For more than 60 years, St. George's Episcopal Church in the American state of Tennessee has provided religious guidance, educational instruction and financial support to their congregation and the surrounding Memphis, Tennessee area. Running dozens of diverse programs and activities and supporting numerous charitable organisations, the church's spiritual focus today is backed by a 21st century pragmatic approach to back office tasks that rivals that of many small businesses.

Business methods help support spiritual mission
"A church is in some ways very much like a business", says Birdie Barker, Parish Administrator and Director of Christian Education for the 1,500-member church. "We have a mortgage on the new sanctuary. We have salaried church staff. We have vendors to pay. We have utility bills. We support numerous charities, including the Emanuel Episcopal Center (located in a Memphis housing project), the Episcopal Church Home for Autistic Children and Habitat for Humanity, to name just a few. We also tithe to our diocese."

Account management
Income is derived primarily from membership pledges and occasional fund-raising events. Although the Christian education program and their onsite Christian bookstore are self-sustaining, their monies run through the church's accounting system. "We run on a fund-based system," Barker says, "And there are 16 accounts to keep track of. More importantly, we need to use our databases interactively."

The church sent out requests for quotes for servers to five vendors in the local Memphis area. They chose the Toshiba Magnia 3000, bid by Memphis Communications Corporation.

Email capabilities
In addition to sharing and backing up databases and files more easily and maximising the use of peripherals and applications, the staff at St. George's Episcopal Church wanted to communicate electronically. "You'd think that, on such a small campus, interoffice communications would be easy. But when you're dealing with people on multiple schedules who can be very difficult to track down, electronic interoffice communications is almost a necessity," Barker says. "We also have a couple of staff members who do a lot of work out of their homes. Email keeps them connected."

Internet access
The church also accesses the Internet extensively. For example, Barker uses it for researching, reviewing, and buying educational materials. St. George's priests use it to interface with other clergy and stay updated on diocese information.

Why Toshiba?

Component reliability
The Toshiba Magnia 3000 offers a full array of features not always found in workgroup class servers. The server supports four hot-swappable hard disk drives and two hot-swappable power supplies and the system is RAID ready, all factors in improving redundancy. Toshiba's engineering expertise in thermal design, honed by years of building the world's best selling portables, is evident in the integration of eight strategically located fans that help to keep the system from overheating and causing downtime.

System management
Toshiba's Systems Management Card (SMC) provides predictive and proactive management of key components. Fans and power supplies are automatically modulated via the SMC for load sharing and temperature control. Intel's® LANDesk® Server Manager, a software package that provides real-time reporting capabilities for system management and trending analysis, and enterprise level management plug-ins are available and fully compatible with all Magnia servers.

Easy software configuration
Toshiba's Server Setup Tool (SST) allowed St. George's to easily load their operating system and software. It gave the church the ability to choose just what it needed in terms of software without cluttering up the system with unneeded and memory-hogging programs, utilities or drivers. St. George's uses Office 97, Corel Draw 8, Microsoft Publisher and PowerChurch (for member information and financial records).

A sound business decision
Memphis Communications trained Barker to handle basic maintenance. The Toshiba reseller takes care of anything larger. Barker says she likes the Magnia 3000 in part because of its dependability. "It certainly is reliable," Barker says. "When we decided to get networked," she adds, "we decided to do it right. The Toshiba server has turned out to be a good decision for us."