IntaSoft introduces IntaChange
Published:
9th March 2004
Author: Philip Howard
Channel: Data Management
IntaSoft
(www.intasoft.net)
is one of my favourite companies. Partly this is because it
espouses the "small is beautiful" approach to life
rather than the delusions of grandeur that afflict some of
the leading lights in our industry. As a company it has been
around for nearly 20 years and although it has expanded into
the United States, and has distributors in Germany and Australia,
it is happy to be a small, self-funded private company with
no pretensions.
If you wanted to think of IntaSoft as a furniture company
then you would think of it as a family firm of specialist
craftsmen as opposed to the mass-produced, anonymous giants
like MFI and Ikea. The emphasis at IntaSoft is very much on
the quality of its products and the service it provides to
its customers.
In fact,
until last month, IntaSoft only had one product, AllChange,
which is a change and configuration management tool, of which
version 7.0 will shortly be released. Perhaps the most outstanding
feature of AllChange is its flexibility. It is sufficiently
extensible, for example, that it can be used for hardware
change management as well as catering for software, which
is not generally the case for more well-known products in
this space.
This flexibility has been carried through to the company's new product, IntaChange.
This is a (completely) web-based change management tool and
it has a number of neat features. However, it is the flexibility
that is, again, most obvious. If there is a field you can
access then you can extend it, if there is a wizard then there
is a non-wizard way of working. The company's general approach,
for both products, is that if you can imagine something being
extensible or customisable then it is.
Funnily
enough, this doesn't extend to personalisation in IntaChange.
The user interface comes in a standard format and with standard
colours. While you can personalise it to the extent of excluding
things from the screen that you are not interested in seeing,
you can't change the colours. Fortunately, this isn't likely
to be a problem. The company collaborated on the user interface
design with Plymouth University and between them they have
done a good job.
Apart from
flexibility, probably the two best things about the product
are its integration with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft
Project, respectively. In the case of the former this is simply
a question of populating contact details from Microsoft Exchange
into IntaChange so that these do not need to be re-keyed,
which is useful but hardly earth shattering.
The integration
with Microsoft Project, on the other hand, provides a bi-directional
update (there is a synchronisation option that automatically
synchronises the details in the two products) so that data
from IntaChange can be used to automatically populate Project
(or vice versa). This means that you can build your Gantt
charts and whatever without having to re-key all the details.
Anyone who works with Project will know that this is a very
significant waste of time currently and this integration is
something close to earth shattering. In addition, IntaSoft
believes that it is the first change management vendor to
release such an integration, at least at this depth.
So, don't
be put off by the small size of the company. It wouldn't have
been in business for two decades if it didn't have something
going for it. |
