Article #4
Whew! - Releif for People Drowning in Email
ÿ
By CRAIG MENEFEE
02/24/98 ALPINE, UTAH, U.S.A.
1998 FEB 24 (NB)
(NEWS)(PC)(SFO)(00054)
Utah firm WordCruncher Internet Technologies (WCTI) has created a little $9.95 downloadable utility program called Whew! to keep track of information that could otherwise be lost in a rising flood of e-mail.
The firm's president, Dan Lunt, told Newsbytes it seems to him it's about time someone offered an inexpensive solution to people drowning in a sea of formatted electronic messages.
Lunt knows about formatting problems. He was one of the first four people at WordPerfect in the early 1980s, back when that program took corporate word processing away from then-dominant WordStar. He rose to become vice president of marketing in the glory years before Microsoft stepped up with Office, leaving WordPerfect out in the same kind of cold place WordPerfect had left WordStar, years before.
Nothing lasts forever. Lunt says a year and a half ago he helped found WCTI specifically to go commercial with some technology created over a 10-year span at Utah's Brigham Young University. He sees the WCTI filtering and indexing technology as similar to the early WordPerfect.
When WordPerfect was developed, he explained, using WordStar to print documents was largely a matter of guesswork. Lunt describes the original WordPerfect as an attempt to solve that problem and as "an early stab at a WYSIWYG [what-you-see-is-what-you-get] word processor."
"That's pretty much where e-mail is now," he adds.
What Whew! does is maintain a searchable index of every e-mail message on a user's machine, even if messages are created by multiple e-mail programs.
Users then can search for single words, word lists, exact or partial phrases, and word combinations. The program supports proximity searches (find coyote within 10 words of roadrunner) and fielded searches (find coyote in the Subject field).
When a search term is located, the program returns a "Reference List" showing a paragraph from the "hit" with search terms highlighted. Showing "hits" in context helps users screen out the irrelevant ones.
Clicking an item then brings up a full screen with the message.
The Whew! program is actually a subset of a much larger publishing-related WCTI program suite but can be downloaded separately. It currently works with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and Internet Mail, n Netscape 3 and 4, Eudora 4.0 and cc:Mail Version 8.0 (using Windows Messaging), the firm says.
A downloadable version that times out after 14 days is available on the World Wide Web at wordcruncher.com. Reported by Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .
Press & Reader Contact:
James Johnston
WordCruncher Internet Technologies, Inc.
801-756-8833
johnston@wordcruncher.com
|
