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askSam - or not...?
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Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 23, 2006 at 04:52 AM
As an occasional user of askSam v5 I regularly think about upgrading to version 6, especially when those Christmas update special offers come round.
Is anyone (still) using askSam v6 on this forum, and has performance and support been improving? I used to use askSam-DOS a lot but fell away rather after moving to its WIN3.1 version. As the upgrade is reasonable ($50 for a Professional->Professional upgrade), it is tempting in a CRIMPish way.
Derek
Posted by Ian Goldsmid
Dec 23, 2006 at 05:19 AM
Hi Derek
Tried it 6 months ago. Its incredibly flaky - data corruption included - plus various annoying application bugs, plus their support gets the prize for being the worst, slowest, even periodically non existent. It is a shame because there are some redeeming features - but overall I would recommend to stay well away from it.
The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me a refund without any hassle.
Cheers, Ian
Posted by Ian Goldsmid
Dec 23, 2006 at 05:19 AM
should have added, check the forums out and you’ll see what I mean.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 23, 2006 at 07:54 AM
Ian:
Yes, I know what you mean about the forums. I was there about a year or so ago complaining about the lack of support for Citation, and have been a longtime member of their much diminished mailing-list - the main reason I haven’t upgraded…
Citation, I should add, is another basically rather elegantly designed product that hasn’t been receiving the support it deserves from its developers. In that case, askSam only had some sort of affiliate role I think, and hosted just a forum for the Citation people. This became not only a reason for my not upgrading Citation, but also another reason for not upgrading askSam…
But I thought I had detected an improvement on the askSam front recently - better support and fewer complaints. Maybe my impression was mistaken, though. The problem is that once software gets a reputation for poor support, every little hitch becomes a new cause of anger, frustration and resentment for users. When things get that bad, forums just make everyone (including the developers) feel miserable about the product.
No satisfied users out there then?
Derek
Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 23, 2006 at 11:08 AM
Derek
>No satisfied users out there then?
Not me, I thought about upgrading to 6 at beginning of the year, and buying 10 to 20 licenses for a project distributing data. I had some issues (possibly bugs) and got no support from forum, or from any of the AskSam people who had email addresses on the newsletter and publicity material .
The main issue is that although it has excellent search and doc management tools, it won’t import Excel tables.
And this was the same reason I didn’t upgrade to the latest version of Citation, in many respects my favourite bibliographic program, but support doesn’t exist.
Graham