home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!timbuk.cray.com!walter.cray.com!rakelen.cray.com!user
- From: robert.kelen@cray.com (Robert Kelen)
- Subject: Re: MarcoPolo questions
- Message-ID: <robert.kelen-130892171330@rakelen.cray.com>
- Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.misc
- References: <student_mis-100892164644@137.202.64.97>
- Date: 13 Aug 92 17:17:02 CDT
- Lines: 59
-
- In article <student_mis-100892164644@137.202.64.97>,
- student_mis@mentorg.com (Arjan van der Valk) wrote:
- >
- > Hi, at this moment I'm evaluating a tool named MarcoPolo.
- > It looks OK, but can someone please send me some advantages/disadvantages
- > and their experience with this tool?
- >
- > Thanks in advance,
- >
- > Arjan.
-
- I've used MarcoPolo fairly extensively, and have built a document center
- with a few thousand things in it. When we looked at different products to
- fulfill the needs of the project I'm working on, MarcoPolo stood out
- because it has some features that you just can't find in other packages. It
- really depends on what your priorities are though, and also how much
- patience you have, and what applications you'll be using, as to whether or
- not it's right for you.
-
- The ability to put in complicated Mac documents as Mac documents (like a
- spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint presentation) was really key to us.
- Even the text in those is searchable. But if you're primarily interested in
- putting in text documents, it's probably not the best thing. The searching
- capabilities are definitely better and more sophisticated in other
- packages.
- For example, MarcoPolo cannot do proximity searching, nor can it do exact
- string matches. So if you wanted to find something like 'Apple computer', a
- document about that said something like 'although Bill was known around the
- office as the human computer, he still had a domestic side, and was rumored
- to make the best apple pie this side of the Mississippi', would also be
- found.
-
- And MarcoPolo is not without its bugs. For example, the current version of
- the Document Creator is almost useless with Excel 3.0. In order to get
- Excel documents in properly, you have to work through Apple's LinkSaver
- utility. And it also works terribly with WordPerfect 2.x. And a couple of
- the menu options in MarcoPolo itself have given me quite a bit of grief
- too. For example, documents that you delete from the Document Center are
- basically left behind, hogging space. They claim that using the Recover
- Free Space option will solve this, but I've never gotten anything but a
- complete system crash using that. And there are other little quirky things
- that just seem to happen that are too silly to enumerate here. Suffice it
- to say that it's not perfect (that's where the patience part comes in).
-
- The folks at Mainstay are not always the most helpful either, though I have
- finally found a few that I like speaking with. For the last 8 months they
- have either told me that 'oh, I've never seen that problem before', or
- 'yes, we know about that, but you'll have to wait until version 2 for a
- fix'. With the exception of the LinkSave workaround, I have generally only
- found either consolation or frustration, not solutions, when dealing with
- them.
-
- Anyway, this might be a longer answer than you were looking for. Let me
- just sum up by saying that it's often been very trying to work with, but
- overall I think it is a cool product that has a great deal of potential.
- I'm hoping that version 2 will be my savior. If I had to do it over again,
- I'd (most likely) still buy it.
-
- -Robert
-