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2010-10-27 StamboomNederland Paid Features

paying for GEDCOM, collaboration, media & reports

feature	Basis	Premium	Premium Plus
price (per year)	free	€ 15	€ 25
advertisements	Y	N	N
online editing	Y	Y	Y
multiple projects	Y	Y	Y
GEDCOM import	Y	Y	Y
XML import	Y	Y	Y
GEDCOM export	N	Y	Y
XML export	N	Y	Y
reports	N	Y	Y
users per project	1	5	unlimited
media storage  (JPG & PDF)	0 MB	100 MB	500 MB

account types

A StamboomNederland account is free, but not all StamboomNederland functionality is free. There are several features that only available to users who pay for a premium account. Information about this is hard to find. There is no single page that clearly lists what you get when you opt for a premium account. That information is, rather oddly, sprinkled throughout the terms and conditions.
StamboomNederland does not display advertisements right now, but after reading the terms and conditions it is clear that the Central Bureau of Genealogy wants to use advertising to offset the cost of the site, and that paying users will enjoy an advert-free site.

StamboomNederland has three account types; Basic, Premium and Premium Plus.
The Basic account is free. The Premium accounts costs € 15 per year, and the Premium Plus account costs € 25 per year. The table shows the differences between these account types.

One thing I do like about paid StamboomNederland account types is that when the year is up, your subscription is not automatically prolonged, but simply reverts back to a Basic account.

upgrading to Premium

It is not immediately obvious how to upgrade to premium. While some commercial genealogy sites take every opportunity to remind you of the benefits of their premium program, StamboomNederland seems to go out of its way to hide the upgrade option from you.

To upgrade, visit your profile page and then choose to view Status; that leads to the Account Status page. Near the bottom of the Account Status page are the two upgrade options that StamboomNederland offers. Clicking the credit card icon for the account type you want leads to another page.

That page confirms the selection you made. To proceed with this order, click the pay button; that leads to the payment page. Well, it should lead to the payment page. I've tried on several occasions, but every time I tried, the first thing I got was a failure page.

It is a general rule that you should not refresh pages on which you perform a transaction, but this is not the transaction page yet, so this page can be refreshed. Every time I tried paying the page would initially fail, but every time I refreshed the page, it displayed just fine.

On this page, you can pay with Visa, MasterCard or iDEAL; iDEAL is a payment system of Currence iDEAL, a company in which major Dutch and Belgian banks cooperate. When you choose iDEAL, you get the screen shown above; the drop-down menu allows you to select your own bank.
The Ogone website used here bundles Visa, MasterCard and iDEAL payments, so that vendors such as the Central Bureau for Genealogy do not have to interface with all the different payment services themselves.

features

A Basic account allows online editing, multiple projects and import of both GEDCOM and XML files. Remarkable is that it does not allow export of your own data.

The Premium and Premium Plus accounts do allow export of your own data. They also allows the creation of reports, use of JPG image and PDF documents and collaboration with other users.

While the difference with the Basic account is qualitative, the differences between the Premium and Premium Plus account is quantitative. The Premium account allows up to 100 MB of media, while the Premium Plus account allows up to 500 MB of media. The Premium accounts allows up to five users per project, the Premium Plus account places no restrictions on the number of users sharing a project.

saving GEDCOM

The table shown in not in error about GEDCOM export. It is unusual, but saving a GEDCOM file of your own data is a paid feature not available to users with a Basic account.

collaboration

accounts

One of the advertised features is collaboration; the ability to share a project with several other accounts. The first thing to note about this feature is that it is not necessary for all parties to have a premium account. Users with a Basic can participate in a shared project. The limitation isn't that they cannot participate in shared projects, the limitation is that they cannot initiate a shared project. Sharing a project with other accounts is something only a premium can do.

sharing

Sharing a project is done from the Project Details page. To share with another user, you choose the SHARE WITH USER button. You might expect a pop-up window, but the button takes you to another page, that contains nothing but an edit control.

The page title has not been translated into English yet; Project delen met een medewerker means Share project with collaborator. You cannot enter a name and you cannot search or browse the user database. Remember that StamboomNederland does not support proper accounts with usernames, but always uses email addresses instead of usernames. You have to enter the email address of the person you want to grant access to your project.

When you do so, the project immediately shows up in the list of projects of that user, and their username email address is shown on the Project Details page. If you enter the email address of someone who is not a StamboomNederland user yet, StamboomNederland merely reports that it Cannot share the project with the indicated user. without explaining why not.
The users you share your project with see your username email address and their own. They do not see which others users you shared the project with.

The Project Details page shows a list of users email addresses you shared the project with. There are a few buttons after each name email address, but none of these work. Presumably these buttons are intended to remove users from the project or promote them to administrator, but all the buttons always result in the infamous Interne fout page.
The practical upshot of this defective page is that you cannot remove users from your project. This is particularly relevant for Premium users, who can share their projects with at most four others.

add person

The multi-user feature seems unfinished. I've tested it using two accounts and two browsers. After sharing a project with another user, the other user gets access to the project, but rather limited access. Perhaps shared projects are by default read-only for all others participants, and one of the buttons that does not work yet allows you to provide modifying privileges, but right now, others users cannot add new persons to a project, nor edit existing ones. Right now, it provides the other users no more than read-only access to the shared project. That makes the sharing feature rather useless already.

StamboomNederland's so-called collaboration feature is merely a multi-user feature.

multi-user

Another thing that makes the shared projects of limited value is that it are merely multi-user projects, not collaboration projects. The Central Bureau of Genealogy asked the developers to create a system that support collaboration, but all the developers delivered is seemingly defective and certainly still unfinished multi-user system. There are no collaboration features.
Users are not informed that they have received access to a project. Project owners are not informed that a user deceived to leave a project. No one is informed when another user makes a change. There is no change log, there is no overview of disputes or tasks. There are no collaboration features at all. StamboomNederland's so-called collaboration feature is merely a multi-user feature.

media

One feature paying users get access to is the ability to upload images and documents. StamboomNederland restricts this to just one image and one document format; JPEG and PDF. That is strange already; an archive should support lossless image formats, such as PNG. When I tried to upload a PNG file, StamboomNederland told me that Only PDF and JPG files are allowed.
That StamboomNederland supports a lossy format without supporting a lossless format is odd.

The feature to upload a media is not in a remotely logical place. It was only after a fairly exhaustive search through the idiosyncratic menu that I happened upon the feature.

StamboomNederland treats media as sources; media can be added as a source. To add media, choose the ADD SOURCE button on the Sources page. There, provide a name for the source, and choose the source type from the drop-down menu to create source. Then, when the source has been created, choose the Citations buttons to bring up the UPLOAD FILE button. I am not making this less than unintuitive approach up; it is you have to choose the Citations buttons on Source data page to get an UPLOAD FILE button on that Source data page. It gets even more ridiculous; the page where you upload the file is the Upload citation page.

This is not usable, it is not even confusing, it is completely messed up. This user interface is proof positive that the developers do not understand what a source or citation is - and that in turn explains why their GEDCOM import and export is so messed up.

reports

The report feature is neither as hard to find, nor as illogical, but it is very limited.
There are no reports at the project level. Reports are only available for individuals. You cannot just select that individual in the project overview and then choose to create a report. You must go to edit page for that person, the Person details page to see the SHOW REPORT button.

Notice the SHOW REPORT button in the bottom shadow of the Show report dialog.

There is just one SHOW REPORT button, and it supports just a few report types; pedigree, pedigree table, patrilineal descent, bilateral descent and patriline. Once again, the poor Dutch to English translations make you wonder what report types they meant.
A little trial and error will show you what's what, but it matters little. There is something very odd going on here. StamboomNederland is a web application, yet it does not show report on the web.
StamboomNederland does not create web pages, it only creates PDF and RTF document. Note that you cannot upload an RTF report created by another user as media for your project; if you try to upload that RTF file, StamboomNederland will refuse its own output.

That blue SHOW REPORT button on the Show report should really a DOWNLOAD REPORT button. When you click that button, you do not get to see report, you merely download a file.
Never mind that there are just a few reports, and that there almost no user-selectable options. As a web application, StamboomNederland fails anyway. Output to PDF and RTF are nice extras, but a web application should show its reports on the web.

The GEDCOM export functionality should not be a paid feature and none of the other paid features is worth paying for.

overall

The overall impression of the paid features make is extremely poor.
The ostensible collaboration feature is merely a multi-user feature without any support for collaboration. The management of project users does not work and the continued lack of proper user accounts means that collaborators are still identified by their email address.

Support for media is limited to just one image and one document formats. The convoluted process for uploading a media file merely proofs that the developers do not understand sources and citations. The report functionality is really a download report functionality; StamboomNederland will not show any report.
The GEDCOM export functionality should not be a paid feature and none of the other paid features is worth paying for.

 

Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.