HardwareCentral has a positive review of the new HP MS214, an all-in-one that mounts PC hardware to the backside of an LCD monitor for a nice sleek unit. This joins HP’s existing TouchSmart models. The Pavilion MS200 series (214 being one of the configurations HP is offering) differentiates itself by not offering as large an LCD (18.5″ versus up to 23″) and not being touchscreen-enabled. This also means it can be had for $559, rather than as much as $1349 for the best TouchSmart model available.

These could serve several functions in your church, especially those TouchSmart models. Kiosk services, child check-ins, and other “by-the-door” functions could be handled without having to find space to hide a desktop within cord’s reach of the LCD monitor. Any other ideas for potential uses?

(From Electronista, here) Dell just unveiled a new PC that would be perfect for those church setups where you need a small computer you can hide away somewhere to do things like drive a multimedia display, run a presentation, or show a video. It’s only 8″ square, which means that you can hide it just about anywhere (as long as it has a few inches to breathe), and it can be configured with Blu-Ray and as much graphics power and memory as you’d want. All models come with an HDMI port and a 4-in-1 memory card reader. It’s called the Zino HD, and it’s priced from $229 to $649 based on options. You might notice a “slight resemblance” to a particular Apple product – but this one comes in pink and lime green, which is what I know you were waiting for. Maybe you can buy several and match each to a color of the liturgical calendar, hmm? Best be ordering that blue-encased model for Advent now!

Direct link to the Zino’s page on Dell.com here.

If you can stand the annoying slideshow format, and having to click “read more” to get the ad out of the way to read the rest of the caption, this PC World review notes a handful of expensive versus cheap printer options for small workgroup settings like a small church office. I’d like to add two things to this, that are only touched on a little in that slideshow.

First, the cost of the printer is NEVER the cost of the printer; the actual box is always an order of magnitude less than the cost of all the supplies you’ll buy for it over the course of it’s lifetime. You have to take into account a couple of factors to truly price out a printer. To do this, get a rough estimate of your total printing for the year; doesn’t have to be real exact, just ballpark. For any printer you’re looking at, look at the pricing for it’s cartridges. Those cartridges will each have an estimated number of pages they’re good for. Divide that number by the price to get the cost per page (for both black/white and color, if applicable). When comparing two printers, look at those costs per page, and based on the number of pages you print, you should have a general idea of what you’ll really pay if you purchase one over the other. Also remember that laser printers often have a separate drum that needs changing occasionally; that will also have an estimated number of pages they’re good for, and you should add that in to your equation. Lastly, you might need to do a little searching, but SOME models have high-capacity versions of their cartridges. At least a few HP models, and several Brother models do (I recommend Brothers because of this; it keeps their cost-per-page pretty low).

Secondly, do your budget a favor and don’t buy your cartridges at Staples, Office Depot, or whatever brick-and-mortar place you shop at until you’ve looked at the online prices for those same cartridges. Get the cartridge’s ID number, check Staples.com for the retail price, and then go look at Provantage.com and see what they’re charging – I can almost guarantee you’ll save A LOT of money. And Provantage is good people; I already mentioned them in my posting about places to buy online. To do more price comparison, go to Google Product Search (I still use www.froogle.com as the url) and put in that cartridge number. Warning, though – be careful who you buy from online (obviously); if you’re going to use a place you’ve never heard of, check them out before trusting them with your credit card number. I’ll vouch for Provantage and NewEgg though.

I’ll put up some reviews for individual printer models as I find them. Lastly – check those online stores for prices on those PRINTERS too, if you’re going to buy one!

Any of us could do this exact thing for $199 – and free if you just do a PC version.

Microsoft takes a lot of crap in a lot of areas for not being an innovator – and a lot of it is justified. But they were way out in front of everyone in one aspect. A couple of years ago, they began working on giving developers a means to build and sell games for the XBox 360 and Windows without the huge amounts of money and skill that it usually took to do so. They made this available in the form of XNA Studio, now on it’s third major release. This scaled-down version of the well-known Visual Studio IDE, used for software development, included some starter kits that could basically be run without modification. Of course, the fun part was either modifying one of these starter kits (and several more were available online), or writing your own stuff from scratch. And while it wasn’t click/drag easy to write something, it was still well within the means of an amateur programmer or three to write some pretty cool games. And it was REALLY cool to be able to play them on your 360!

See, none of the other big console manufacturers have given ‘indie’ game developers the ability to write games for their systems. To do so, you need to purchase a dev kit from them, which is essentially an unlocked version of the console that costs quite a bit more than a regular one. You also need to get your game approved by them before you could sell it, and if you want to do hard copies (i.e. sell at GameStop or Walmart) you need to find a publisher. And of course you needed to be able to write the game in the first place… and deal with a whole host of other issues. Essentially, the console market and it’s billions of dollars, was firmly controlled by a handful of people.

So now any one of us could write an XBox 360 game, and play it on our own machines, but could only give versions to other people with XBox 360s and XNA Studio installed on their computers to play. Then Microsoft revealed the big plans everyone was waiting on – letting you sell your game via XBox Live, the online multiplayer ‘experience’ that had also been used by some game publishers to sell add-on content. They set up what is now called XBox Live Indie Games, a site where you could post your game and sell it! Anyone with an XBox 360 could navigate to here through their system, and just like purchasing anything else via Microsoft Points, could buy your game – and you’d get 80% (I think) of the revenue with Microsoft keeping 20%. It hasn’t been going on that long, and the Indie Games setup is still in its infancy – they’re still sorting through issues like rating games so that the better ones don’t get swamped in the midst of a load of crap games (not unlike the iPhone’s App Store’s issues). But there’s been a few great games that have come up through Indie Games that would never have been released if it wasn’t for this.

So yay Microsoft, right? No, Bible Navigator X isn’t a game – but being sold through the Indie Games section indicates it was written with XNA Studio, and released through that same mechanism. So what’s the part that kicks butt?

First, games released via XNA Studio can be cross-compiled into versions for Windows, AND THE ZUNE. Yeah, you can use the same package, and likely a lot of your assets from your XBox 360 version, and make a mobile version too. Microsoft hasn’t set up their Zune App Store yet, but it’s coming very very soon, and it’ll probably work exactly the same way. I know Zune doesn’t have the iPhone’s market share, but if you can do a mobile version, a Windows desktop version, and an XBox 360 version without a ton of extra work, think of the possibilities – and why not take advantage of them?

Second, and the part I’m REALLY excited about, is that you have FULL ACCESS TO XBOX LIVE when you write an XBox 360 game. That means you can integrate GamerTags, and badges, and all that stuff, plus DO MULTIPLAYER VERSIONS OF BIBLE SOFTWARE! I can’t even begin to process all of what you could do, but think of the possibilities!!! You essentially have the entire infrastructure of an online gaming world to tap into; it’s crazy to think of what you could do with it. Anyone out there thought about this aspect of it yet? Developers, indie gamers???

(I should point out that the $199 I referenced is a yearly payment to MS to join their XNA Creators Club – this lets you connect your computer to your XBox 360, publish games to XBox Live, and get access to other resources. You don’t need this to do Windows stuff, and most Zune stuff, though.)

Many churches use QuickBooks to handle their finances, and in many cases it works better for them than trying to use an all-encompassing church management system with financial modules. PC World has a review up (here) of the newest version for those of you whose churches fall in that group. The short of it is that QB now has the ability to recieve credit card payment within the application, but still doesn’t do multi-user or online bill-paying. I’ll dig up some reviews of the latest editions of the other accounting packages soon.

(via NewEgg.com*)
(via NewEgg.com*)

* Indicates affiliate link (more info)

Via Smallbiztechnology.com, I saw a great little article from WSJ.com (here) recommending two features you might seriously think about adding to your church’s website. One is a click-to-chat option; if a visitor clicks a button on the site, it spawns a chat window that can be monitored by someone at your church. A related function is the ability for a user to type in his/her phone number and get an immediate call back from someone at your church (or literally call the person right on the website, right to a landline!). I love the idea of not just showing a visitor all the stuff your church is doing, but being right there to answer questions or provide assistance in some way – with a personal touch that I think really makes a difference for some people.

The sites mentioned are:

• Meebo.com (chat; free)
• BoldChat* (chat, $)
• ProvideSupport.com (chat, $)
• Jajah (phone, $)
• TringMe (phone, $)
• BoldCCM (phone, chat, kitchen sink; $)

Any others you’ve tried, seen, or recommend??

* Indicates affiliate link (more info).

Much to the chagrin of many, email is not dead yet. And it still provides a vital communications link between churches, their members, and their potential members. For many of these, who don’t do RSS, or Twitter, or really the Internet, email is the only real electronic medium they’re comfortable with. That’s why your church really should set up an email marketing program. It doesn’t have to be much – even if you just cut and paste content from your newsletter, bulletins, or blogs, it’ll work. The idea is just to stay in touch with someone, either to keep them informed or just to keep your church in their “peripheral vision”.

Smallbiztechnology.com identifies the four main purveyors of this service (here) – ConstantContact.com is one, and is a vendor I know has been used successfully by organizations I’ve worked with. This article goes beyond that, though, to remind customers of those services that they need to cross-promote and utilize email addresses gathered in other ways to grow email readership. For instance, do you ask for an email address for downloading forms or audio files from your website? You don’t have to ask for a registration, just an email – and allow them to skip that step if they wish (so you don’t alienate them). In a lot of cases, people will provide an address so they can hear about any other content they might be interested in.

ConstantContact provides a 500-email-address plan for $15/mo. You can check out the other vendors to price-shop, as well as look for features you want to have. Also, talk to whoever handles your website’s technical needs – some hosting packages (the guys who actually serve up your website) offer free or discounted options for email marketing as well. Definitely look into it, though – email isn’t going away anytime soon.

Smallbiztechnology.com has a short article up (here) about online collaboration suites, listing a few worthy of trying out. Oddly, Google Apps is not listed – and as (I would believe) the largest of the online office packages, I would think they’d be included. Google Apps also offers their enterprise version free to nonprofits, and has a ton of great features for collaboration.

Of course, if you’re not using one, and you have a staff of greater than, well, one – you probably should be. These suites give you a place to store (and sometimes edit) documents, spreadsheets, presentations, files, contacts, and more (features vary from suite to suite though). The real value though comes when you add in the fact that you can share all those files with others, even editing the same document at the same time (Google Apps at least does that). No more emailing documents around, or backing up a bunch of different files while worrying if you have the latest versions. And each has it’s own mix of other features, like task tracking and assignment, email, and calendar integration. These are great not just for staff, though; committee heads and other volunteers could be given access as well.

Some are free, some have limited free accounts with a set number of users, and some are a monthly fee. Try a few and see which offer the features you think you could get the most use out of. Besides the others in that posting, any others come to mind? And what is the killer feature YOU want in an office suite?

I’ve done a lot of purchasing in my various roles at my various employers, and I’ve come to rely on two vendors for handling 90%+ of what I’ve purchased. Firstly, NewEgg is my default vendor for most anything hardware-wise; RAM, hard drives, monitors, mice, etc. Especially if you need some commodity part or an uncommon adapter, they will almost always have it – and have it a LOT cheaper than Staples or OfficeMax will. Go to Staples and you’ll see a 56Kbps modem for $35 (here) (yeah, not everyone has broadband); on NewEgg, you can get one for $8 (here). Sounds like good stewardship. And the shipping will get it to you often in one to two days, even when you get the standard 3-Day (which is often free).
I’ll usually compare the NewEgg price to the price that Provantage has; if Provantage has it, it’ll often be cheaper. Provantage doesn’t have the same large selection as NewEgg, but it has a greater selection in some stuff than NewEgg does – for instance, server racks. And Provantage has one trait I’m continually amazed by – they’ll get stuff faster to you than you’d think possible. I’ve ordered software on a weekday afternoon, AND RECIEVED IT THE NEXT MORNING. If you’ve ever ordered from Dell or any other larger vendor, they take that long just to validate your credit card, much less even start fulfilling it. So the one factor that might keep you from ordering online – namely, getting the merchandise ASAP – is no factor if you hit up either one of these guys for your stuff.
One other mention I’ll throw out there is Froogle – i.e. Google Product Search. Given a product name or identifying code, it will check a ton of online shopping sites to get you the best prices out there, and often including the taxes and shipping costs as well. Occasionally (rarely) someone might beat NewEgg or Provantage on price – this is your best way just to make sure. The best way to do this is to get the part number for whatever you’re shopping for – that way, GPS finds results that are exact, not just every variation on a product line, including any accessory for it that’s available. Of course, make sure that the vendor that might be offering a lower price is offering the exact same thing you’re shopping for (not some crippled, refurbished, or knockoff version), and that they’ve got a decent feedback rating, if you decide to use them. And remember, if the price is way lower than the competitors, you should be very suspicious – this is the Internet, after all.
And please note: I have no relationship, affiliated or otherwise, with any of these guys – I’m just recommending them because way too many churches go and pay full retail at Staples, Office Depot, etc. when they could get their stuff a lot cheaper online.

Any other online store recommendations? Any bad experiences with the above sites?