FileMaker bucking enterprise trend with latest version
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Bigger and brawnier isn't necessarily better for everyone. FileMaker's new desktop database adheres to the Apple division's credo that ease of installation and use is more important to its user community than whizzy new features that add bulk and complexity.
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Feature Consolidation runs and runs
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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The Open Document Format saw a marked uptick in use last year across the globe, according to the ODF Alliance&#39;s 2007 report.Twelve countries and six regional governments have adopted &quot;pro-ODF policies,&quot; according to the group, composed of companies and organizations that advocate for the format. The latest countries are the Netherlands and South Africa, which require government agencies to use the format. Also, more than 40 applications now support ODF, and the Alliance&#39;s membership ranks are set to rise above 500, according to the report.&quot;Considering where we started when we launched the alliance back in 2006, the developments in 2007 are amazing in terms of the progress that has been made,&quot; said Marino Marcich, managing director of the group.&quot;It&#39;s one thing to recognize ODF as a matter of policy in an enterprise architecture framework and another to mandate its use,&quot; he added. &quot;Proprietary formats in the public sphere are going out of style and becoming unacceptable globally.&quot;The ODF Alliance&#39;s report marks another chapter in the long-brewing debate over Microsoft&#39;s Office Open XML document format and ODF, which is supported by the likes of Sun Microsystems&#39; StarOffice application suite and Google&#39;s hosted productivity software.OOXML is the native file format in Microsoft Office 2007, and&#160;Microsoft is attempting to get it recognized as a standard. ODF advocates have lambasted OOXML, calling it far too proprietary to warrant such a stamp of approval.Marcich echoed that charge. &quot;Microsoft certainly has the right to advance its proprietary format,&quot; he said. &quot;What it doesn&#39;t have the right to do is call OOXML open and interoperable. ... We&#39;d love it if Microsoft supported ODF in its products natively.&quot;Despite the prevalence of Office software, ODF nonetheless has a chance to thrive, Marcich argued.Today, he noted, Microsoft&#39;s&#160;DOC format, not OOXML, is still dominant. &quot;If the question is &#39;what is the future,&#39; clearly ODF has the lead right now,&quot; he said.OOXML cannot supplant&#160;DOC until the majority of organizations and users upgrade to Office 2007, he noted, a process that will not occur imminently.&quot;We have a window here where governments have time to make a decision as to upgrading,&quot; he said. &quot;I think 2008 will be a critical year as to which format will emerge as the format of the future.&quot;Another ODF advocate, Andy Updegrove, also expressed pleasure over ODF&#39;s adoption to date and optimism about its future. &quot;The tipping point has been passed. I don&#39;t think it will lead to a deluge, but progress will continue,&quot; said Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston. Updegrove serves as legal counsel to technology companies as well as standards bodies, including OASIS, and closely tracks the ODF-OOXML saga on his blog.Updegrove predicted that 2008 will be &quot;a tough year for Office,&quot; pointing beyond ODF and OOXML to broader trends in computer usage. &quot;The monolithic idea of an office suite is really eroding, and the younger you are, the more meaningless it becomes,&quot; he said.Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment Friday.Another win for ODF in the United States could come soon. New York officials are expected to decide which format the state will use in its systems. The public comment period for the matter had originally been scheduled to end on Dec. 28, but an updated document on the state&#39;s Web site indicates that the period has been extended to Jan. 18.
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EnterpriseWizard this week is releasing the 2.0 version of its CRM application, a product built on top of its SaaSWizard Web application development platform and designed to be easily customizable.EnterpriseWizard 2.0 employs templates and drag-and-drop style customization of tables and fields through a browser-based interface. Users can also define business rules, sketch out workflows, and generate reports. Other new features include an improved search engine and the ability to automatically transmit information from a client computer when a trouble ticket is sent out.The SaaSWizard platform represents &quot;man-centuries of development,&quot; rather than the man-hours usually used as a measure, according to CEO Colin Earl. But EnterpriseWizard is not alone in offering end users the ability to change its application.&#160;SAP&#39;s recently unveiled CRM 2007&#160;product features an Web 2.0-style interface that users can manipulate to their liking.A difference lies in EnterpriseWizard&#39;s underlying business model. Earl said his company is looking to partner with systems integrators and value-added resellers. The company hopes they will use the core SaaSWizard platform to create and sell customized applications -- both CRM (customer relationship management) and other types -- to customers in vertical industries.&quot;Our vision is not to build these products ourselves,&quot; he said.Many on-demand software companies have the wrong idea, he argued. &quot;What I see happening in the market is the SaaS vendors have a direct sales model, and they are effectively trying to take the whole pie for themselves. I think this is a strategic mistake,&quot; he said.While the J2EE-based product is available on-demand, it is also possible to deploy it on an internal server, a fact that drew a nod from one close observer of the CRM scene.&quot;Generally, the fact they offer both on-premise and SaaS is great -- we feel customers like the choice of being able to move seamlessly between the two environments, assuming the two products are functionally the same,&quot; China Martens, an analyst with the 451 Group, said via e-mail.&quot;It&#39;s impressive they&#39;ve retained high-end customers over years such as Chevron and have a bit under 400 customers in total,&quot; she added. &quot;If they do want to garner more attention amid the plethora of their competition, we&#39;d expect them to seek some VC funding, also advice from VCs as to how to best grow their business.&quot;The company has about 40 employees and financially is &quot;very healthy&quot; these days, according to Earl, though he acknowledges that the years spent developing SaaSWizard were &quot;pretty lean.&quot;EnterpriseWizard costs $65 per staff user per month for the hosted product, and $950 per staff user if it is purchased outright on Linux, with unlimited end-user access, according to a spokesman. The company also offers the software for purchase on Windows or Solaris for about $1,150 per staff user.End users have limited capabilities, including the ability to submit and update their own records, whereas staff users -- such as sales representatives -- have a more sophisticated interface and can gain the ability to change records from other users, the spokesman said.
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Users of the popular compression tool should upgrade their software, company says.
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Microsoft Wednesday released the latest versions of its performance and monitoring tool, which forms a cornerstone in its plan to create a management platform for Windows.
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On tap for the new database management system: improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what Oracle dubs "diagnosability."
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The new FileNet release sports a J2EE-based content engine and content federation services for third-party repositories.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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FileMaker has offered more information about&#160;problems when running FileMaker&#160;on Mac OS X 10.5&#160;Leopard.FileMaker has also confirmed that it has not tested earlier (pre-FileMaker 9) versions of its software on Leopard, and will not&#160;release Leopard&#160;compatibility updates for earlier versions.The company is currently aware of two incompatibilities: with Leopard each language version of FileMaker Pro 9 and FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced works only when the Mac OS System Preference &#39;International Formats Region&#39; is set to a specific region. The second problem is that Instant Web Publishing doesn&#39;t work.&quot;The English language version of FileMaker works only when the region is United States. It does not work when the region is United Kingdom, or Australia, or France, or any other region,&quot; the company explains.&quot;FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced currently do not deploy properly on Leopard. We are working on Leopard compatibility updates for FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced but do not have an estimated availability date at this time,&quot; the company said in a support note.The company seems to be aiming to release its Leopard compatibility update on Nov. 19.Macworld.co.uk is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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Everyone's a 'developer' now More evidence that the nature of applications development is changing has come with the announcement of the latest version of NetSuite's SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings, which take some significant steps along the road to bridging the gap between business users and applications development.â¦
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New version of accounting software for small businesses has also been designed to increase efficiency.
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Storage Expo Iomega punts a hard disk autoloader
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NetEase gets a timely upgrade after early success with a new title.
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Blog: Software maker says it's ready with a near-final "release candidate" version, which will find its way on to servers later this year.
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Several different versions of the enterprise messaging service will be released.