Got Some Online Database Ideas? at effective web ministry notes

Got Some Online Database Ideas?

filed under Tools by rob on 16Feb07 @ 10:37 am EST

A buddy of mine wrote me yesterday and asked this question:

Hey man. Our church is looking for an online database product/company. Do you know any that you would recommend? The basic need would be storing/sorting/emailing contacts.

How would you answer him?

Here’s a few sites I sent him to.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (if it’s just managing contacts, a shared spreadsheet could do it)
BaseCamp (ups the ante for project management)
My del.icio.us Web 2.0 list
Big Contacts (new and don’t know much about it)
Google Office (tutorial (?) of how to use their suite of products)

Later I thought of TntMPD. They may not use the financial side of it, but could keep contacts managed and synced between all users. Then if they each have a Smart Phone that syncs with Outlook, they could take those contacts with them wherever they went.

What are your thoughts?

7 Responses to “Got Some Online Database Ideas?”

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1 Clay on Feb 16th, 2007 said:

You might also take a look at ZoHo (http://www.zoho.com/) They have an entire suite of online office type products. There is also WebAsyst (http://www.webasyst.net/contact-manager.htm), which might be exactly what you’re looking for.
2 rob on Feb 16th, 2007 said:

And I just ran across Highrise from 37signals.
3 Josh on Feb 16th, 2007 said:

Since you mentioned managing contacts, I figured I’d throw this out there. I just read about it over at the ChurchBit Google Group this morning. It’s called Plaid. You can find it at http://www.plaidfile.com/ (although I’m not sure it’s been fully released yet — didn’t spend much time looking at it).

Also, you might want to take a look at Dabble DB (http://dabbledb.com/) and Wufoo forms (http://www.wufoo.com/). Not sure if they’d be exactly what’s needed, but might be worth looking at nonetheless.
4 David Russell on Feb 17th, 2007 said:

I’m not sure if I’m understanding the tone of the question, but if you’re only needing to “store, sort and email contacts”, you could use a distribution service like Campaign Monitor to do that. You can even add custom fields to their database to grab all kinds of information from the end user. So, you can build a form pulling in as much data as you’d like and then store that data at Campaign Monitor. You can even pull that data back into email campaigns dynamically. Pretty rad.

The same can be accomplished using the CMS ExpressionEngine if you are looking to create a site as well or integrate the contact information into a sharper web front end.
5 rob on Feb 18th, 2007 said:

@David : The context for the situation my friend is in is that he works for a church and they had all sorts of contacts stored with a company online. The company closed with no warning so they are rebuilding their database out of their own personal contacts in Outlook. What they want to do is find a replacement service to store their contacts so they all can access them.
6 David Russell on Feb 18th, 2007 said:

Ah. So an Exchange server wouldn’t work for them in this case? I mean, Exchange has OWA which allows any Exchange user account to be accessible via the web. And of course, Exchange supports basic contact management including shared contacts and distribution groups.

If they don’t have a Windows server in the office already, or if they are seeking a simpler, out-of-the-box type of solution, I’d look into Wufoo or DabbleDB, both already mentioned by others. With a little creativity, either can be mended into a solution.

Also, this would be pretty simple to build if they wanted a custom web app. I can’t imagine something like this costing more than a few hundred dollars to build. Of course, they’d want to be certain it was locked down and not publicly accessible to protect the valuable private information they are gathering.
Oh, and Plaxo is a company that deals in contact information handling. I have never used them, but they may have a service that could work in this scenario.

A few extra thoughts for the discourse.
7 rob on Feb 18th, 2007 said:

@David : Never been a fan of Plaxo. Not sure why. They are probably fine but I remember them years ago and some rumors of security problems, etc. Just never been a fan, but it’s probably a decent option.