After having switched my personal domain e-mail over to GMain several months ago. I have been very impressed with the Google Apps eco-system.

For many years (well before I started working here), my church has been using Exchange Server (roughly 40-50 users) and in recent years we've found it a bit tedious to maintain. None of our IT volunteers have Exchange training/experience, and the two IT people on staff (myself included) do not have any training/experience either.

Over the past year, I have taught myself some of the basics of Drupal and moved out church website over to it. One of my most recent projects was to move our Sermon Podcast archive over to Drupal (seen here: http://church.stpeterlcms.com/sermons_online). I am using CCK and created a Podcast content type and Views2. The list, while nice, looks very bland. I'd like to jazz it up a bit. Each podcast node has an image attached to it that goes along with the sermon topic. While looking around the net...

So, I got to thinking the other day...
I am a big believer of "in house" content. Basically, if you have the ability, host your church blogs on your own domain... do it. If you have the ability to host your photo galleries on your own site... do it. Keep stuff in house. It helps drive traffic to your site.

However, there are some services that can not be hosted in house for many... such as live streaming of video, twitter, ect... And, it's also good to go out and share with those who might not be in the church "loop".