Check it out here:
http://www.stratovista.com/index.html

In case you don't know the original concept, just search this forum for Noah in the box on the left.

Alexander

Thanx for StratoVista. This is a truly interesting program, something different, maybe even useful once I get my head around it. Intriguing... so is the organizational structure.... a little weird for sure... but so was Agenda, Ecco, Ariadne, ADM, UltraRecall & SQLnotes aka InfoQube (or IQ) -- at least for me. And it seems pretty polished out of the gate even if the graphics are sort of mickey mouse.

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield CT USA

I got the following message from the Stratovista team:


Dear Noah and StratoVista Beta Users,

We've completed the beta test and StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0 is now available for download at:

http://www.stratovista.com/StratoVista%20Purchase.htm

The purchase price is $49.95 and includes one year of free upgrades and support.
If you are a registered StratoVista beta user you will be receiving a second email with a discount coupon.
This coupon will be valid for a limited time only.

We would like to thank all of you for your great suggestions and continued support!

Alexander, it appears there is no trial version for this software? Am I right, or is there something on the site that is staring me in the face, and I'm missing it?

It looks interesting, maybe even good. But I am not prepared to put $49 down if there is no trial, and no reference I could find to a refund it one isn't satisfied with the program.

Anyhow, I'm interested to see how well it works for anyone prepared to pay for it.

Daly

Daly,

I definitely agree. I posted the message for information without actually checking the link. I indeed assumed that one would be able to try the final release before they buy.

In this day and age, even ignoring the crisis, I can't see how such a business model can work.

Alexander

Perhaps it might work, depends on who their target group is. Though I'm a little sceptic on that too. There is a group of users who just buy and don't care much about trials (depending though how prominently the trial version is pushed to users), or 1.0 users who might not object much about the upgrade without trial.

What catched my attention was the Google word in the product name.

Thomas wrote:

Perhaps it might work, depends on who their target group is. Though I'm a little
sceptic on that too. There is a group of users who just buy and don't care much about
trials (depending though how prominently the trial version is pushed to users), or
1.0 users who might not object much about the upgrade without trial.

Or they could have be targeting companies and large organizations where you would sell a commercial product license and the accompanying support.

Tom S.

Tom S. wrote:

Or
they could have be targeting companies and large organizations where you would sell a
commercial product license and the accompanying support.

That may well be, but, if so, they need to dramatically improve their website. As it is currently designed, I doubt any IT professionals are going to stake their careers on adopting a product from a company whose website is so amateurish looking.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Tom S. wrote:

>Or
>they could have be targeting companies and large
organizations where you would sell a
>commercial product license and the
accompanying support.


That may well be, but, if so, they need to dramatically
improve their website. As it is currently designed, I doubt any IT professionals are
going to stake their careers on adopting a product from a company whose website is so
amateurish looking.

What, you wouldn't wager your job on a software company that goes for the ol' preschool, cartoon balloons theme? How could you lose?

;-)

Tom S.

"Alexander, it appears there is no trial version for this software? Am I right, or is there something on the site that is staring me in the face, and I?m missing it?"

StratoVista is the premium version of our first product called Noah. Noah is free and available for download at www.gen9.com. If you like it you may want to consider upgrading to StratoVista at some point in the future (the Noah DB is automatically upgraded when you install StratoVista).

In addition to being faster, StratoVista has a number of additional features (http://www.stratovista.com/Features.htm There is also extensive documentation for StratoVista in the form of a user manual with embedded video tutorials (http://www.stratovista.com/Tutorial.htm which, when combined with the experience of using Noah, should provide enough information to help you make a well informed purchasing decision about StratoVista.

Kind Regards,
-Gen9-

MAF, many thanks for your post. Indeed the concept looks more clear now. It also answers some of our questions from the original Noah thread: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/631/

I will now take a second view at Stratovista regarding the limitations identified then, which discouraged me from further using Noah.

By the way, I would note that what you pointed out regarding Stratovista being the premium version of Noah is not obvious from the website. I used Noah but the various changes and announcements (user forum taken down, then replaced by a blog that hasn't been updated for quite a long time) suggested to me that the product would be abandoned in favour of v.2.0 (indeed this is what one usually expects when new versions are announced). I would probably have expected to have Noah and Noah Pro, Stratovista Lite and Stratovista.

Will Noah continue to be supported, i.e. potential bugs fixed, etc, or will such support only be invested in Stratovista?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

MAF, many thanks for your post. Indeed the concept looks more clear now. It also
answers some of our questions from the original Noah thread:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/631/

I will now take a second
view at Stratovista regarding the limitations identified then, which discouraged
me from further using Noah.

By the way, I would note that what you pointed out
regarding Stratovista being the premium version of Noah is not obvious from the
website. I used Noah but the various changes and announcements (user forum taken
down, then replaced by a blog that hasn't been updated for quite a long time) suggested
to me that the product would be abandoned in favour of v.2.0 (indeed this is what one
usually expects when new versions are announced). I would probably have expected to
have Noah and Noah Pro, Stratovista Lite and Stratovista.

Will Noah continue to be
supported, i.e. potential bugs fixed, etc, or will such support only be invested in
Stratovista?

Hi Alex,
Your point about the website is well taken. We're working on it. Regarding the blog,
we found ourselves responding directly to emails and sites like Outliner. It wasn't much more
labor intensive and we think most of our users appreciated the more personal/direct access.
We will continue to make Noah available as a free download but all of our development
resources (and support resources) will be focused on supporting, expanding and refining StratoVista's
features and capabilities.

Regarding "taking a second view" - by way of saying thank you for the time you and the other folks have
invested in this posting - if you're interested we can arrange to provide you with a free reviewers
copy of StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0 and the other contributors a $20 discount. Contact me at
info@gen9.com and just say "Outliner Software sent me" and we'll send you the discount code.

Kind Regards,
-MAF-

-MAF- wrote:

Regarding "taking a second view" - by way of saying thank you for the time you and the
other folks have invested in this posting - if you're interested we can arrange to
provide you with a free reviewers copy of StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0 and the
other contributors a $20 discount.

This is indeed most generous and kind of you; I for one am flattered.

-MAF- wrote:

if you're interested we can arrange to
provide you with a free reviewers
copy of StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0

A quick question. We weren't sure why the name includes the words "Google Edition". Is there some special integration with the online Google tools that might be of interest?

Tom S.

Tom S. wrote:

-MAF- wrote:
> if you're interested we can arrange to
>provide you with a free
reviewers
>copy of StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0

A quick question. We weren't
sure why the name includes the words "Google Edition". Is there some special

integration with the online Google tools that might be of interest?

Tom S.

Hi Tom,

Yes, StratoVista is designed to be to Google Web Services what Outlook is to Exchange Server. It can exchange email, appointments, contacts, documents, photos and other data with Google?s free Web Services Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Google Docs and Picasa. Future versions of StratoVista will add interfaces to other important web services from Google as well as other vendors. We think this is a new way to look at the problem of providing a small enterprise with a very inexpensive, scalable, low maintenance client/server solution in lieu of Outlook/Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino - especially for Open Office shops. OO is a fantastic app, but it doesn't have an email/ PIM capability. A feature comparison - StratoVista vs. Outlook vs. Lotus Notes - is provided at www.stratovista.com/Features.htm
So, you can use it as an independent personal information manager, as an Internet mail client and/or in conjunction with Google Web Services.

But there's also some other very unique features - an example and one favorite is the the Email Download Controller (not found in Noah or anywhere else for that matter), which permits users to selectively downloads only those emails that meet certain criteria that they define. It leaves the rest of the emails on the mail server for future use or will delete them from the server if preferred.

So, let's say you have years worth of emails - thousands - on your mail server that you just don't seem to get around to deleting and/or you leave copies there for backup purposes (like most of us), and you hate Outlook's archive feature (if you use Outlook). Download Controller eliminates archiving (it essentially uses your email account as one) and allows you to avoid downloading all of these emails. It solves the problem using filters that you set with a few clicks. You can set a time filter (i.e. any thing older then a year, month, week, day etc. is filtered out) size, or max number. Even cooler (sorry, I really like this feature) is that every time you classify an email - by selecting a sender's email to create a Topic, or sub-folder - SV assumes that this sender is important to you and so it downloads and protects (from the auto-purge, which cleans up everything in your Inbox already downloaded when it's sent date exceeds the date filter) everything from this sender.

The bottom line is that you can quickly use this feature to eliminate all the emails from everyone except from people you've selected - with the exception of maybe a day or a week of emails from everyone - in cases where you get an email from someone who is new and not already classified (if they're important you create a Topic with them, if not they disappear in a day or two). I'm probably not doing this feature justice with this explanation - so I suggest you check it out in the user manual if you want more info, here - http://www.stratovista.com/Tutorial.htm#Email%20Download%20Controller

Hope this answers your question and my apologies if it sounds like an advert.

Kind regards

-MAF-

Hi

I've been reading this thread with interest. I have been wedded to Outlook (now 2007) for years, but have been constantly seeking a single solution for integrating email, web, files, task & calendar management in one product (gemx doOrganizer just didn't cut it for me). I believe Zoot 6 will have this capability, and Stratovista looks quite ingenious.

Since the developer is reading these posts I wanted to suggest that he consider adding tabbed browsing to "the fully functional internal web browser". This would make a huge difference as we could then spend more productive time using the SV internal browser rather than always referring to Firefox or IE 7/8..

Another question is: With Outlook we can send/receive meeting invitations and when these are "Accepted" they are automatically added to the Outlook Calendar. I wonder how Stratovista would handle this?

IJG

Ian Goldsmid wrote:

Hi

I've been reading this thread with interest. I have been wedded to Outlook (now
2007) for years, but have been constantly seeking a single solution for integrating
email, web, files, task & calendar management in one product (gemx doOrganizer just
didn't cut it for me). I believe Zoot 6 will have this capability, and Stratovista
looks quite ingenious.

Since the developer is reading these posts I wanted to
suggest that he consider adding tabbed browsing to "the fully functional internal
web browser". This would make a huge difference as we could then spend more productive
time using the SV internal browser rather than always referring to Firefox or IE
7/8..

Another question is: With Outlook we can send/receive meeting invitations
and when these are "Accepted" they are automatically added to the Outlook Calendar. I
wonder how Stratovista would handle this?

IJG

Hi Ian,

We've actually considered adding the more advanced browser features, like tabbing to the internal browser in StratoVista,
(btw, just to clarify, you can set a different page for each Channel Tab as well as each Topic, but I don't think that's what
you're asking). Our thinking against this went as follows:
1) The primary function of the internal browser is to support the core features of StratoVista, not to entirely replace Firefox or IE.
We don't think most users would give up FF or IE even if we did.
2) Both Firefox and IE can be used with StratoVista - for example you can drag pages from them into StratoVista (to save the page
on your Time-line) and open pages from SV into either of them.
3) There's always a trade-off between the "functional set" and performance. We tried not to add more functions then we really thought
were necessary (and we've had some pretty "exciting" internal "debates" on this) so as to keep performance as crisp as possible.
4) Adding more features, especially visible ones like browser tabs, would increase the functional and visual complexity of SV, which is
something we would like to avoid, especially since we've already introduced many new concepts into the design already (i.e. Channel Tabs,
Stations, Topics, Floating Tabs etc.)

With respect to "send/receive meeting invitations" -
1) Set up a Topic (or a Channel) to publish Appointments, Notes and/or emails to Google Calendar
(see - http://www.stratovista.com/Tutorial.htm#Publishing and (http://www.stratovista.com/Tutorial.htm#Google_Calendar
2) Invite the people (or the entire world, if you want) to share the calendar with - this can be done either in
SV or the "output calendar" that you create using SV in the Google Calendar settings page.
3) Modify the Auto Accept rules in GCalendar the way you want them (see http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=44105&topic=8605

And you're good to go. The neat thing is that you can share the calendar (and invite, allow editing etc.) with anyone - they don't need to be
StratoVista users. They don't even need a Google account for many features, but having one is better (and it's free anyway). You can't
make this claim about Outlook/Exchange Server

A further point is: As far as I can see now I've installed SV is that it is text only, no rich text or html editing. Is that correct, and if so, when (hopefully) do you intend to add RTF / HTML text editing?

Ian Goldsmid wrote:

A further point is: As far as I can see now I've installed SV is that it is text only, no
rich text or html editing. Is that correct, and if so, when (hopefully) do you intend to
add RTF / HTML text editing?

Scratch that - sorry, it does include rhtml editing