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askSam Professional
v5.1
Reviewed
by: Jack
Reikel, send
e-mail
Published
by: askSam
Systems, go
to the web site
Requires: Windows
98 or later
MSRP: $149.95
(Standard), $395.00 (Pro); upgrades: $89.95-$139.95 or
free depending on your current version
askSam
is a database flexible enough to organize years of e-mail,
documents of all kinds, research notes, simple names and
addresses, spreadsheets and anything else you can think
of (testimony from court cases for all you lawyers?), and
which also provides full text indexing to give you fast
searches and access to everything you've stored. You can
access more information than you could in previous versions
of askSam - on the Internet, via e-mail, on CD-ROMs or
in files on your hard drive. askSam turns the information
into searchable databases. Since we last reviewed askSam,
the programmers have been hard at work and this update
is well worth a look (v5.1 is a free update for existing
v5.0 users).
We use
askSam in our computer hardware labs primarily for information
storage and searching of product reviews, product datasheets,
product promotional materials and spec sheets. It's handy
and fast and users aren't restricted to predetermined database
formats. Traditional databases are designed to handle structured
data - you pre-define a structure then shove your data
into the available space. askSam, on the other hand, does
not require predefined structure or field lengths, you
can search without learning a query language, and you can
create reports without programming (either manually or
with the help of the Report Creation Wizard). Most reports
retain context sensitivity so that source document links
remain active. You can also combine both free-form and
fielded information in the database.
Because the askSam user interface looks and feels a bit
like a word processor, the learning curve is mercifully
short. We were able to access most versions of all of the
following file formats: Adobe PDF Files, text files, RTF
files, HTML files, hypertext links to external web sites,
Microsoft Word and WordPerfect documents, e-mail messages
(we tried Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat,
Netscape, etc.), databases (Microsoft Access, dBASE - we
did not try Paradox or ODBC), Microsoft Excel, comma delimited,
tab delimited and fixed-position data. We also used askSam
to directly import documents scanned using TextBridge's
optical character recognition (OCR), and to compile questionnaire
information and generate reports.
Once
your information is in askSam, you can search for any
information contained
in fields or in free form. askSam
offers a wider variety of searches many other database
programs and some of the fastest and most powerful searches
you'll find anywhere. The search list includes full-text
searches for any word or phrase, wildcard searches with
* and ?, Boolean searches (AND, OR and NOT), proximity
searches, numeric searches (>, <, >=, <=, <>),
date searches, fuzzy searches, searches through multiple
askSam databases and case sensitive searches.
Cons:
askSam's user interface is reasonably clean but you need
to spend
a lot of time with the program in order
to make the most effective use of all the power under the
hood. It's not a "Con" strictly speaking but
you also have to spend a lot of time in the Help system
in order to fully understand the range of features in the
program. If you don't read the product documentation, you
may not be able to take advantage of askSam's real power.
Pros: askSam works fast and stores/accesses enormous amounts
of data. This is a serious tool for people who are serious
about information management and information access. If
you have thousands of e-mails and thousands of documents
(in your business or field of study) which are stored in
a network location or across many locations, askSam is
an ideal information manager which allows you to effectively
mine all of your data. Reasonably good software development
kit (SDK), decent report generation out of the box, solid
support on the web site. askSam v3.x users should upgrade
now (thereby automatically eliminating the need for any
more hypertext/link workarounds); lots of improvements
for v4 users too. Highly recommended.
Letters to the Editor are welcome and occasionally abused in public. Send e-mail to: whine@kickstartnews.com
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