Tech Forum

Does the church provide access to wards or stakes Office 365 accounts? Our ward uses a variety of tools to manage the ward council, none of them connect well or encourage collaboration between groups. Before I buy an Office subscription for our ward I wanted to see if the church has plans outside of HQ to use or allow wards to use Microsoft Teams.

Thoughts? Any wards using a Teams or Slack today to help coordinate at the ward council level?

The church seldom announces development plans ahead of time. However, I've never seen any indication that anything like that is contemplated. In fact, the church seems to very carefully avoid allowing unstructured notes about members in any official system (except where submitted by members themselves like on mormon.org). My guess is that they are concerned about the privacy issues including the possible violation of privacy laws in some countries.

So although I understand the desire in today's world to use this kind of collaboration software, I personally doubt the church will make it generally available. The fact that the work of the church is all about the personal lives of it's members means the subjects discussed by a ward council are of a different nature than those in the business world.

Likewise before using any online tool for the ward whether it be Teams, Slack or just Google Docs, make sure to take into account the policies in the Meetinghouse Technology Policy section 4.9 (which despite the name of the document applies to use of membership and member data both inside and outside the meetinghouse).

Thanks for your thoughts on this topic.