Communications Database

The bane of my existence right now, the combination of contact, list, and subscription management that is taking place in the communications database and my own database. Now communications wants to move away from using access. Jonah's organizing a meeting next week for us to consider our options. I've been assigned to investigate our alternatives. I have a few ideas, and will probably even be open to a non-homegrown application as long as it's flexible enough to be customized to fit our needs. I'll need to investigate some other options as well, though. AAAS should have something we could latch onto if we wanted. I'm sure there are some open-source products out there (Ed, as always, is pushing this option). Sean suggested at the low end we could use ACT! or something similar. And then there's always the option of me creating our own system, which I had already started in order to alleviate a number of problems that we're having (data mainenance, duplication) as well as address some needs (user-control, web site customization). I have one week to get all the info together.