Introduction
Son of Service (SOS) is a multiuser volunteer management database for non-profits, charities, schools, churches, and clubs. SOS will keep track of your volunteers, their contact information, availability, work history, comments, reminders, and relationships. It will help you quickly find the right volunteer for the job and e-mail him, and it will make reports about how you are using volunteers.
SOS is a helpful tool for organizations with many volunteers or multiple volunteer coordinators.
SOS is free
Your organization helps people for free, and your volunteers work for free. So you know there is a "free lunch."
SOS is free. It's free from charge: notice there is no menu option for purchasing or ordering. But SOS also provides freedom from many restrictions. Download the program, install it, and use it without buying expensive licenses. Use it on as many systems with as many users and volunteers as you have. Use your choice of server operating system and RDBMS. (You don't need to buy a RDBMS or other server software.) You can even modify SOS to meet your specific needs because the full source is available to you.
Requirements
SOS was engineered to perform well old hardware that many organizations on small budgets use, but it works wells with modern systems too. SOS scales from one user to many.
- A person with technical computer skills to install and configure SOS.
- Web server software such as Apache or IIS.
- The PHP scripting language. It's often installed with Apache and on many web hosts, but if you don't have it already, it's free.
- Almost any RDBMS[1] including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, Oracle, DB2, etc.
- A web browser for each client. Most modern web browsers work including Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla Firefox.
- An ethernet network and a server computer are recommended.
1: SOS uses ADOdb to support a variety of RDBMS, including free RDBMS. Not all RDBMS have been tested yet.
Status
Though SOS is usable now, it will acquire more features and undergo further testing before the 1.0 release. In the meantime, you are welcome to demo SOS, download SOS, help develop it, or write for more information.
As of 2004, development has slowed down. Our organization has been using SOS, and it suits our volunteer needs.
As of late 2005, I was considering developing a donor, volunteer, and contact management system for non-profits, but as of August 2006, I have not found a decent database platform. For example, GNU Enterprise has good ideas, but it is not mature.