Folks,

Coming into this a bit late, but let me say my e-AOS Awards experience has
been uniformly bad.

First off, like someone said above, SAVE EVERYTHING. There is an order
number buried in your order confirmation email that is required to install
the program. This is *NOT* the same order number that appears on the packing
slip that accompanies the physical CD-ROM.

Secondly, I emailed the AOS and was informed that I needed that email. Well,
at the time I thought I'd deleted it and I replied back to Pam Giust *AND*
Lee Cooke. I told them that their current system was very poorly thought out
and could someone please look up that order #, because I deleted the email,
and by the way, why didn't you offer to look that order # up as part of your
original reply?

No word after two days from either of them.

I finally did a search in Outlook and FOUND that darn sales confirmation
email from the AOS and was able to install the program.

I wasn't encouraged to see the installer drop for an extended period of time
to a freakin' DOS window.

Then I ran the program.

If there weren't 11,000 photos, many of rarely seen species, I would have
returned the whole thing and asked for my money back.

It has to be the most amateurish implementation of an embedded database that
I've ever seen. It looks like something from Windows 3.1 from 1992! It has a
negative usability rating in my book.

At this point I really do just give up on the AOS. Put simply: They Don't
Get It, and I don't think any amount of work by volunteers at this point
will make them see the light.

Oh, and I think OrchidWiz is much much better - and will continue to improve
rapidly. The owner/developer, Alex Maximiano, is amazingly responsive to
comments and feedback and his photo database is expanding rapidly. This
really is a case of you get what you pay for.

......My $3 (adjusted for inflation)

-Eric in SF
www.orchidphotos.org