Canterbury recommendation

[Joe Woodard <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recommend purchasing Canterbury document management software. I've
compared it to Hynet's Directive and other products like DocMaster,
Astoria, and Documentum.  Investigation showed that no other product does
what Canterbury does at the same cost.

Canterbury costs $35K for one server and five client seats, plus $5K
annual support. Chyrstal Software, the creators of Canterbury, won't allow
their VARs to sell less than a five seat license. The price delayed our
purchasing effort six months. But other products seem to be geared for
different purposes, are too immature, or far too expensive (Documentum
starts at $75K).

Canterbury fits our need to manage many Framemaker documents generated by
various projects contributing to overlapping products. The documents are
used by at least ten different audiences. Canterbury can also track
changes to non-Frame files, like graphic files. This allows us to archive,
search for, and recover illustrations for all document and presentation
purposes.

Canterbury will help us build the computer infrastructure that will speed
the work of document assembly, editing, and printing that must be
efficiently constructed for a small document team to create the breadth of
material our products require.

Canterbury won't require additional software to do its thing. Batch
functions for file collections, like file addition, deletion, and printing
can be added with minimal effort using a small built-in batch scripting
language.

Extensive custom batch processing or elaborate editing functions using
programmatic variables shouldn't be necessary, though they can be added
using csh, ksh, perl, or framescript. We don't see the need for such
development this year.

We like Canterbury's search function across large sets of documents. That
allows us to retrieve the right observation, requirement, test case, or
design feature from hierarchies of Frame-based documents.

We appreciate the fact that Canterbury manages change to the paragraph
level. We'll depend on Canterbury to help us track which document parts
are used in many other documents. This feature is critical for efficient
reuse of sections of documents.

We especially like the fact that Canterbury allows direct content editing
using the interface we know and prefer, Frame.

Our most serious reservation has been that VARs have treated us like small
potatoes. We hope that once we spend money they will be more forth-coming
and helpful. The Chrystal representatives have been superbly helpful.

===========================================================================
 Joseph Woodard, Open Telephone Network, Inc. Berkeley, CA
 http://www.otelnet.com



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