So what happened to Idea

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 9, 2007 at 09:41 PM

Hi,

I remember a while back there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for Idea from Sycon, but no one mentions it any longer. I’m just wondering if there are still Idea enthusiasts out there, and what, if any, are the latest developments with this software.

Steve Z.

Posted by Jack Crawford
Feb 10, 2007 at 06:38 AM

I mentioned in the thread about new developments for 2007 that last year had been a very quiet one for Sycon (and Brainstorm) at least from a user perspective.

I’ll drop a line to Christian and ask him what is in the pipeline.

IMHO at this stage Idea! has not realised its very promising start.

Jack

Posted by Jack Crawford
Feb 22, 2007 at 05:23 AM

I’ve just received the following from Christian Doehm of Sycon:

“We have planned quite a lot new features for Idea! this year.
For the single user edition as well as for the team edition.
Beside others, the single user edition will get interfaces with Word and Excel and a general application interface (e.g. exporting data from the tree into a structured MS Word document, same goes for Excel).
The team edition will get a additional web interface and integrated workflow (the workflow concept was not easy to design but I think we have a very nice and very simple approach now).
For both editions we will go in the direction to provide help to master projects content related.”

I guess we can only wait and see.

Jack

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 10, 2007 at 11:24 AM

As mentioned elsewhere, as far as I can tell, IDEA! appears to be a sort of spin-off from SYCON who are active as a project and quality management consultancy firm, providing methodologies and tools to their business customers. AIbase is a similar program, though it’s apparently a one-man project. Given that the market for local software in Europe is divided in very small niches, I can understand that they don’t invest most of their resources to their software products.

Nevertheless, I find them very responsive as far as support is concerned; when I had trouble with a database, Christian sent me a link to PC Visit ( http://www.pcvisit.de/en/ ) and he solved the issue in a couple of minutes over the phone while looking at my desktop.

In the past year, I’ve discussed several times through email with Christian regarding my use of IDEA! as the database infrastructure for a professional project of my own. He mentioned the two new directions, i.e. the web interface and workflow features and asked for feedback. I imagine that rather than releasing public betas etc, they work on a one-to-one basis with their main business customers.

All this to say that my impression is that most development in SYCON happens “under the sheets” for a long period and only when everything has been well tried and tested does it come out in the open. (As a sideline, I have the same impression for Kinook judging from UltraRecall releases 2.0 and 3.0, though obviously their timeframes are much shorter!) Even then, it is not really publicised; click the download link to the stand-alone trial version of IDEA! and you’ll see that it’s been regularly updated, though you won’t know about it until you check the build version of the .EXE file.

Concerning the product itself, IDEA! is very much behind features when compared to a program like UltraRecall; there is one area though that it is uncomparable and this is scalability, i.e. UltraRecall is practically a one-user product even though it is possible for several users to use the same database through a network. IDEA! Team has been built from the ground up as a client-server application and can utilise a multitude of SQL implementations as its engine depending on the business needs.

Having recently worked with “traditional” implementations of enterprise databases like Oracle, I find that IDEA! incredibly user-friendly (!) and intuitive in this market.

alx

Posted by Cassius
Mar 10, 2007 at 08:12 PM

Alex,

I think that different cultures and companies do handle projects differently. As a co-lead on a joint FAA-EUROCONTROL project, the Brits admitted to being conservative in what they claimed for their projects’ capabilities, and I believed them. At the FAA, the opposite tends to be true. Have you ever been shown a presentation of a prototype information system? At the FAA and elsewhere in the U.S., I always asked to see another example using other data of the presenters choice. Far too often, there was no WORKING prototype. The presentation was a fraud and claimed capabilities were nonexistent.

In Germany, there are companies that take pride in their products. But then, there is Mercedes and BMW, most of whose vehicles get poor reliability ratings in “Consumer Reports,” owner survey’s.

-c

Back to topic list