Dad, I’m pretty sure I’ll be asked to set up the church local area network (LAN) when I join Imago Dei church. I’ll probably set up some type of internet connection. What do you recommend for our startup church for file sharing, printer sharing, and internet connection?
My son is finishing his degree from Dallas Seminary and will join a startup church in Phoenix. He’s pretty sure his electrical engineering training from Texas Tech means he’ll be the technology guy.
You may be surprised at my answer.
I suggested that he not build much technology infrastructure. I suggested that they use cloud-based technologies like Google Apps (docs, calendar), Dropbox, WordPress.com, and others. I suggested that they purchase an internet service for their church office but no servers. Just use a wifi network. Purchase a network-capable printer or use a less expensive printer with an inexpensive print server. For my home network, I use a D-Link DP-300U device I purchased on eBay.
How would you have answered the question?
With today’s schedules, it is best to make sure that all can work from anywhere. Having no servers at the church is the way to go. In time they may need one for the A/V guys, but really that would be for staging / caching content from/to the Internet. That would likely be pretty far into the future.
In other words, you gave the correct answer. Though I would add that if they do work at a desk and they have the option for a wired connection instead of Wi-Fi I would go with that to make sure they have good quality for VoIP like Skype and such as the wi-fi can degrade when there are lots of people working.