- Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)
- 30 Jul 00
Architosh Macworld
Expo Report - 3
Like most years at Expo New York, we strove to look around more
carefully for those discreet diamonds in the rough. Every expo has
a number of new smaller developers, or an older developer showing
for the first time in years. This third report focuses on some of
the more obscure products shown at Macworld.
This Report: Graphing and Data Analysis Software, Business Software
and Internet Security Software.
Chronos Organizer and Group Organizer
These two products are really great. Really! This is one of those
products that Windows users would love to have but don't because
Chrones LC is
a true-blooded Macintosh developer.
At Expo we asked if there was going to be a cross-platform version
for mixed environments and they said no. Not at this point in time.
Just prior to that discussion we watched and overhead the two Microsoft
product managers for the Macintosh version of Outlook Express ask
detailed questions about the product. They acted like volchers hovering
above the solo presentative to Chronos, asking pointed and detailed
questions about features and the future.
The Chronos rep asked back if they had anything like what Chrono's
Personal Organizer could do and they said not yet and not for awhile.
It was clear to anyone around that Microsoft truly admires this
product in a super big way.
Chronos
Organizer was the first product—with Group Organizer coming
just recently. Personal Organizer is a calendar, address book, word
processor (yes, you read that right!) project manager, memo taker,
telephone dialer and alarm clock all rolled into one program. The
product is also Palm/Visor Sync compatible.
Some other nice touches—especially for design professionals
like architects—include Gannt charts for managing individual
project information (like AEC Software's FastTrack Scheduler 7)
and a Personal Diary component where you can record those important
notes in your professional life.
The product lets you dress up your calendar with Themes, using
different combinations of colors and even pictures.
Group
Organizer is the networked version of the program. It naturally
supports multi-user network access to common calendars and functions.
The administrator sets user preferences from the server side.
Some key features of Group Org are its ability to use both AppleTalk
and TCP/IP networking, off-network working with your group's data
and then automatic syncronization the next time you log onto your
network. This last feature is great for PowerBook users. For Palm
Pilot users you can even syncronize your group calendars and contacts
over the Internet.
For more info go to Chronos
LC. on the Web.
Meeting Maker 6
Meeting Maker, by On Technology,
is known in the Mac community for its enterprise level abilities...really
the only product for the Mac in this class (although one could argue
that FirstClass Intranet Server is just as good). Apple has been
using it for up to 700 employees around the world for years.
The fact that it can scale like that is one of its neat qualities.
If you are starting small but plan on getting real big, this a software
you can grow into.
Meeting Maker is a true cross-platform, multiuser scheduling application.
The product runs on Solaris, Mac OS, NT and Windows 95/98. Win2000
support should be there as well. At Expo we asked about Mac OS X
and they had a beta version running on a PowerBook G3 running Mac
OS X DP4. It looked real nice...simple but sophisticated enough
that Macworld probably wouldn't take a shot at its interface like
it did in a review in 1999.
New in version 6 is the ability to syncronize with Palm OS devices
and access schedules over the Web via a Java client. This makes
this a true international, mobile users' dream scheduler. Meeting
Maker is apparently excellent and proposing meetings, scheduling
activities and arbitrating among people's schedules.
For design and engineering firms with mixed Mac/Windows/UNIX/Linux
environments, Meeting Maker 6 may just be the perfect application
to serve everyone's needs.
[Editor's note: in recent news, On Technology has teamed up with
Red Hat Linux folks to bring Meeting Maker to the Linux platform.
Meeting Maker is the corporate standard for group scheduling at
Red Hat as well. This clearly is good news for the company and fans
of the product.]
For more information go to On
Technology on the Web.
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