ACE Organic was originally developed at the University of Kentucky (UK) with funding from Prentice Hall. In Spring 2005, a fully tested and validated version of ACE was migrated to a Prentice Hall server. This version, currently ACE 1.6.1, is now used commercially.

Meanwhile, development of ACE, now funded by the National Science Foundation, has continued at UK. The UK version, ACE 1.7, has many features that are absent in ACE 1.6.1, and new features are continually added.

If you have used the Prentice Hall version of ACE previously, be aware that the way that ACE 1.7 matches students with their instructors' courses is different from ACE 1.6.1. In ACE 1.6.1, an instructor provides a course number to his or her students, and the students enter that number in ACE to enroll in the course. In ACE 1.7, the instructor uploads a class list, and students whose ID numbers are in that list are automatically enrolled in the course. (Eventually, when ACE 1.7 is implemented commercially, it will employ the method currently employed by ACE 1.6.1.)

ACE 1.7 is a beta version of ACE, so occasionally the program will go down for maintenance or implementation of new features. The likelihood that undiscovered bugs are lurking in the code is also substantially higher than it is for the already commercial ACE 1.6.1. By using ACE 1.7, you acknowledge that ACE may occasionally not work properly. We will try to alert you when we need to bring ACE down, but you understand that ACE may go down for unanticipated reasons. At the same time, you will have access to new features as soon as they are implemented.

One major difference between ACE 1.6.1 and ACE 1.7 is that the support provided by Prentice Hall for ACE 1.6.1 is absent in ACE 1.7. Prentice Hall's username and password help is not available in ACE 1.7, nor is 24-hour support. Please be patient with us if you have a problem with ACE.

Your help in alerting us to any bugs that you may discover is most appreciated. Please be specific about what you did that elicited the bug and about what happened. Always include the names and versions of your operating system and browser. If there was a problem with a particular question, please include the question number or a description of the question. Also, paste the Marvin source code (choose Edit → Source) that elicited the error message into an email message.