Animal Shelter Manager 2.0.16 review
DownloadAnimal Shelter Manager is a complete computer solution for animal sanctuaries, veterinary surgery clinics, and rescue shelters. It
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Animal Shelter Manager is a complete computer solution for animal sanctuaries, veterinary surgery clinics, and rescue shelters.
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 MySQL database engine 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. Four years ago, 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.
Here are some key features of "Animal Shelter Manager":
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 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.
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.
Requirements:
MySQL
Java Environment
What's New in This Release:
Separated FIV Result to a separate line for US users to save confusion.
Added "OwnerEmail" wordkey to output the owner's email address in documents.
Added OpenOffice 2.0 versions of all media templates and set default for new databases to OpenOffice 2. Added missing rtf versions of some templates for MS Word users.
Added notes to linux and unix tarballs about the requirements for zip/unzip installed in /usr/bin for OpenOffice support
Fixed custom report screen to display fields again when selecting a table in the drop down.
When outputting FIV/L and other test results to word processor templates, if the animal hasn't been tested, a blank is returned instead of "unknown".
Removed dependency on Java 5 ProcessBuilder for OpenOffice support and rewrote to use Runtime.exec() instead. ASM is now fully 1.4 compliant again.
Animal Shelter Manager 2.0.16 keywords