Non-Profit Tech Blog

Ok, I’m back and in full effect! All of my experiences with the non-profits in Egypt reinforced some long-held notions I have about how small non-profits here in the US should deal with IT. The major issue is this: smaller nonprofits rarely have IT as their core competence. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be touching IT as most likely it will be someone inexperienced and liable to make expensive mistakes. This is not to take away from your average accidental techie but Exchange and Active Directory administration is no fun for a beginner.

My recipe assumes that the non-profit has already gone to Techsoup and purchased Office 2k3, Win XP and antivirus software for all their workstations and that they also have a minimal network setup (1 switch, 1 DSL modem, and 1 router/firewall).

Outsourced Hosting for the Small Non-profit
1 Microsoft Exchange host using RPC over HTTPS
1 Sharepoint host — this will be your default file server – yes, your file server!
1 Web host — using whatever CMS you want

Now, there is a cost for all this. Chances are, your Exchange app and Sharepoint app will require different passwords. Add on the network login and you end up with three different username/password combinations. It’s a burden but certainly cheaper than having a full-time IT administrator. For a nice list of the drawbacks of hosted Exchange, see this article entitled Decision points for Exchange hosting.

The actual outlay for these hosted services is roughly $200 a month for 20 people depending on your provider. It’s certainly cheaper than hiring an IT guy for roughly $60k a year to handle your tape backup and Exchange admin tasks.

People may not be so happy with the idea of having to literally upload and download all the files in your network but I believe that you’ll end up with at least some rudimentary document management if you put it all in Sharepoint. Someone at the non-profit would still have to handle the task of adding, changing, and deleting new mailboxes and logins but you can get someone to teach you that for probably $400 — 3 hours of consultant time. Also, another staff member will have to learn how to administer Sharepoint, set up some basic document libraries, intialize the user lists and set up your basic Web parts.

What does the recipe avoid?
Hardware and software for Exchange server is roughly $10k not to mention the time needed to backup the server and the necessary backup infrastructure (autoloader and Veritas).

Sharepoint hosting hardware is another $6k (Dell server with a RAID array) plus a few hundred dollars for Sharepoint server and 20 Sharepoint CALs through Techsoup. With Sharepoint, you can avoid the permissioning issues that are so prevalent when using a typical file server. Nobody has to learn how to set up group permissions. Instead, you’ll use Sharepoint’s audience features. The Sharepoint administrative interfaces are easier to use for the accidental techie when it comes to setting up permissioning levels.

Web hosting is so expensive due to the constant firewall administration that most people would rather just have it hosted. In fact, this is perhaps the most frequently outsourced application at most non-profits at this point.

And best of all, no more backup infrastructure because none of your files will be locally hosted on a file server. By enforcing rules on storing files in a structured way in Sharepoint, you don’t end up with the large piles of data junk that accumulates over the lifetime of a nonprofit. Over time, the cost of backup is pretty high (tape loader at $2k plus the tapes at $80/ea).

What the recipe still requires
Training. Lots of training. You will need to send staff to learn how to administer your hosted Exchange and your Sharepoint host. This isn’t trivial but more akin to the same kind of Office 2k3 training that you would have sent your staff to anyway.