So what happened to Idea

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