AskSam Systems' askSam 3.0 Professional

Emedia Professional, June, 1998 by Mark Fritz

askSam Systems' askSam 3.0 Professional promises to do what ordinary databases can't. Databases are designed to deal with structured data. They require you to predefine a structure and shoehorn your information into that structure. Unfortunately, most of the information that is clogging hard drives and piling up on desktops comes in the form of unstructured data, material that can't be easily broken down into fields and records--formless stuff like email messages, letters, faxes, memos, white papers, random notes and doodles, contracts, to-do lists, magazine clippings, and resumes. Long a popular product for desktop information management, askSam was designed to handle unstructured data. Unlike traditional databases, askSam does not require predefined field types and field lengths. In fact, you don't need to use fields at all. You can simply dump a document into an askSam window, and it automatically becomes a searchable record.

Sound too good to be true? Well, you're right. The "gotcha" with askSam is that while you can store formless, unfielded information in its database, doing so pretty much limits you to full-text searching. You can't take advantage of more advanced search techniques or sorting, and you can't print out the kind of sophisticated reports that fielded data permits.

But given this limitation, askSam's real advantage is its ability to mix structured data with unstructured data, to allow users to employ both fields and freeform text on an as-needed basis from document to document. With askSam, you can create a database with as strict or loose a structure as you wish, and if you come upon a document that can't be broken down in fields, you just throw it in with the other fielded documents anyway. You may not be able to access the data in those freeform documents as easily or take advantage of reporting, but you can at least employ full-text searching. And your documents will no longer float in limbo on your hard disk, where, unorganized and unindexed, they are as good as lost.

FREEDOM FROM DATABASE TYRANNY

One sure-fire way to add value to your formless information is to give it form. askSam's flexibility makes it easy to do this. Fields expand as you enter information into them, stretching to fit your needs (up to 16,000 lines). For example, it's easy to dump a newspaper article into an expandable field. You could call this initial field "Bodycopy:" or "Article:". Then you could append to the top of the article fields like "Date:", "Author:", "Headline:", "Subject:", "Source:", and the like.

Once the fields are designated, you can search them and print out reports. If your database includes document types other than new paper articles, your sorting results will only gather a subset of the documents, to which you added similar field names. Unlike traditional databases, askSam then allows you to mix together documents with different fields, same fields, or no fields at all, and append additional fields at any time. You don't have to preplan and prestructure everything. Your information system/database can evolve as it grows.

askSam also provides a great function called Automatic Field Recognition, which automatically searches your document for potential field names. Probably the quintessential use of askSam is as a database for email messages, because Automatic Field Recognition makes a this task so painless. You can set Asksam to recognize a colon as your field delineator. Then when you run Automatic Field Recognition, anything that follows a colon will become a field. Thus, when you import your email messages, your "TO:", "FROM:", DATE:", and "SUBJECT:" headers automatically become fields. And now you can take advantage of all of askSam's searching capabilities: Boolean, fuzzy, wildcard, proximity, numeric, date, and multiple. And you can sort lists and print out reports.

Another classic use for askSam is for creating a database of HTML pages culled from your favorite Web sites. This is easily accomplished by choosing "Save As" from your browser, saving the HTML files in a temporary directory, and then importing them into askSam. Unfortunately, when you do this, you only get the text, not the linked inline graphics.

Sensing that there is a market demand for such HTML file databasing, askSam Systems is developing a spin-off consumer product called Surf Saver that will streamline this process and grab the graphics as well. Company President that Surf Saver will work Phil Schnyder says from within the browser (so far, only Internet Explorer) so HTML files can be saved directly to an askSam database.

For the database-phobic, askSam also comes with predesigned data form templates for common office database applications, including databases for Letters, Faxes, Memos, Names/Addresses/Phones, and To-do Lists. There are also templates for common Internet applications such as an HTML (Home Page) Archive, and databases for E-Mail, Internet Information, and Newsgroups.

WHAT CM ASKSAM DO FOR CD-ROM?

While askSam seems a natural for placing searchable information on CD-ROM, the general public hasn't yet caught on and veteran askSam users don't seem to need the capacity. Many askSam users have purchased the Electronic Publisher runtime viewer, but most seem to be distributing their applications on floppy diskette rather than CD-ROM. That's because most legacy projects are text-based and text information is relatively compact, especially compared to multimedia. askSam even includes a "Pack" function that compresses saved files by permanently removing deleted documents and reclaiming fragmented space.