Microsoft support for Vista, etc.

The Register has published a very interesting announcement about the support for the Vista operating system. I think that it is worth everyone knowing about this, especially VARs installing and supporting systems on pre-Windows 7 operating systems.

Conference Guide

If you are still considering whether or not to attend this years Revelation conference, the conference guide is now available to help you to decide.

The guide includes a note from Mike, a complete list and details of educational session topics, details about the many speakers and an introduction to the conference’s keynote speaker. The guide concludes with registration information, pricing and everything else that you need to know about the conference.

Reliability and Performance Monitor

Did you know that Windows Server 2008 includes an improved Reliability and Performance Monitor. This useful utility can be used to monitor and check the over all disk activity on your server and you can use it to drill down to see which Revelation Linear Hash files are the most utilised.

Identifying heavily utilised files with slow response times is the first step to determine whether faster solid state drives will be beneficial to your business and this utility can go along way to helping make a better more informed decision.

The Reliability and Performance Monitor can be started by running perfmon.exe on the server.

OpenInsight 9.2 and the Universal Driver 4.7

Development on OpenInsight 9.2 continues and this release is scheduled to include the following new features:

OpenInsight for Web (O4W) - A web development toolkit that empowers OpenInsight Developers to rapidly create browser based forms, reports, menus, dashboards and programs. I have been playing with this over the last few days and it is very, very nice indeed, clearly the best web development tool to come out of Revelation.

SQL Connector - With this new connector, SQL tables are now seen as native tables to all components of OpenInsight including forms, reports, popups and stored procedures. I have also had a quick look at the SQL Connector and, using the built in wizards, it is child’s play to set up and use SQL tables from within OpenInsight.

D3 Connector - This connector will allow OpenInsight to be a front end application development tool with the D3 database from Tiger Logic. I am yet to get my hands on this one.

Bitmap Indexes - Bitmap indexes have nothing to do with images, but rather with bit arrays (the 'bit map'). OpenInsight developers do the work internally with bitwise operators. They are mostly used for indexes where the number of indexed values are relatively small; e.g. Sex (M, F), Active(Yes, No), etc. Basically, there is one index node per index value, as opposed to OpenInsight's Btree or Xref indexes, which could have many nodes per value, or multiple values in a node. Bitmap Indexes are extremely fast, and are much faster than existing Btree indexes.

TCL Enhancements – Mike has also recently shown me some really nice enhancements to TCL, including displaying list results in a grid control that you can manipulate and copy to the Windows clipboard from and also support for some long lost ARev Softkeys – watch for a video on this soon.

In conjunction with the release of OpenInsight 9.2 Revelation will also be releasing the Universal Driver 4.7. The Universal Driver 4.7 replaces the Universal Driver 4.6 and will be offered in two versions. The free bundled version supplied with OpenInsight 9.x network user licenses (NUL) and the standard version to be used with OpenInsight 8.0.x and below as well as Advanced Revelation.

Both products are expected to be released in Q2 2010.

OpenInsight and Thin Client Deployments

We have recently had a couple of people asking about configuring OpenInsight systems to run in a thin client environment, most notably Citrix and Terminal Server.

Following assistance to get the systems working, the clients wanted to better understand the working of the system. My experience indicates that getting these systems to work on one site is not always a recipe for success on another site and often an exact duplicate of a site at a new site results in a system that needs further configuration to get it to work correctly – go figure!

It is for this reason that, whilst we know that OpenInsight runs fine in these environments (once correctly configured) and Revelation even have some Citrix systems hosted internally, they are still officially labelled as unsupported. This sometimes results in consultancy services being needed and onsite investigation to resolve some of the more stubborn issues.

However, to better help Revelation VARs and users to understand these environments from an OpenInsight installation perspective, Sprezzatura have written and published a very useful blog posting. You can gain access to it at www.sprezzatura.com and I would highly recommend all VARs take a look and anyone else involved with or considering a thin client based OpenInsight system.

www.revsoft.co.uk

Guys, the http://www.revsoft.co.uk/ web site is now back up and running. However, following the rebuild some of the old pages have gone and most have been renamed as part of a new marketing drive that I am on at the moment. It has not been fully proof read and I apologise in advance for any typos and other similar errors. It was published earlier than expected owing to our issues with the hosting provider’s web server and our domain.

Any pages requested from a search engine and that no longer appear are currently going to a page not found page. If you hit this please email me with your requirements and I’ll get the content to you by return of email. For example, the error code pages are not yet there and I’m not planning on recreating them unless they are really needed as the help files in OpenInsight are now very good and contain this and much more information.

In addition, a lot of the documentation, manuals, etc. (especially older files) have been removed as they are now included in the OpenInsight install and from 9.2 there are folders with 9.1 and 9.1.1 documentation, etc.

That said, please let me know if there are files and content that you used to use a lot and that is no longer there. I have the old site saved locally and I will get the content republished based on demand.

Revelation World Conference

The Revelation Conference is now only a few weeks away and the conference website is now live.

The Revelation World Conference is the most significant event in the Revelation calendar and provides Revelation’s developers and end-users with a large number of education, networking and business relationship building opportunities.

To be held between the 27th and 30th April at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas and with sessions on new features such as O4W and O4SQL, this has to be one of the can’t miss events of the year.

The conference web site contains all of the information that you will need about the event, including a letter from Mike, a list of vendors who will be available to meet and discuss Revelation based topics with, an introduction to the keynote speaker and of course details of the education sessions and their speakers. Of course, there is also a section with registration details.

So, should you attend?

If you are involved in any way with an ARev or OpenInsight, or considering purchasing OpenInsight or a pre-built Revelation based application, then the answer is, without doubt - YES you should attend.

However, with the economy just entering recovery many people will be questioning the cost to attend, rather than considering the cost of not attending. With over 18 technical education sessions to choose from, there is no easier, faster and cheaper way to get a complete understanding of specialised areas of the products and technologies that Revelation provide. Furthermore, with new features planned for release around conference time, this is the perfect opportunity to fully understand how the technologies will benefit your business, gain valuable information prior to release (to help you plan your future developments) and to voice your needs from these new and exciting developments.

In previous years, the conference speakers (all Revelation professionals) have delivered amazing value from their talks, leveraging their considerable product and technical experience. Furthermore, session attendees usually have the opportunity to continue the dialogue with the speaker during the vendor fair and conference evenings. Then also through the services that many of the speakers offer following the conference. The conference really is the ideal venue for adding to your address book of top knowledge resources.

With the invaluable knowledge that you are unquestionably going to gain, the professional contacts that you will make and the huge motivation that you will ultimately leave the conference with, this is the one Revelation event that is sure to leave you more confident, productive and profitable.

I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas in April.

Visit http://www.revelationconference.com/ for more details.

www.revsoft.co.uk

Those of you who frequent the EMEA web site (http://www.revsoft.co.uk/) will have noticed that the navigation has disappeared and that there are other issues with the site. We are aware of these problems and have been working with our hosting provider to get them resolved.

It would seem that the web server side of the site is seriously broken and following several days of investigation, they are unable to resolve the issues.

For this reason, the site will be nuked shortly and www.revsoft.co.uk will be offline for a short time whilst we reconfigure the server side settings and upload the site.

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any information from our site.

I apologise for any inconvenience that this might cause.