roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (04/30/91)
A couple of years ago we decide to move away from using services
like BRS to search Medline and move it in-house on CD-ROMS. After looking
around, we decided that KnowledgeFinder from Aries Systems was the way to
go. The idea was to put the database on an AppleShare server and let people
access it over the network from the Macs in their offices, as well as public
access ones in the library, etc. To make a long story short, the hardware
finally arrived yesterday; I now have an SE/30 with an 80-meg hard disk, 6
CD-ROM drives, and AppleShare server software, and it's time to order the
database. The question is whether KnowledgeFinder is still the way to go.
The two absolutely inflexible requirements are that it has to run on
Macs and it has to be networkable. When we first explored this, KF was the
only system which was; is that still the case, or have other companies
ported their stuff to Macs now?
Also, is KF still a good product judged on its own merits? When we
first looked at it, there were some fears that Aries, being a small
one-product startup, might go out of business, or simply not have enough
manpower to continue development of new versions. Have they managed to
attract enough customers to obviate this fear? Have they continued to
develop and improve the software? The KF demo that comes on the Apple
CD-Explorer disk is still the same version they were shipping in 1988. Are
there new (better, hopefully) versions out now?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"