General Knowledge Base vs Ask Sam vs Idea

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 20, 2008 at 02:28 PM

Alex, you make a good case also for UR.

I have never found UR helpful with imported PDFs, and would keep them separate in the UR file, but linked.

Will UR search a linked PDF doc?

Surfulater if good with clones, but if there’s a limitation to searches it could be a problem (are you following this Neville, if so, what think you?).

Anyone have a sense on the practical upper limit size of a UR data base? 10,000 docs reasonable?

I’m, surprised there’s no one out there who has experience with AskSam, except that I know AskSam was seemingly going the way of programs affiliated with the Sommer/Lewis brand of support and customer relations. Would you believe that AskSam has had a user concern with fixed right hand marging, ie. fixed doc width for several versions, and in spite of dozens of user complaints about, it is still being talked about in the forum for the beta version?

Thanks

Daly

Thanks.

Daly

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>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
> >