As is always the case, things never go as we plan...
I just received an email from People Driven Software with answers to my questions, and I have updated the post on them. But what is really interesting is that they have a new product called PDS Live which is a web based product with an MS SQL backend. Since my biggest problem with PDS was their use of Access, this is big news.
Sigh.
So my "top six" may become a top seven. I'll have to do more research into PDS Live and let you know. The nice thing is I didn't set out to have a top six, I set out to find which solutions merited the time investment for a full analysis.
I'll keep you posted.
Joel
Update: I've looked over everything they have available on their website regarding PDS Live. At this point it is still a young product and it requires a windows based client to use effectively. If the product had been out longer in the marketplace and there were a lot of churches I could talk to who were using it, I might be willing to go further. However, the product is still in its infancy and would require a significant investment on our part to utilize the windows client (we use Mac OS X, so purchasing windows + VM software like Parallels or VMware for each client, plus the added support costs). Not the right solution for us.
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Hey Joel,
I just want to provide a little more info for those reading your blog who are Mac users. It is true that part of our web-based system uses a Windows client. But you don't have to use VMware or Parallels, especially in a larger church with many users. We have several large churches using Remote Desktop which is free for all the Mac user clients. We recommend that they connect to a machine running Windows Server 2008which can handle many simultaneous sessions. I have personally witnessed 20 concurrent sessions on a low end server and it handled them just fine.
FYI - I personally use a Mac full time now and I use VMware with Vista and it works really well.
Thanks for all your work on this project. I wish you guys the best.
Yours,
Mark Kitts
People Driven Software
866-737-9273
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