Re: Character v Gui

Simon, found your website, both of them! Nice roadster! DMS Sounds like a
great app.

I've been in the trade since before you were born, 33 years with IBM, NCR,
then PICK now with a very expensive back-office system for the reinsurance
business for over 20 years.

I've maintained since the advent of the 'first' gui that worked and
therefore 'required' the mouse, AND let the users do anything they wanted
to, so-called 'event' stuff, that not only is it ineffiecient, it is
expensive to maintain and even more prone to users able to put erroneous
info into the database.

I gave my users lookups, using Wintegrate, a great UK product built by David
Robertshaw and now sold by IBM,  that allowed them to pick and choose codes,
a DDE download system that allowed them to extract data to disk for picking
up by Excel based upon subroutines from Wintegrate, and an MS-SQL
Datawarehouse that 'un-normalized' my database to allow them to use Crystal
and Excel to generate their own reports. That has satisfied "All of the
Users" but, of course, the DP staff has nothing to do except enhance their
resumes so "Where is GUI"  is asked every year at audit time. I just remind
them that adding a hand movement to data entry is ineffiecient from an
Industrial Engineering review and that they will alienate their user
community. Users only have to get to 5PM on Friday, the harder we make it
for them to complete the work, the angier they get at not being able to
complete it, at US!

I was tested against a competitor's product once before a final sale to a
Billion USD Reinsurance company in Bermuda.

My Competitor had this all singing, all dancing Java based system over
AS-400 SQL. Our applications are similatr, it takes 6 pages of information
to completly fill out a reinsurance contract on-line.

His time: 22 Minutes per contract average for five contracts, 110 Minutes

My Time 4 Minutes average for the same 5 contracts, 20 Minutes, 75% less
user time!

You can still sell with "no mousie" if you logically present it to them. I o
nce built a simple single screen demo of the most complex 'basic details' of
my application to demonstrate this. It works to defeat GUI when they see the
drop downs mouse point etc, sub forms for associated MV's etc. etc.

We also tried to maintain two systems once, a couple of Million later we
dropped the idea.

Nice talking to you in this forum, if you'd like to know how I did SQL, just
drop me an email. It was pretty simple once we got SQL-2000.

Nick


"Simon Verona" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> You know the problem with groups like this.?
>
> If you read it in isolation, you only find out about all the problems
people
> are having with Multivalue products.   Particularly may of the challenges
> involved in interfacing applications with the outside world - particuarly
> the graphical world.
>
> It's nice though that in recent threads, people have come forward asking
the
> question "Whats wrong with multi-value?" "Whats wrong with a character
> interface".     Personally, whilst the big technical struggle for me at
the
> moment is providing a gui, I don't actually believe that it will improve
my
> application for the end users (rather the opposite for most people).
>
> Our application (which is 99.9% character based) is probably one of the
most
> feature-rich in the industry. Probably has one of the lowest total cost of
> ownership compared with competitors with anywhere near the feature set.
>
> We've decided that we will continue long-term with both a character and
> graphical interface.  Where we gui'ze a part of our application it is only
> done if the gui version provides extra features that the character version
> can't.  I also try to ensure that the data entry screens we have gui'ized
> can be used without a mouse whereever possible.   I'm amazed at how
> difficult that is to write sometimes!!!
>
> Anyways, personally I still maintain that MV still has it's place in the
> world - whether as a back-end database for a windows/web application or
for
> producing superb character applications.  It just needs some tweaking to
> make the former just that little bit easier!
>
> Just one more 2 Euro installment early on a Saturday morning!
>
> Regards
> Simon
> "Nick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > "Semi-Retired" Tony, I still do 30 or so hours a month, and the handicap
> is
> > coming down!
> >
> > My compadre in Bermuda went thru this with RD, got the typical, "You can
> try
> > anything you like but we won't support it". Yep, I could write it to,
gave
> > the user a 50K price tag and have the design done. They gulped real hard
> on
> > that...
> >
> > How did you like my new logo to go along with Gus' MV,  A "circle and a
> > slash thru a PC Mouse", "No mousie mousie here!"
> >
> > We still have not gui-ized a thing except some simple wintegrate stuff,
no
> > complaints yet as we are still the fastest data entry environment in our
> > business..
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Nick
> > "Tony Gravagno" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > > 5 thoughts:
> > > -----------
> > > 1) I don't think there are any software solutions that will work but
> > > they can certainly be custom written.  I'd do it if there was real
> > > demand.
> > > 2) Not that you asked, but D3 does not support Clustering as it's
> > > understood in the industry, so disk mirroring is not equal to hot
> > > failover.  However, with an n-tier solution, code could be written to
> > > do an auto-failover with minimal interruption.
> > > 3) Check with RD to see if D3 8.0 has some solution for this.  I doubt
> > > it, but it's worth asking about.  Hot backup isn't supported in
> > > pre-8.0 releases over NT but as mentioned in #1 it's do-able.
> > > 4) I haven't had any coffee yet today so my answers are more
> > > "nebulous" than normal.
> > > 5) I thought you were lucky enough to be retiring away from this...
> > >
> > > Tony
> > >
> > > "Nick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >
> > > >Thanks for the Info on my Previous Post
> > > >
> > > >Does anyone have a Software Solution that works with D3/NT, the
client
> > > >wishes to have
> > > >two separate machines..
> > > >
> > > >Thanks,
> > > >
> > > >Nick
> > > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>