Has anyone else been trialing the beta of version 6 of AskSam? I've been trying it out over the past week and I think they may have actually begun to make this program workable. The key new feature relating to this forum is the virtual folder list that creates an hierarchical view of your data.

The way this works is that you can designate a field as a folder view. When you enter a word or phrase in this field, it shows the new record in a folder named that word. For instance, say you have a Field called "projects," you can then view your data broken out by project. Type "Marketing Plan" in the field and there will be a folder for Marketing Plan and any records you create with Marketing Plan in the project field will show up under that folder. A cool feature is that you can also create subfolders automatically. So, type "Marketing Plan\Ad Campaign" in the project field and you will have a subfolder of the Marketing Plan folder called Ad Campaign. You can also switch which field is the folder field, which might also be useful with certain kinds of data.

So, I guess they've been learning a little from ECCO and Zoot.

There are several other significant improvements. You can see a listing of these at the following URL:

http://www.asksam.com/beta/asksam6/fixlog.asp

Steve Z.

Having used the DOS version of AskSam, I went on to buy the Windows version when it came out - first, v3, and then v5. For some reason, though - I think because I was so wed to Lotus Agenda and Lotus Magellan at the time - I never really warmed to the program, which requires everything to be imported into it before it can be indexed and searched.

For my purposes, a combination of Zoot plus an indexed search program seems to fulfil my needs, probably because it is so like the Agenda+Magellan combo, and because it was able to import my Agenda files so well.

As my search program I first used Wilbur (free), then dtSearch - although X1 is getting better all the time - to index everything that won't go into Zoot. This means mainly long txt, doc, pdf, and htm files, which I keep in a logical folder structure on my hard disk. Where I have comments to make on the files I have indexed, I make them in Zoot and link the file in question to the comment.

This is a pretty simple arrangement and has its clunky aspects, but Zoot is so useful that I'd be reluctant to give it up now. However, it does sound from what you say as though AskSam may be moving towards combining these features. And a big advantage of AS for some people is its reporting facilities. Maybe it's time I took another look...

Derek

Whenever I've looked at AskSam, I have been dismayed by the price difference between the professional and standard versions. Its effect may be comparable to the effect on you of ndxCards' policy, in that to get all the features one wants one is forced to pay disproportionately. (I think the differentiation of the ndxCards versions will probably increase as the program develops.)

Stephen Diamond