Joomla! as intranet for Community Centre

[ilox]

I'm on the Management Committee of a small community centre. They are presently running a small network of 10 PCs in the Learning centre as well as 4 other PCs for Administration.
I was thinking that a CRM would be very useful for management of memberships and tracking enquiries and class lists plus some kind of reservation system for Hall and Room Bookings.
I am a very experienced Joomla! user/builder/sysop but none of the others know a thing about Joomla! - and even less about networking

Can I please have some suggestions of how I would go about assessing and establishing the needs.
Then how to establish which software would best suit those needs. I have a gut feeling that we might be looking at CivicCRM as a starter but I have no experience in this field to go by.

Later perhaps we could be looking to develop a Joomla web site but for the moment all I am thinking about is the Intranet and applications.

[ilox]

And now I have a need to help a local Youth Centre with IT support to provide training and tutorials for young offenders.
My thoughts are to run Joomla on their Intranet perhaps using CivicCRM to manage the list of young people. Perhaps using the new education modules to handle the 'students' and track progress through the modules. I would also want to use Joomla to list and provide the online tutorials I will be building as part of the project.
I'm thinking of the Ravenswood User Home Page module so we could give them an option to say who they are and what their goals might be.
We would like the opportunity of providing a resume builder as part of the general outreach to young people. I did hear that such a thing is possible through Community Builder but I have never seen it in operation.
There are probably a number of other modules and options to be explored before this comes to fruition.

First up though is what I would need to run Joomla on their Windows network. I would not have any control over the network side so I would have to run with MS programs. What would b the way to do this? A WAMP such as Ravenswood provide? From what, a mounted CD with saving to another CD-RW or DVD-RW?
Another problem is that the student computers wont save any of their work so I would need a way to keep their work stored somehow and only they would be accessing it.

Am I biting off more than Joomla can chew?

Is there another community centre out there doing these kinds of things?

[limestone]

A few suggestions -

• Set up a testing server on your home pc using (for example) appserv.
• Install on it Joomla, Community Builder and Facile Forms to be going on with, and any other components you need to try out.
• Once you've done that and got a system working, you can install it just the same way on your student network.

[ilox]

Thanks for the suggestion, downloading appserv now.