News :: 15MR: Power Phone Book v1.6.0.11g

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Power Phone Book version 1.6.0.11g by DG Software—An application for a personal or network-based phonebook.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Power Phone Book is an organizer of new generation. It has all standard functions as modern organizer, additionally allows to user, to set up data access thru Internet, all over the world, providing high level of security. Power Phone Book is ease in administration. Local single-user version does not need any administration; all of settings is performing by the software itself.”

Quick Pros

• Group functionality
• Quick data entry
• Searches are quick due to database usage

Quick Cons

• Interface very dated; Use of old-style tables
• Spelling and grammar atrocious; Manual is very hard to read and understand
• No instructions on how to configure network support
• Likely insecure for network usage without manipulating database directly (Default username/password)
• Scheduler is not usable for more than individual use, and not great at that
• Memory footprint of database and application quite sizable (~40MB)

Expansion

While many smaller businesses are looking to find an alternative to the pricey Exchange servers for initial cost and cost to maintain. While many smaller businesses find themselves resorting to either paying for Exchange servers or using less-than-adequate alternate methods. While this application doesn’t offer to-do or project tracking, it does serve up a phone book which can be used on a network as well as a scheduler.

Data entry was quick, though doesn’t look great, and searches were adequately quick. While this application does what it is supposed to do, it doesn’t do it with much grace unfortunately.

The interface is very old and looks almost like it was programmed with an older version of Delphi without much effort outside of drag and dropping controls on the page. The primary data table is hard to wield and manipulate based on needs. The interface and moreso the manual has serious grammatical and spelling errors (‘Referens Books’ for one,) and in the case of the manual makes it very hard to read in places.

As with the manual, it is very minimal and mostly states the obvious. The information on the networked interface, it only tells you the basics for setting up the client-side interface and nothing on how to manipulate the database for different usernames/passwords, networking restrictions or anything. This application requires you to have experience with Firebird Server and direct manipulation of the application. As it is, the database would be very insecure. If you didn’t have a firewall, theoretically anyone could find your database and login to it across the network with the use of a basic username/password to this application.

The scheduler is basically useless; No way to ‘assign’ scheduled tasks, and the interface is so basic, there’s no ‘clock’ or similar for picking times, the notification options are awkward at best, and essentially good as a reminder clock, if you remember to leave the application open.

To top the application off, the memory footprint with the database engine and application is very large and only stands to grow with the amount of data usage. 40MB with a few entries is large as it is.

Final Verdict

While I always have high hopes for alternates to Outlook and Exchange, this application unfortunately disappoints, even as a simple phone book application. Dated interface, spelling and grammatical issues, ease of use is very much lacking and trying to set up the network support safely and securely may require a major investment as well. I wouldn’t recommend this application, even for free unfortunately. As a pay-for application at $23.95 a seat, the price would definitely become high for much more than a few people anyways. If the application went through a fairly hefty revamp along the lines of what corporations need, I might suggest it. At this time, this doesn’t meet ‘Enterprise’ support, let alone small business or even personal. For personal, you might as well stick to Outlook, Outlook Express or Outlook Mail.

Posted by BladedThoth on Sunday, April 15, 2007