A word on Surfulater (today on Bits du Jour)

Posted by Neville Franks
May 31, 2007 at 01:50 AM

Please see below.

Bob Mackreth wrote:
>That’s another good thing about Surfulater- an active and accessible author, who
>pays attention to user feedback.
> >But I do have to agree with Cassius to a certain
>extent: if I recall correctly, the demo version I downloaded would not allow me to
>create a new knowledge base, and trial users are locked out of several of the support
>forums.
> >If you’re going to time-limit a demo version, then why cripple it? Some of us
>like to put a program through its paces to see if it’s going to work for our needs.

Unlike other software we allow the Surfulater Free Trial to be restarted at any time, as documented on our FAQ page. Allowing new Knowledge Bases to be created could potentially enable folks to continue using Surfulater forever by restarting the trial, hence this restriction was put in place.

No other features are disabled or restricted in any way in the trial and the sample knowledge base content can be deleted or just simply added to. So I never considered not allowing new KB’s to be created as being too onerous and was a reasonable tradeoff to allow the trial to be restarted.

Having said all of that I do plan to see if this restriction can be removed.

>And
>keeping trial users out of support forums seems downright
>counter-productive.

There is a Pre-Sales Surfulater forum that anyone can read, post on and get replies. The Surfulater Customer forums are provided as an added-value area for paying customers. They also provide an area where product direction and development are discussed away from the eyes of potential competitors.

Neville Franks