Questions from a prospective customer

[alvinschmucker]

I am considering PowerChurch Plus for my congregation, and I have a few questions.
1. What technology is PowerChurch based on? Visual Basic? Foxpro? (I am an IT professional at my day job)
2. Our congregation does not have a church office; I would be running this on my home computer. Ideally, there is another church officer that would be able to run the software as well on his home computer for reporting purposes. Do we need to purchase two licenses for this? How can we share data?

Thanks,
Alvin

[NeilZ]

I am considering PowerChurch Plus for my congregation, and I have a few questions.
1. What technology is PowerChurch based on? Visual Basic? Foxpro? (I am an IT professional at my day job)
2. Our congregation does not have a church office; I would be running this on my home computer. Ideally, there is another church officer that would be able to run the software as well on his home computer for reporting purposes. Do we need to purchase two licenses for this? How can we share data?

Thanks,
Alvin

1. Powerchurch is built on the latest version of Foxpro.
2. If I remember right, Powerchurch is licensed on a site license basis. All you would need is one license to be able to run on different non-netwoked computers. However, there's the problem of sharing data. You would have to be swapping out backups and restoring them, then the problem arises that you may overwrite something that was added to one database, and not the other.

However, you may want to call the Powerchurch office and ask about their online version, which they will be offering soon. This would allow anyone from your church with the proper permissions and passwords to have access to your church data via the Internet. This would solve the problem you have with no central church office and many members needing access.

[alvinschmucker]

An online version?? That is what we really need! Do you know, will the online version include the full Accounting module including check printing?

I'll call in tomorrow, but I'd appreciate any knowledge that you may have.

[tborgal]

The online version is the complete full functioning version and works very well. I was one of the beta testers and was very impressed with the speed that it worked, with the exception of making backups. It is virtually no different than the program as loaded on my PC. Some of the reports had some minor formatting issues but all in all it works fine. I don't know if a final pricing has been set as yet however.

[Zaphod]

We're finalizing all of this, and we'll be making this available very soon. Hopefully, in a matter of days, not weeks.

Yes, the online offering we have is the full version of PowerChurch Plus that you can run using a Citrix-like setup that we're hosting. You can access it from any machine with an internet connection. We've tested it on Windows and Linux, and both work fine. We also just received a Mac client we've yet to test, and there's even a Pocket PC client. We tested it, and it works great, but the only problem is you have to scroll around to see all of any screen you may be working in.

This is specifically intended for folks with your situation, alvinschmucker. Churches with a couple of users who want to be able to access PowerChurch remotely while sharing a single set of data.