MUSAC Ltd is now officially a registered charitable entity (Registration Number CC50905). To be eligible, our constitution needed to meet a number of criteria, but in practice it means that profits do not, and can not, go to individuals (in our case they are reinvested for educational purposes). There are some compliance requirements and a number of benefits. A couple of examples of charitable entities in the education space in New Zealand are Core Education and Virtual Learning Network.
We still have salaries (staff are not volunteers), IT costs, power bills, lots of sponsorship, support, etc so that means we need to sell product and services to make a surplus and operate efficiently as a business and reinvest to build and grow more products and services.
From a school perspective, you can be assured that every dollar paid to MUSAC is headed directly for either improvements to products and services or educational outcomes, not personal gain.
Friday, 5 September 2014
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
Cloud Services we use at MUSAC ... and intend to
Not all services are destined for the cloud, but many are. A bunch of the services we use at MUSAC are still internal/Massey/server/desktop based, but we've moved many to cloud based or a hosted option. Personally, I use a bunch as well.
From the MUSAC perspective, we use Xero as our accounting package. It is early days for us with Xero and there are a bunch of things that are easier and some things we miss ... but this is not a Xero review blog post.
Our CRM is hosted by OneNet and by and large this has worked quite well for us.
Within the team, we have some of us using DropBox and OneDrive (the cloud service previously known as skydrive). As we are also still attached to Massey our email is still part of the corporate University structure, but once our Charitable status is validated it is my intention to head down the Office 365 route. The services bundled in Office 365 will suit us down to the ground and help us particularly around collaboration. My personal life has a google domain account and I've had skydrive/Onedrive and outlook.com for quite some time. Really like the way Microsoft have shaped up Office 365. Google docs is a little too simple for my business needs althouigh to be honest I've not used it for a couple of years - so should probably have another look.
Other cloud services we leverage and have active accounts with here at MUSAC:
From the MUSAC perspective, we use Xero as our accounting package. It is early days for us with Xero and there are a bunch of things that are easier and some things we miss ... but this is not a Xero review blog post.
Our CRM is hosted by OneNet and by and large this has worked quite well for us.
Within the team, we have some of us using DropBox and OneDrive (the cloud service previously known as skydrive). As we are also still attached to Massey our email is still part of the corporate University structure, but once our Charitable status is validated it is my intention to head down the Office 365 route. The services bundled in Office 365 will suit us down to the ground and help us particularly around collaboration. My personal life has a google domain account and I've had skydrive/Onedrive and outlook.com for quite some time. Really like the way Microsoft have shaped up Office 365. Google docs is a little too simple for my business needs althouigh to be honest I've not used it for a couple of years - so should probably have another look.
Other cloud services we leverage and have active accounts with here at MUSAC:
- Skype
- blogger
- survey monkey
- mailchimp
- youtube
- goto meeting
- Google analytics
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