Aptean go members Review

GoMembers was a great step up from our original AMS. GoMembers has a well-designed database that tracks historical, current, and future memberships. Among many of GoMembersÕ features, the staff uses the committee module to track the Boards of Directors at the National level, as well as the Chapter level. We were able to offer greatly improved member self-service with more renewal choices, and, as a result, increase staff productivity. The problem with GoMembers is that it is expensive to implement changes to the system. The customer can make some configuration changes, but only Aptean can add new objects to track new data. The root cause of this limitation is Progress. Progress is the name of the middleware on which GoMembers was built. It is a proprietary programming platform and limits the capabilities of the customer to integrate with other systems and add new objects. Progress also has a user interface component on which many of the software features critical to our organization reside. The UI is not available in browsers, so we are forced to use the full client on either a desktop or a connection to our Terminal Server via RDP. This is an inconvenience when travelling to events. Customizations to the system are expensive in two ways: development, and ongoing maintenance. The estimates that Aptean provide have largely been accurate to the final implementation cost. In addition to the development cost the customer must pay an annual fee equal to a percentage of the implementation cost. Our organization needed to make many customizations to meet member and staff needs. As a result we pay a very high annual fee. My impression of GoMembers after being a customer for five years is that it was not designed to be easily customized. An association must constantly evolve and provide new services to members. An AMS must be adaptable to provide or interface with those services. Unfortunately, GoMembers is not adaptable without high cost.