Ten years ago only a handful of people in the community sector used email in their day-to-day work. Now it’s hard to imagine life without it. The pace of technological change is relentless and community organisations often lag behind, foregoing the benefits of new technologies.
In this seminar Pere Ruka (the IT Manager at MacKillop Family Services) and Elaine Cope (an IT consultant with ICT Matters, working with many small community organisations) described and demonstrated some cutting edge technologies they are using to improve, streamline and simplify organisational systems while saving money and reducing energy consumption.
Pere showed us the virtual network (powered by Citrix) he set up at MacKillop, complete with virtual desktops hosted on thin clients that have replaced desktop PCs. Energy consumption and maintenance costs (not to mention space taken up on everyone's desks) has been dramatically reduced, office flexibility increased, and system management vastly simplified. He also discussed other virtualisation platforms.
Elaine demonstrated SharePoint, a web-based intranet from Microsoft that can improve your organisation’s collaboration and effectiveness by streamlining the management of and access to data. It can be used to host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores and documents, as well as host applications such as wikis and blogs. Able to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites, SharePoint can be your organisation's one-stop information hub.
Download the presentations
Links to other resources
For more information contact Dean Lombard 
Doing IT Better is a social justice initiative of the Centre for Community Networking Research (Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University) and the Victorian Council of Social Service, generously funded by a foundation.
The 2009 Seminar Series is generously sponsored by Multimedia Victoria.
© Victorian Council of Social Service 2009