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Technology Stocks : Enterprise Informatics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bob zagorin who wrote (3708)	5/19/1999 4:33:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13797

Bob, no, not in over a year. I'm sure they have radically improved it since then. I had a quick look through the material available on their web site. About all I can glean from that is they have gone whole hog on Microsoft technologies. That is about on part with many of the smaller and most of the larger players. That they've adopted MTS and Queue services is slightly different although in the long term direction for most. COM / DCOM based applications are pretty much the thing now. So on the technology platform front, they are more or less on par with others. They still have their TIE technology which offers some benefit in large image handling. As far as differentiating functionality I didn't really pick up on anything that grabbed me. I'd be interested in seeing any other marketing and technical materials that may be available. Its very hard to make a judgement without hands on using the product and more importantly hands on implementing. I'm willing to accept for now that it will be a competent product in these respects. I can tell you that most products we've used all have their strenghts and weaknesses and I would expect the same. One key aspect of how a product will be accepted is in the area of customization. All products say they are fully customizable, no argument there. What makes a real difference is how the customization is carried out. Let me explain. - you need to develop customization to allow data entry forms to do something that the original product doesn't do out of the box. What are your choices. Do you / must you: - simply "add" to the existing functionality a snippet of code that adds the needed functionality, or; - replace the entire form with custom work in order to obtain the needed functionality. Virtually all vendor/products allow for the later. Some also allow for the former (sometimes the result is not as nice). What this flexibility gives you is speed of implementation and lower cost. One of the key things we would look for in a product review. Integration hooks are very important and more importantly how often are you forced to do low level or replacement type development. Altris WinTrack was terrible in this regard. The end solutions were cumbersome, prone to break. I'm sure EB is not this way, but would be looking for confirmation of this assumption. It would be nice if there were some compelling differentiators that stood out. In the absense of that, then what does the company add that differentiates itself to customers, to partners. I don't know. (On other subject raised yesterday I noted that Altris is basically OEM'ing StaffWare for workflow. That's an acceptable solution and at least gives them some mind share at Staffware.) Probably more than you wanted to know... Cheers