About

Animal Shelter Manager is a free/open source computer package, covered by the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. It is designed to take most (if not all) of the paperwork away from running an animal shelter/sanctuary.

The package is both free as in freedom and free as in beer, however if you like what I am doing and want to help, you can support the project by:

An Open System

Animal Shelter Manager has been carefully designed to run under any operating system and computer platform, ensuring that you always have choices and options. Using ASM you will never be locked in to any one particular technology or forced to spend money to get what you need.

The system is completely free in all senses of the word and utilises other free software solutions, ensuring no unpleasant licence costs to users and most importantly ensuring your rights and freedoms to open standards, open file formats/protocols and the ongoing guarantee unfair terms will never be put upon you whilst you use the system. For more information on the Free Software movement in general, visit the Free Software Foundation.

User Base

Given the free nature of ASM, it is difficult to ascertain accurate user statistics. A conservative estimate, based on downloads and feedback I have received indicates that the ASM user base is somewhere around 8,000 shelters across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Europe - although it could be many more. Compared to commercial competitors, this gives ASM one of the largest (if not the largest) installed user base of any computerised shelter management package available. ASM has also been translated by volunteers to Dutch, French, Spanish and Lithuanian. If you would like to help translate ASM to your language, please read the Translation HOWTO.

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 HSQLDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines 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. Back in 2000, 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.

Who am I?

I'm an IT professional who has been developing software for a living since 1992. I've worked on hundreds of software projects for a wide range of large customers across many sectors (power generation, armed forces, criminal justice, catering/quarrying stock control, finance, gaming, telecommunications and more)

My wife and I foster animals and do volunteer work for our local RSPCA and ASM is one of my many hobby projects

Supported Platforms

Currently, Animal Shelter Manager is known to run under the following operating systems (including all hardware platforms supported by them):

Quotes from ASM users:

"I have been looking for this my whole life!! (well almost) for this it scored mega points for me with my boss and FINALLY we can keep track of things..."
"I want to thank you for the extraordinary effort and time you have given to ASM. The design is sound and flexible for future evolution!"
"I'm floored... your software is, simply put, infreakingcredible! ... damn good job!"
"This is awesome!"
"...this is geared for exactly what I do. You've just made my rescue management go a lot smoother."
"This is, by far, the absolute coolest thing I've found as far as managing a rescue."
"I just want to say that this software is great!"
"I know I keep telling you, but I LOVE this program!"
"...thank you for such a wonderful product. It is a cracking piece of kit!"
"We're small, but this is a big help! Thanks!"
"The best shelter program I've found, and I've tried several!"
"Thanks so much for all you do! ASM is helping place thousands of animals!"
"Great OSX support - this is the only game in town!"
"Great software! Thank you for creating and sharing it with us."
"ASM does an excellent job keeping me organised."

Animal Shelter Manager is Copyright©2000-2009, R. Rawson-Tetley