Best Practice advice needed

[Ty Zucker]

I'm looking for some help or opinions on a best practice for our
situation.


Background:
Our church operates an elementary school; preschool - 8th grade.
Currently, between faculty, staff, and computer lab we have about 50
computers on site in a windows 2000 domain with Active Directory.
Students have individual userids for network logon, but not email access.
Currently we have pop3 email accounts for all our staff but are in the
process of moving to Exchange. I'm learning all this as I go.

Here's my question(s):
We have about 1200 members in our church and about 170 children in our
school. Currently we keep all member contact information in a piece of
software that was written specifically for churches. The problem is that
it doesn't integrate well with other software, nor is it network capable.

What I'd like to do is use Exchange and/or AD to keep all our member
information so that various people in our organization don't need to go
through our office staff always to get the most accurate information.
Information gets used for the usual reasons: mailings, phone contacts,
helpful info/history on family situations, etc. Sometimes mailings would
go out to individuals and yet sometimes to families - obviously based on
different critieria.

I'm assuming I will want to create an individual mailenabled user for
each and every member rather than each household. If so, how then do I
design things for when we want a mailing for only 1 per household?
Obviously if a family has 2 parents and 3 kids, you want to be able to
refer to only that household. Yet at other times you might want to list
out each and every person. Do I use categories for this? In other
words, would I designate a unique category for each household?

Also, what about those members who are staff people and have their own
mailboxes on our system and are also members of our church. I guess I'm
asking about how seamless mailbox-enabled users and simply mail-enabled
users coexist? Is it as simple as everyone who has an email address of
our organization is a mailbox-enabled user and everyone else is simply a
mail-enabled user?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Users of the network go in the AD - create contacts in a public folder for
the church members who won't be logging into your network. A database,
either in access or SQL is another option for church members. That way you
can access it from other applications.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Search for answers: http://groups.google.com
Most recent posts to the Outlook newsgroups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=microsoft.public.outlook.*&num=30

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP]]

FWIW, I have been using the Church Helpmate database for a few months. It's in Access and very flexible in terms of handling both household and individual member data. The only thing that it doesn't do perfectly is handle children who belong to two households because of a joint custody agreement, but I understand there may be an update coming or already avaiable to handle that.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Outlook and Exchange solutions at http://www.slipstick.com
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

Users of the network go in the AD - create contacts in a public folder for
the church members who won't be logging into your network. A database,
either in access or SQL is another option for church members. That way you
can access it from other applications.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Search for answers: http://groups.google.com
Most recent posts to the Outlook newsgroups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=microsoft.public.outlook.*&num=30

I'm looking for some help or opinions on a best practice for our
situation.


Background:
Our church operates an elementary school; preschool - 8th grade.
Currently, between faculty, staff, and computer lab we have about 50
computers on site in a windows 2000 domain with Active Directory.
Students have individual userids for network logon, but not email access.
Currently we have pop3 email accounts for all our staff but are in the
process of moving to Exchange. I'm learning all this as I go.

Here's my question(s):
We have about 1200 members in our church and about 170 children in our
school. Currently we keep all member contact information in a piece of
software that was written specifically for churches. The problem is that
it doesn't integrate well with other software, nor is it network capable.

What I'd like to do is use Exchange and/or AD to keep all our member
information so that various people in our organization don't need to go
through our office staff always to get the most accurate information.
Information gets used for the usual reasons: mailings, phone contacts,
helpful info/history on family situations, etc. Sometimes mailings would
go out to individuals and yet sometimes to families - obviously based on
different critieria.

I'm assuming I will want to create an individual mailenabled user for
each and every member rather than each household. If so, how then do I
design things for when we want a mailing for only 1 per household?
Obviously if a family has 2 parents and 3 kids, you want to be able to
refer to only that household. Yet at other times you might want to list
out each and every person. Do I use categories for this? In other
words, would I designate a unique category for each household?

Also, what about those members who are staff people and have their own
mailboxes on our system and are also members of our church. I guess I'm
asking about how seamless mailbox-enabled users and simply mail-enabled
users coexist? Is it as simple as everyone who has an email address of
our organization is a mailbox-enabled user and everyone else is simply a
mail-enabled user?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Mike Sperry]

I wonder if BCM would be useful for this, using Accounts as families, and
Contacts as individuals within the family?

Mike Sperry
http://www.SperrySoftware.com
Find 30 Outlook add-ins that can make a difference!

FWIW, I have been using the Church Helpmate database for a few months. It's
in Access and very flexible in terms of handling both household and
individual member data. The only thing that it doesn't do perfectly is
handle children who belong to two households because of a joint custody
agreement, but I understand there may be an update coming or already
avaiable to handle that.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Outlook and Exchange solutions at http://www.slipstick.com
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

Users of the network go in the AD - create contacts in a public folder for
the church members who won't be logging into your network. A database,
either in access or SQL is another option for church members. That way you
can access it from other applications.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Search for answers: http://groups.google.com
Most recent posts to the Outlook newsgroups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=microsoft.public.outlook.*&num=30

I'm looking for some help or opinions on a best practice for our
situation.


Background:
Our church operates an elementary school; preschool - 8th grade.
Currently, between faculty, staff, and computer lab we have about 50
computers on site in a windows 2000 domain with Active Directory.
Students have individual userids for network logon, but not email access.
Currently we have pop3 email accounts for all our staff but are in the
process of moving to Exchange. I'm learning all this as I go.

Here's my question(s):
We have about 1200 members in our church and about 170 children in our
school. Currently we keep all member contact information in a piece of
software that was written specifically for churches. The problem is that
it doesn't integrate well with other software, nor is it network capable.

What I'd like to do is use Exchange and/or AD to keep all our member
information so that various people in our organization don't need to go
through our office staff always to get the most accurate information.
Information gets used for the usual reasons: mailings, phone contacts,
helpful info/history on family situations, etc. Sometimes mailings would
go out to individuals and yet sometimes to families - obviously based on
different critieria.

I'm assuming I will want to create an individual mailenabled user for
each and every member rather than each household. If so, how then do I
design things for when we want a mailing for only 1 per household?
Obviously if a family has 2 parents and 3 kids, you want to be able to
refer to only that household. Yet at other times you might want to list
out each and every person. Do I use categories for this? In other
words, would I designate a unique category for each household?

Also, what about those members who are staff people and have their own
mailboxes on our system and are also members of our church. I guess I'm
asking about how seamless mailbox-enabled users and simply mail-enabled
users coexist? Is it as simple as everyone who has an email address of
our organization is a mailbox-enabled user and everyone else is simply a
mail-enabled user?

Thanks for any suggestions!