Just got a mail about a promotion offer on AskSam (USD 89), so I thought I'd better check out my trial. I followed their tutorial, and quite quickly it appeared that even though it has something like the smart folders in Zoot, you can't choose e.g. categories from a picklist when adding new records, like you can in Zoot, and many other programs. This doesn't seem very convenient. Maybe I misunderstood something, as AskSam was proposed here recently as an alternative to Zoot, and is indeed a very mature product (in terms of life time). But from my first impression, it doesn't seem nearly as versatile.

-Peter.

Peter,

I have had a license for askSam for years, even upgraded to the new version, more out of habit than anything, I guess. It inevitably disappoints me. Your intitial reaction, that it isn't nearly as versatile as Zoot, is also my experience. What sets it apart from most info-manager databases, is that you can choose to create fields or not. If you create fields, you can then print tabular reports, which is not possible with most of the hierarchical databases we discuss... although, you can do so with Zoot. Nevertheless, even the reporting function in askSam seems rather weak. I do keep some data in askSam and when I need to print it, I actually output it to a CSV file (which it does pretty well), then open that file in Excel.

Also, the $89 price is for the non-pro version. This version does not include the indexing that makes askSam fairly powerful. I got the same promotional e-mail, and I believe they are also offering a major discount on the pro version, which is usually $400, but in this offer is $195. If you decide you want to use askSam, definitely spring for the pro version.

Steve Z.

Its some time since I used Asksam ( I upgraded to 5.1 professional, but never got around to installing it)but yes you can set up pick lists for fields - as far as I remember. Don't ask me how, and I see the online help makes no mention of it, but persevere it should be there, as I rmember there were global pick lists and field pick lists.

Asksam is a very different tool to Zoot. Once upon a time, I used AskSam for everything, I had a database using fields for bibliographic records, I imported Word, PDFs and Outlook into AS to make them searchable, and I had several other databases set up for random data. It was low on resources and was fairly versatile.

However, I started to use Zoot, and Zoot was far better at dealing with random data than AskSam. I got fed up importing files into AS. just so they could be searched, and replaced that functionality with DTSearch, and then found out about file linking with Zoot. I bought a proper bibliogaphic database, because my Asksam database still didn't create bibliographies inside a Word processor.

For a spell I stuck with AS for records that needed to be formatted, it worked far faster than Zoot at searching imported Outlook emails, and if you needed a more formal database with nicley formatted reports then AskSam was streets ahead of Zoot. But eventually, my use just drifted away.

I do occasionally think about re-installing it just for the Outlook capability, but that seems a bit of an overkill, and for formatted records, I would certainly be looking at something like UltraRecall now.

AskSam was revolutionary in its day, I think I originally bought version 2, but apart from some special purposes, I am struggling to think of any every day use that isn't done better by other things.

I would love to be shown wrong however, as I have a great fondness for the program, and every so often I come across the CD and think about re-installing it.

Graham

Peter,

Have a look at

http://www.asksam.com/asksamtips.asp?file=central.ask&b=askSam%204%20Tip%20of%20the%20Month%20%2d%20October%202001

I'm not sure if the link will work, but its in the AskSam tips section for October 2001.

Graham