Diane Gutenkauf wrote:
>
> Patricia Kirkland wrote:
> " Argus is recommending an upgrade to their new Open Edition product, at
> considerable expense."
>
> I suspect that Questor is suggesting that you upgrade to their "Open
> Insight" based product. Open Insight is a product of Revelation Technology.
> It is a great database for museum applications. An unfortunate fact of
> software life that often to stay current with a product, one must purchase
> an upgrade because a vendor can't or won't devote resources to maintaining
> older versions.

Actually, "Argus: Open Edition" is developed using an "object-oriented
development tool" called PowerBuilder and standard SQL databases as the
"backend."  (you have a choice of the latter from products of Oracle,
Microsoft and Sybase...maybe others.)
While I don't fully understand the exact relationship between all these
components, I don't think it has anything to do with Open Insight from
Revelation.  If that was part of Argus for Windows (tm) I suspect that
Questor is no longer using it, since their own staff emphasizes that
Argus: Open Edition is an entirely different product from Argus for
Windows (tm) which is no longer being developed.

If you don't want to move from DOS, I'm fond of a product called REGIS
from Museum Research Associates of Hallowell, Maine, which is an R:Base
application.  (Actually they might be into Windows by now).   But
Diane's advice to check with CHIN and the Museum Computer Network are
good suggestions.

Actually, it's sort of amusing that as soon as a product is designated
"Classic" you're supposed to assume that it's so obsolete that you'll
never get good support for it and must upgrade at considerable expense
to stay on top of things.

Doug Kendall, Curator of Domestic Life
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison

>
> Regarding Argus for Windows (tm). When I last checked, Questor had used a
> version of Open Insight that has been replaced with an upgrade. Questor had
> not taken advantage of Revelation Technology's enhancements and had not
> upgraded the version of OI upon which Argus is based. My impression is that
> they are devoting much of their development energy into a new
> product--Pluto. Traditionally, when a developer replaces a platform, they
> taper off support of the old one. Users are expected to upgrade to the new
> platform and usually have to pay for the upgrade.