some research

One of the things I've said I'll do as a piece of research is some survey work. perhpas a neat way of doing this is to use google apps. Google apps is one of the possible tools that could be used by Church communities to work togther as teams, although there are some notes of caution about committing to Google as a solution, more of which later.

Anyone can have a google apps account, but one neat feature is that the URL you've spent good money on renting can be used as the URL google uses. This is particularly important for email, whereby you (obviously?) want to use the URL name in your email addresses.

Once you've migrated your URL to google and google apps is setup (and that takes a little bit of effort learning about MX records etc. I'll try and retrun to that subject as well), you can start using another part of google apps - google docs.

below is a simple webform that can be easily created. The neat bit is that the replies to the form get inserted into a (ms compatible) spreadsheet, which is not a bad way to start manipulating the information:

You can also embedd the forms into any webpage.

Here's my embedded form:


What do you think?

Mark