I've been asked to help manage my church's information systems. We're small (~3 staff, ~150 parishioners), which puts us below the needs of a lot of the "Church Management" software I've seen.
The biggest problems right now seem to be:
- No centralized management of email lists. Committee composition and leadership changes pretty often, and usually what happens is the new person just copies the To: line on a previous message and emails from their own account. (Along with the obvious problems, this has lead to a couple of embarrassing Reply-Alls.) My optimal solution would include hiding personal emails (maybe behind @foochurch.org aliases), and on some lists, only allowing certain users to send.
- A couple services (e.g. the website, some social media) are hosted with free/cheap hosting companies that don't appear to have any kind of AD/LDAP interoperability, meaning we're going to need shared passwords for some things. With the understanding that this is already not optimal, I think what I'd like is some kind of secure password management system that would be able to check authorization against a directory.
- File storage is a pretty big problem. We're only talking about 5 or so users that would need access to this, and given the technical level of the users, I think a network drive or something like Dropbox for business is about the most complicated it can be. Ideally this would include backups.
Since that this is a volunteer effort with no permanent IT staff and little budget, I'm trying to find the right balance of hosted, simple, and cheap.
Given the problems above, I think the place to start is a directory server (hosted if possible), but I've never set-up ActiveDirectory or LDAP (I'm more of a programmer than a sysadmin), so I'm not entirely sure if that's right and how I should actually organize the directory. Most of the articles I've read about either are aimed squarely at the enterprise.
Also, I don't know if there's a mailing list manager that's hosted and hooks in with those.
So, how would you solve those problems with those constraints?