funny you should ask
there doesn't seem to be a way other than buy it. talk w/ your sales people.
Say, UNO, are you going to Summit?

Re: Summit

Alas, this year we are slugging through a migration to Peoplesoft and I had to decline. I really like summit, been there each year since 2005, great people, great technical material, a great value for learning.

Maybe next year (or 2011) when the go-live for Campus Solutions 9.0 is behind us and the 14,000 Focexecs has been converted (some dating back to 1992).

Bleh...

Dan at UNO

Looking ahead for InfoAssist - for those who have had success:

We are considering creating InfoAssist fexes for users as templates but want to lock in some code, e.g.

1.) Joins
2.) -INCLUDES for stylesheets and other code
3.) Other best practices

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks to the Focus Nation!

Maybe I'm reading these posts the wrong way but I sense a trend in thinking that InfoAssist is supposed to be a replacement for DevStudio. I think the only way you can evaluate InfoAssist is as a tool for the NON-TECHNICAL BUSINESS USER who is NOT a developer. If you look at it from that perspective it is one heck of an impressive tool. If you try to look at it as more than that or try to compare it to DevStudio then you will surely be disappointed.

It's interesting to me that there is such a seemingly wide gap between experiences. It seems like it has either worked well or worked very poorly. This could simply be a matter of expectations or it could be an issue of platform compatibility. Time, and more feedback, will tell.

With regard to some of the issues presented here I've run IA (7.6.8 and now 7.6.9) logged in as both a developer and as a business user.

So far, a business user has never been able to see any master files that they do not have access to. We run in MRE so I can't speak to how Personal InfoAssist behaves when looking at application directories but in MRE this has never been an issue.

Every window I have been able to bring up from the application is resizable.

In the 7.6.8 version the windows did behave strangely when Accessibility (Section 508) was enabled. In 7.6.9 you still get the message about the JAWS screen reader and you can't use the compound document features. Other than that it seems like the screens work properly.

The only time I've seen the performance compromised is in Interactive Design mode and having more than a half dozen sort fields. For this reason I encourage our users to work in Query Design mode.

All-in-all I'm definitely taking the half-full look at this. As a brand new tool it is already quite robust for the NON-TECHNICAL BUSINESS USER and I only see it getting better from here. I am much more confident rolling out IA to my users than I ever was of Report Assist mostly from the perspective of learning curve and appearance. Our end users are all external customers and the way an application looks and feels is sometimes equally as important as the functionality it has.

Anyway, that's my 2$ worth (inflation you know ;o)

those are called Reporting Objects.
work like a charm.
you can do that now in REportASsist just fine.

Demos and dog-n-pony's are fine but I don't think I could pull the trigger until I could really "drive the CAR".

We run through a Citrix environment also so I'm not sure what (if any) headaches could occur.

Raj - you can change the field formats easily - works fine (in 7.6.8 and higher)

quote:

Originally posted by raj_t:
I agree with Susannah. InfoAssist is not ready for prime time, it is very slow. How come they missed a simple feature like changing the field format (for example, changing the no.of decimals to 2 for a numeric column).

----------------
WebFOCUS 7.6.8 on Windows 2003 Server
SQL Server 2005
Windows XP

Any update on InfoAssist and whether users can get a hold of a demo or a trial of this product before buying it?

There is a trial license key - we got one from our Account Rep and I think you can get it from Tech Support if you called and asked.

Shantie

If you use the MRE, it works with the dashboard deployment and not the traditional applet.

Because of the cost associated with IA, we would probably use the trial version for a while and wait until IBI sunsets the applet in favor of IA and hopefully there won't be any (?) cost for switching RA for IA. Shouldn't there be an announcement soon since version 8.0 doesn't use the applet version of the MRE?

I am in the process of testing for an upgrade to 7.7.2. I'm very interested in Info Assist.

Anyone know if it's gotten any better than some of the comments here two years ago?

windows is better/faster than unix. whats your opsys, prarie? we're upping to 772m soon, as well. there was just a demo at the users group, but even the demo was way way way slow in even loading. its such a heavy app. Report Assist is so light, and thus so fast. Its like Microsoft getting rid of FrontPage..a much-missed app...cost them customers.

We are on Windows.

I've played with it a little bit...and didn't notice slow yet. I'm just trying to get my company over thinking Webi is a great user tool.