In Support of PowerHouse

[Neil Harvey]

Bob et al

The PDF manuals are great.
We have placed these on an Intranet, and our programmers have access to them
via their web browsers.
Today's browsers seem to merge (fairly) seamlessly with Acrobat Reader 4.0,
and so we have "virtual html" PowerHouse help. And if they find this too
slow to load, they can download a copy onto their desktop.

I personally miss the paperbacks, because I used to read these from time to
time, especially on new releases. I was taught to do this by Chris and
Robert at Synergy Computing. I was always amazed at how much I didn't know,
and how useful PH could really be.

I'd like to express our support for all the effort made by the PowerHouse
team. We use PH on MPE/iX and have done since 1985. It's hardly ever let us
down (and never critically), and we always find it possible to solve our
users business problems quickly and efficiently, which I guess is all you
need from a RAD language.

Properties we look for in any solution include time to prototype, time to
deploy, robustness, maintainability, longevity and sustainability (these
last three are the same thing, I guess). Powerhouse gives us all these.

Over the years, the robust PH, MPE/iX and Image/SQL combination has enabled
us to concentrate most of our effort and time on solving our users problems,
and surprisingly little on managing the platforms.

Couldn't really ask for more.

Regards

Neil



-----Original Message-----
From: Deskin, Bob [mailto:Bob.Deskin@Cognos.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 10:31 PM
To: powerh-l@sphere.swau.edu
Subject: RE: OpenVMS Differences Document


The PowerHouse manuals will be available on CD (PDF format files). In fact
you can download the current edition (no OpenVMS stuff yet) from our web
site. Most of our users have PCs (sorry Chris) and having a searchable
reference manual set made having online help redundant. We are looking at
other formats for the manuals but it doesn't look promising. It would have
to be something we can generate with our current document source (we use
FrameMaker) or from the PDF files.

Bob Deskin              
PowerHouse Web Product Manager and Senior Product Advisor
Application Development Tools, Cognos Inc.
bob.deskin@cognos.com (613) 738-1338 ext 7268 FAX: (613) 727-1178
3755 Riverside Drive P.O. Box 9707 Stn. T, Ottawa ON K1G 4K9 CANADA

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike.Lamers@phs.com [mailto:Mike.Lamers@phs.com]
Sent: August 1, 2000 1:56 PM
To: richard.witkopp@idt.com; powerh-l@sphere.swau.edu
Subject: RE: OpenVMS Differences Document


The removal of on-line help is fine ... but what will replace it?
Perhaps COGNOS should take a lesson from SAS.  When VMS clients upgrade to
the newest version of SAS, they receive a nice CDROM that has complete
documentation in HTML format.  The CD can be loaded to a network drive to
provide slick, quick and easy to use help for Users of all levels.

Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Richard Witkopp [SMTP:richard.witkopp@idt.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, August 01, 2000 10:54 AM
> To:	powerh-l@sphere.swau.edu
> Subject:	RE: OpenVMS Differences Document
> 
> > Detailed comments (pure opinion):
> > All-in-one, CDD, help, rms journalling, kanji: gone/undecided 
> > - no loss
> > 	for us. We've used & given up on CDD & RMS journalling long ago.
> > 	I always meant to use help, but probably never would ;).
> 
> No help for your poor users? tsk tsk
> 
> > QUTIL to replace PHDFM; fdl to be added.
> > 	I seldom use PH generated files: they need tuning via 
> > edit/fdl.
> 
> Not worth the effort for Cognos to add fdl. It's a simple 2 step
> process of creating a file and extracting an fdl that the customer
> can do.
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