General Knowledge Base vs Ask Sam vs Idea

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 20, 2008 at 01:12 PM

Hi Daly,

I would second UltraRecall for reliability and ease of use. As far as I know, you should be able to do in UR anything you might have done with the other programs, though I am not very familiar with AskSam or GKB.

For your needs I would rule out Surfulater, which is very capable with HTML content but, as far as I know, can’t search within attachments. Similarly, IDEA! uses Windows Search to the search inside attached files; in addition, the program hasn’t been updated for a couple of years.

>I am never quite sure how to differentiate between bringing a Word
>doc into UR, or simply linking to it.

You should import the documents into UR if you want them indexed for quick searches, which I definitely suggest considering the sheer size of material. This will happen automatically upon importing as long as .doc and .pdf are included in Options / Import / Keywording (they are by default). You can keep the original files in place if you want as well, as the links will be maintained.

Both the Word and PDF files can be opened in the UR window itself if you so wish; see Options / Documents. Note however that anotating PDFs is not as easy as editing Word documents. Special PDF editing software is required. However, you can keep notes for each file in its Item Notes pane.

You’ll be able to organise files within folders in UR’s tree; cloning is supported so the same document can exist in several folders.

>And to make matters even more challenging, the mentor who has given me the 3,000 pages, says
>there’s about another 5,000.

UR uses a compressed SQL database so you will see little differences in speed regardless of size (mine is about 50 Mb) after they have been imported.

alx