Rowland Aertker
THE META SOLUTION C.B.C., Inc., P.O. Box 72, Dept. Meta, Canton, CT 06019, (203) 693-9215, http://www.metagroup.com, $1495
Fortune 500 companies pay thousands of dollars annually to subscribe to just one of the Meta Group's seven IT (information technology) consulting services. The Meta Solution offers 1994's monthly IT reports, drawn from Meta's consulting services. For example, Enterprise Data Center Strategies treats client/server and mainframe strategies and other enterprise-wide architectural issues. Workgroup Computing Strategies addresses client and network OSes, as well as mail, workgroup, and decision support applications.
The CD-ROM includes "flash" notices of important events or announcements, "fax" summaries of weekly all-service research meetings, and analyti
cal reports from each service. The Windows interface supports Boolean and intuitive searches and offers a browse mode, all via a button bar or pull-down menus. Intuitive searches can be based on text you compose or select in a document.
Search results can be reported in reverse chronological order or by relevance, which is based on the number of hits in a document. You can search all services and document types simultaneously or limit your search to one or a combination of services or document classes. You can print or export entire documents or selected text.
The search engine is still evolving. Masking more words, such as
a
, for instance, will help. For now, don't be surprised if an intuitive search based on a few lines of text retrieves hundreds of records. Remember, too, who Meta's clients are. If your IT needs intersect with those of the corporate giants, this CD-ROM will be most useful to you.
A Mac version is in the works. Ingram-Micro plans to make the same data available
to resellers via its InfoWare IT on-line service this summer.
Information Technology
