(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
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Lakeshore Christian Church in Antioch, TN is completely Mac-based. Everything from office work to Sunday morning worship video is entirely Mac driven, according to senior minister Randy Cordell.
“When I first began working with Lakeshore, we had an old 286 PC,” he told MacCentral. “It was used for basic (read, ugly) bulletins and newsletters. I convinced the office to ditch the PC and go with our first Mac. We purchased a 7600/132. Since then, we’ve added three iMacs, a G3 Blue & White, two PowerBooks (including a first generation Titanium). We also picked up some used equipment along the way: two 660/AV Centris/Quadras, 7200/90, and an 8600.”
The church uses the PowerBook for their Sunday Morning worship service to display song lyrics using PowerPoint. The iMacs are used throughout the office for Internet access and document generation. Their Web site is kept up-to-date on another iMac in a home office.
“Because the Mac is so versatile, we can use the various Macs to meet the changing needs of our growing congregation,” Cordell said. “In fact, this weekend we resurrected one of the 660/AVs to use as a backup Point-of-Sale register for our semi-annual consignment sale. Using FileMaker Pro, we networked our first iMac and the 660/AV to track sales and print receipts for shoppers.”
Aside from day-to-day office work, the most heavily used Macs have been the PowerBooks, the first of which was a G3/233. Its primary function was running PowerPoint slideshows for the Sunday morning worship services. After a few years of hard use, the church decided to upgrade to the Titanium PowerBook for the job, Cordell said. Because the Powerbook G4 supports Expanded Desktop mode, they’re able to more easily navigate through PowerPoint songs on-the-fly. This offers the worship leader more flexibility during the service, Cordell said.
“I could go on forever about the ways we use our Macs,” he added. “I’m the unofficial technical contact. By ‘unofficial,’ I mean volunteer. The fact that the Macs are so easy to maintain makes my life much easier. I couldn’t imagine keeping that many computers going if we were using PC hardware and any version of Windows. That would most likely require a full-time staff member, which would take away resources that could be used more effectively elsewhere.”
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