Software Santa

FREE and/or Open Source Desktop Software! => Office or Productivity Tools => Topic started by: Software Santa on March 28, 2009, 10:22:14 AM

Title: Animal Shelter Manager 2 is a free administration system for animal shelters
Post by: Software Santa on March 28, 2009, 10:22:14 AM
Animal Shelter Manager 2 is the complete, free administration system for animal shelters!

Another great Application from the tireless Elves over at SourceForge!

Works on Most Computers (Except Mac Classic.)


Quote
About

Animal Shelter Manager is a free computer package, covered by the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. It is designed to take most (if not all) of the paperwork away from running an animal shelter/sanctuary. The system can also be used to manage a veterinary surgery or clinic.

The package is both free as in freedom and free as in beer, however if you like what I am doing and want to help, you can support the project by:

    * Buying a CD
    * Donating your time - help me with documentation, testing, translating, anything!
    * Donate me the price of some beer and/or pizza by way of saying thank you.

An Open System

Animal Shelter Manager has been carefully designed to run under any operating system and computer platform, ensuring that you always have choices and options. Using ASM you will never be locked in to any one particular technology or forced to spend money to get what you need.

The system is completely free in all senses of the word and utilises other free software solutions, ensuring no unpleasant licence costs to users and most importantly ensuring your rights and freedoms to open standards, open file formats/protocols and the ongoing guarantee unfair terms will never be put upon you whilst you use the system. For more information on the Free Software movement in general, visit the Free Software Foundation.

User Base

Given the free nature of ASM, it is difficult to ascertain accurate user statistics. A conservative estimate, based on downloads and feedback I have received indicates that the ASM user base is somewhere around 6,000 shelters across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Europe - although it could be many more. Compared to commercial competitors, this gives ASM one of the largest (if not the largest) installed user base of any computerised shelter management package available. ASM has also been translated by volunteers to Dutch and Spanish. If you would like to help translate ASM to your language, please read the Translation HOWTO.

It's Free! It Must Be Bad!

No! ASM is an industrial strength piece of software that thousands of shelters rely on to operate their organisations every day. It utilises other free software, such as the award-winning HSQLDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines for managing information and it is extremely feature rich and capable of managing almost all aspects of a shelter environment.

Free software packages are often far superior to their commercial counterparts for the simple fact that the people who build free software have no other incentive than the desire to do it, and care very much about what they are doing. Developers of commercial software do it purely for money and are often under tight deadlines, producing mediocre software that lacks the care and attention to detail of free packages. For example, MySQL is one of the most popular relational database engines in the world, most of the internet runs on the Apache webserver and the majority of internet email is exchanged by the SendMail program - all of which are free software. There are countless such examples (eg: PHP, Python and of course Linux.

ASM was born out of an ideal that management software for shelters should be free. Back in 2000, my local shelter asked if I could help them - they were drowning in administration and they could not find a good computer package to help them. A number of US-specific packages existed, but they were expensive, and those that weren't were extremely poor. So I started designing and coding, implementing in a computer program what they needed. I put up the program on the internet to let other shelters try it, and to my surprise more shelters started to use this program and tell me what they wanted. Then people contacted me from the US, Australia and Canada. ASM then grew to accomodate the additional needs of those countries. I was delighted to hear computer science students around Europe have used ASM as the subject of coursework, and as an example of how to write a large scale management package well.

Now we get to today, and what started out as a little program is now a complete management system, built from the ideas and needs of shelters all over the world.

Who am I?

I'm an IT professional who has been developing software for a living since 1992. I've worked on over 100 software projects for a wide range of large customers across many sectors (power generation, armed forces, criminal justice, catering/quarrying stock control, finance, gaming, telecommunications and more)

My wife and I foster animals and do volunteer work for our local RSPCA and ASM is one of my many hobby projects

Supported Platforms

Currently, Animal Shelter Manager is known to run under the following operating systems (including all hardware platforms supported by them):

    * Microsoft Windows (9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista)
    * Linux (all distributions/platforms)
    * MacOS X
    * NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD
    * UNIX variants (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc.)

Features
Animals

    * Track animals through the shelter and outside world with ease throughout their lifetime
    * Manage and remind for vaccinations, surgery and medical treatments
    * Manage animal diets
    * Move, induct, adopt, transfer and foster animals with donation tracking
    * Keep track of animals not part of your shelter for independent clinics
    * Manage agreements with insurers for automatic number ranges and generation of insurance paperwork automatically
    * Advanced media facilities allow attachment of full multimedia and documentation to animals - ditch reams of paperwork!
    * Generate paperwork automatically - interfaces to a wide range of word processors, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, AbiWord, OpenOffice, StarOffice and any wordprocessor supporting XML, HTML and Rich Text.
    * Waiting list facilities including urgency updating/tracking
    * Animal litter management, automatically watches litter members leaving the shelter and completes them on correct days. Removes headaches generating accurate litter figures
    * Full medical tracking and management
    * Flexible logging allows extension to store any type of data (bite reports, etc.)

Diary

    * Full management diary system
    * Create ranges of diary tasks for common functions and execute them against animals
    * Output individual diary reports for everyone
    * Diary integrates into all record types
    * Vet management diaries
    * Complete medical diary system, including scheduling, multiple treatments, etc.

Owners

    * Track owners and suitability for ownership
    * Full entity management, track other shelters, pet stores, etc.
    * Warning messages for unsuitable owners
    * Store owners desired criteria and automatically be notified when suitable animals arrive
    * Track volunteers
    * Store criteria for suitable animals for owners and auto generate suitability reports
    * Track animal movement histories to owners
    * Owner media
    * Bulk mailshotting of owners through printed documents or email
    * Full donation management, including regular commitments
    * Flexible logging allows extension to store any type of data (complaints, etc.)

Internet

    * Generate full-featured, fully customisable websites publishing animals for adoptions - widen your audience. One site successfully rehomed six of their longest-term animals in just two months to owners from all over the country and receive many enquiries from the internet site.
    * Automatic search engine generation
    * Publishing and uploading to the internet can be done completely by ASM without the need for FTP clients - just answer a few simple questions and your site will be uploaded for you.
    * Fully compatible with free hosted webspace - no expensive servers required
    * Publish straight to PetFinder.com, 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com and Pets911.com for US users - complete with all data mappings
    * Non-interactive publishing through a command line interface allows scheduled jobs to automatically generate and upload your website every day.
    * ASM Online - a version of ASM to run on your web server, easing administration and allowing remote users to get started with no installation.

Mail Merge

    * Create filtered data sources for mailshots, eg. Locating animals off shelter who require vaccinations
    * Create bulk data sources, filter and email automatically
    * Generate printed letters for mailshots, convert to HTML/RTF and send via email or generate individual document files

Lost and Found

    * Track and store lost and found animals
    * Find potential lost and found matches with an intelligent matching engine
    * Include shelter animal database as potential found matches
    * Lost and found media
    * Publish lost and found to the internet

Reports

    * Full ranges of management reports
    * Shelter Inventories
    * Movement analysis
    * Long Term Animals
    * Animal auditing
    * Automatic RSPCA Head Office figures generation for UK RSPCA shelters
    * Flexible report generation - all reports are handled as HTML to integrate with the web browser of your choice, and to allow editing with many popular office products and direct emailling.
    * All reports are fully customisable, using templates and cascading style sheets.
    * Custom report creation tool allows you to generate your own reports - much more advanced than commercial tools (eg: Crystal Reports, ReportSmith), allowing SQL preprocessor instructions, group tags, ability to request criteria from users, etc.
    * Animal Shelter Manager has its own built in web browser with advanced scaling/printing facilities to ensure that what you get on paper is exactly what you wanted. In addition, all reports are compliant to the HTML 3.2 standard and compatible with any web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc.)
    * Generate high quality, full colour graphs of management information, financials and adoption figures

Security

    * Create many users and control exactly what each can do
    * Audit user actions to find out who did what
    * Highly configurable - most areas of the system can be customised, including warning behaviour, report visuals - even database locking.
    * Integrate with your site's LDAP server or Operating System security.

Requirements

Platform:    Microsoft Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista, MacOS X, Linux, BSD, UNIX
Requirements:    300Mhz CPU or better, with at least 64Mb of RAM
Hard disk Requirements:    Variable based on data size. As a rule of thumb, allow at least 2Mb per 1,000 animals (not including multimedia)

http://sheltermanager.com/site/en_oss_asm2.html (http://sheltermanager.com/site/en_oss_asm2.html)

http://sheltermanager.sourceforge.net/download.php (http://sheltermanager.sourceforge.net/download.php)