I've come into this discussion late, as usual, but I'd like to add my 2 cents worth.

I strongly support John Conley's idea of using Google Docs. My computer club uses Google Docs for all its membership details and account keeping etc. Some of these docs are shared with selected members of the committee, otherwise they are kept private. To date we have 17 documents kept this way.
The advantages of doing what we do are
1) we don't need any commercial software
2) we can share (or keep private) any of our documents
3) and this is the BIG one - we don't have to worry about back-ups and computer crashes. Good ol' Mister Google does all our back-ups for us and stores them, not only away from our club, but over seas. You can't get much more away than that! And ask your self this - be honest - how many of you have ALL your mission critical documents backed up every day and stored well away from your premises.
Add to that the fact that anyone with permission can access their documents anywhere in the world and you can see we have a very flexible system.

All this is known as "Computing in the cloud" and at first Microsoft didn't want to know anything about it, but now they have seen what is happening in computer land and they are busy making the same applications as Google.

tony
Lenovo lappie, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb HD
Ubuntu 12.04
Running BIAB under WINE