing features as I use other services, but I’m sure this is a good one.

Office Apps are Microsofts greatest gifts to the world.  Maybe not that great, but this has effectively removed a barrier between Office people and nonoffice people.  Microsoft Office is an expensive purchase if you are buying it yourself and a church budget, much like an individual budget can’t necessarily handle it.  Now, the basics of Word and Excel are available to everyone via Windows Live.  I think that there is a download version that can be used offline and then the documents uploaded to your SkyDrive at some point. Older Office version documents can be uploaded for those who use office 2007 or before now.  And for those early adopters who have started using Office 2010 already, you can save right to or browse your Skydrive within the Office interface.

Messenger is an awesome little chat tool.  I’ve used that for years and didn’t even think of it as a Windows live product; but it is a part of the package and for good reason.  If you are signed into messenger, even if there are 10 of you in 10 different locations you can chat with each other and share those little connection conversations as if you were in the same building.  Being able to see if someone is busy or away or available for a quick question is a very handy way to stay connected with your decision makers.

Integrating Hotmail into the mix allows them to have calendar sharing that is much more attractive than the google calendar alternative.  It also ties in the contacts and task lists that we have come to expect from Outlook.

Finally, Movie Maker doesn’t seem like much but for slideshows, worship presentations or website promo-videos this nifty little piece of freeware does a descent job as a starter product.

There are other products that make up the Live experience, but I wanted to focus on the ones that would be most appropriate to help a church create a work related share.  So, if you are trying to figure out how to bring your church staff together with an easy to use, easy to implement platform….Windows Live is definitely a way to go.  And won’t cost you a dime.