[software] Grace (was Re: Design Decisions)

[Tom Hallman]

Bob wrote:
> * Grace: Looks like it's still in the early stages of development.  No
> docs, no screenshots.  Could turn into something, we'll see.  In the
> meantime, I don't have time to compile it myself.

Hi all,

   Just wanted to chime in briefly here as the head Grace developer =)

   To be clear, I'm not sure Grace is what y'all are looking for at the 
moment; it's currently focused more centrally around donation management 
rather than donor management.  While it doesn't do much more than that, 
it's not in the "early" stages; rather, my organization (DiscipleMakers 
- www.dm.org) has been using it daily for several years.

   DiscipleMakers has been talking about changing Grace's focus to 
include more CRM functionality, but that's probably a few months off, 
anyhow.

   Part of the reason the website is sparse is that we've recently moved 
it from our own hosted server to Google Code, since it was one less 
system for us to maintain internally =)  I plan to update that in that 
near future.

   You can find some older but mostly accurate docs and screenshots here:

   http://www.dm.org/resources/open-source/documentation/users-manual
   http://www.dm.org/resources/open-source/documentation/screen-shots

   Installing Grace isn't too awfully bad (no compiling required), but 
its not as streamlined as I'd like.  Still, if anyone is interested in a 
small program that facilitates donation entry, check scanning (works in 
Linux... Windows support coming soon), and basic reporting, this might 
be a useful tool.

   In any case, I'm eagerly following this thread(s), and I'll be happy 
to help however I can once we make some key decisions and get started.

~Tom