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| Dec Feb |
Blogchalk:
Portsmouth, NH, US
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Monday, January 13, 2003
- Prethink
works like a search engine for small offices, home offices,
workgroups, or individuals.
- Prethink doesn't poke around your network looking for
documents. Instead you feed it documents that you want available for
search.
- You can send Prethink email. It will index your email and make it
available for searches.
- Prethink can listen to weblogs (RSS feeds). It will index posts and
make them part of its search database.
- You can import entire directories of files.
- Prethink does not run in a browser. It is a regular Windows
application.
- You can drag and drop files onto Prethink's client window and they
will be added to the search database.
- Prethink saves you time, energy, and a few brain cells every time you
don't have to hunt around your network or your hard drive looking for
a document that "you know you have here somewhere".
- When you don't have to remember where you saved things, you can
remember much more important stuff.
- By freeing up room in your head and preserving brain cells, Prethink
can make you smarter.1
- If you have Microsoft Word installed on your computer, Prethink can
understand Word documents. It will index the contents of these just
like any other file.
- Prethink consists of a server and clients. A server running on one
machine on your network stores all the documents, handles the
indexing, and processes search requests from the clients.
- Even though Prethink has a server and clients, it is very easy to set
up. You can get it running in fifteen minutes or less.
- The underlying architecture (called Arsenal) is designed to be open
and extensible. We haven't published the SOAP or Python interfaces yet
because they haven't been sufficiently frozen. Look for this sometime
this spring.
- Prethink is not open source, but you will have a significant portion
of the source available. It is written in Python and the interface
between client and server is SOAP, so many people will be able to
customize its behavior without much trouble.
- Prethink only costs $50
per user. Volume discounts are available: talk to us.
- $50 gets you a year of support and upgrades. Support is through our
website. Upgrades will be automatic beginning with v1.1. If, after a
year, you no longer wish to get support and upgrades, you can still
use the software.
- We host our bug
database online, out in front of everyone. We've tried to make it
easy for you to report bugs and make feature requests.
- You aren't locked in. Files are stored (unmangled) on the server. Data
is stored unencrypted in a standard database format. Although we don't
recommend it, you could extract all of your data with a simple Python
program. (We don't recommend it because, while it is trivial to
reverse-engineer, the database schema is unpublished and subject to
change.)
- Backing up your Prethink database is a piece of cake.
1 Note: this statement has not been evaluated by the FDA
and is not a guarantee. Prethink may not actually raise your IQ. But
at least people will think you're smarter, and that doesn't hurt,
right?
12:58:06 PM
#
I just uploaded a free demo for those who want to try Prethink before they make a purchase. If you have any questions while you're testing it, please email me (brian at silverback-software.com).
5:58:06 PM
#
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© Copyright 2003 Brian St. Pierre.
Last update: 1/13/2003; 5:58:47 PM.
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