As ex. dir. of a county historical society in PA, I used PP 2.6B for 1,200 membership records which were input manually by myself and volunteers. Now I am working for a different organization and learning to use PP 3.0 for collections management. I find PP 3.0 a much better product than PP 2.6. The newer version has many more useful, time-saving features in all areas and the manual is much, much better. I have found the PP tech support always very helpful and they always get back to me promptly. They went above and beyond the call of duty to help me when I had a particulary puzzling problem. If you can convince your trustees or ex. dir. to put it in the budget, I would STRONGLY recommend going with PP 3 rather than the 2.6, AND continuing to purchase yearly support agreements. Personally, I found the 2.6 version (which is the original version of PP) very "clunky and buggy," that is, it has a lot of quirks and it's not particularly user-friendly. It took me a lot of time playing around with it to learn to use it, despite taking the training course. (I will say that neither I nor my museum have a laptop so I didn't have one for the training session, which would have helped me alot as I'm one of those "learn by doing" types.) I consider myself moderately computer literate. Maybe those who are more computer literate would not feel that PP 2.6 is difficult to learn. Please note, all databases are not equal. The following is probably oversimplified, but there are basically two types of databases, "flat" or "relational". PP is a "flat" database. A flat database can do a lot, but it's internal "architecture" or structure is not as powerful as a relational database, which is probably why vendors for the latter charge more for them. (Flat vs Relational databases is addressed in the "new, revised Registrar's Manual" that came out a few years ago for anyone that wants a citation/source for more info. check the AAM bookstore or borrow one from another museum.) I don't know for sure but I suspect that "Raiser's Edge" and similar databases are relational. These are membership database for colleges, hospitals, etc. that need the ability to crunch, sort & manage massive numbers and pieces of information. A flat database will get probably get bogged down trying to work with that much data. Finallly, regarding tech support response time, I will offer the following advice, and anyone can skip it they don't want to take the time to read it: If they haven't gotten back to that person "after a month", I would certain call them again. In any office, messages get lost, waylaid, accidentally filed with a bunch of papers, fall off a desk onto the floor and swept up by the cleaners, etc. I call anybody back if I haven't heard back from them in a week and I'm waiting for a response. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and being pleasant gains more results and goodwill than grousing, tempting tho' that may be. It is up to the vendor to help you and give you a satisfactory response, but it is up to you (or each of us) to make sure you are clear in defining your problem and what you expect by way of assistance. I have found effective communication takes practice and it's gained on the job, not from school (altho' effective office procedures would be a useful college session! ). Nancy P. ----- Original Message ----- From: James Schulte To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 5:56 PM Subject: Past Perfect Two years ago the site I work at decided to go to Past Perfect because of its cost in a time when budgets are tight. At first everything went well, we transferred much of the information we had from Excel over into the system.So my account here cannot base problems on anything but Past Perfect. As we went along inputting artifact after artifacts( we only have about 1200) problems began to developed. First we realized when you input anything into the condition area and update it you lose all previous data. The same occurred in several other areas. We called Past Perfect to tell the about this serious problem and we got an "oh yea" we'll get back to you.well were still waiting a month later for their solution.We loved the program because of simplicity, but now realize we traded a lot for it. Were still using it and trying to come up with solutions ourselves. James T. Schulte South Jersey Historian 43 Nottingham Rd Pennsville NJ 08070 856-678-2230 "Making South Jersey History come to life" ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes). ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).