Third Party Watch
by
Shawn M. Gordon
President of S.M. Gordon & Associates
12/92
Well I am happy to say that so far, this column has been receiving very good feedback from the vendors that I have talked to. Sure I have ticked off a couple of people too, but as I say, the response has overall been very favorable. It hasn’t been always easy to find something interesting going on, and it’s been harder keeping my mouth shut about some of the things that I have found out.
I recently decided to check in with some old friends to see what they were up to of late. How many of you know Kathy McKittrick? Well she was one of the first people that worked at DISC, then a few years ago she quit to start doing her own consulting. Turns out a lot of her consulting lately is for DISC. With the advent of version 3.0 of Omnidex, which is supposed to be platform and data base independent, it seems they have slightly changed the thrust of the company. They are now offering a three tiered Omnidex product, which consists of:
Omnidex Kernel – the is the installation and maintenance utilities, and the Omnidex procedures and indexes.
Omnidex Drivers – These attach to the Kernel in order to allow for machine/database dependencies. This is so you can get specific about the operating system and the DBMS.
Application Integration – This is what Kathy is focusing on I believe. This is were DISC will provide a custom integration of Omnidex for a customer’s application. This could be as simple as writing an Oracle User Exit, to developing a full blown client/server lookup system.
As always Kathy offers her fast pace two day Omnidex training course. I worked with her years ago when I was first learning Omnidex, and she really knows her stuff.