Visual Recall 1.01 Reviewed by Dale L. Larson Xerox, besides being known for copiers, has long been known for having several neat laboratories (most notably Xerox PARC, their Palo Alto Research Center) which produce wonderful technological innovations that make other companies rich. For example, Apple got rich with the Mac, using technology borrowed from the Xerox Star (if you've never heard of the Star, you can make an educated guess about its commercial success). Recently, Xerox has been trying to reshape itself, focusing on solutions for all types of documents in all media, and making effective transfers from the research labs to the commercial marketplace. XSoft is a software division of Xerox, and Visual Recall is one of its new products, moving technology from the labs to the desktop. Is Xerox's new push is working? From this user's vantage point, that question still lacks a definitive answer. An important part of the new Xerox has to be marketing. Without it, the best mousetrap won't sell, with it, even inferior old technology can become "industry standard." Before looking at the box, I knew nothing about Visual Recall, and the outside of the box is sparse. There is almost no descriptive text, just "Visual Recall for Windows," "New Dimensions in Document Management," "TextBridge inside!", a picture of hundreds of documents with a magnifying glass over a few XSoft addresses, and fine print about trademarks. Same front and back, with no additional details. In their defense, perhaps it wasn't really intended for display on the retail shelf. I quickly got the impression that this software would be a way to visually locate scanned documents on my hard drive, and that this was the Windows version of software available for several platforms. I was wrong on both counts. Fortunately, once you stop looking for marketing to tell you what it is, you open the box and find that Visual Recall has good documentation. The Visual Recall System Administration and Installation Guide describes VR as follows: "Visual Recall from XSoft is an application that runs in the MicroSoft Windows environment. It is a collaborative document management system that lets you index, search, retrieve, store, view, and modify documents and images stored on your local disk or on Novell file servers. You can also work with CD-ROM and non-electronic documents. Visual Recall can run in networked or stand-alone mode." Really, it seems to have more to do with organization than with recall. VR works in terms of files, documents and drawers. Any file on your HD can be a VR file. Once a file is indexed into VR, it is a document (a document can also contain multiple files). VR documents point to one or more files, contain properties such as Author, Date, Revision, Contact (all of which are user definable), and documents may have their text content indexed for fast text searches. Finally, cabinets are databases with their own directory for all of the database files for all documents within that cabinet. Each document belongs to a cabinet. You don't have to have multiple cabinets. Files aren't moved to a cabinet, they stay where they were on your HD, only the indexing information for documents is stored in the cabinets. Each cabinet has its own property set, so you might store different types of documents in different cabinets in order to index them with different properties. You can include multiple cabinets in searches. Indexing, Searching and Viewing Visual Recall has easy to use mechanisms for indexing existing files, making them VR documents. You can even index files with aren't on your system (magazine articles, for example), but you won't be able to do a context search unless you scan and OCR these documents to get them onto your HD. Once you've indexed a number of documents, VR allows you to easily search for or look at a particular file. The "Visual" in Visual Recall comes in with the GUI you use to specify searches, the different views with which you can browse 'hits,' and the viewer that allows you to display your documents on-screen, even without the application the documents were created with. You can specify simple or complex searches based on document properties and document content. VR content searches are driven with advanced linguistic technology (the TextDataBase engine developed at Xerox PARC) that matches roots and derivations. It is easy to narrow a search if you find that you've too many 'hits' with your initial query. You can look at the results of your search as a simple list of hits, or in two unique views. The Tree View shows hits in a hierarchy of properties, and the Grid View shows a 3-dimensional wall with hits laid out linearly by a property like date or version. As soon as I saw the Grid View, I recalled having read a paper on it in the Human Computer Interface literature within the last few years and that the paper had come out of Xerox PARC. I wish I'd been using a tool like VR in 1991. I might not have had to spend 20 minutes searching my shelves for the paper (Mackinlay, et al., "The Perspective Wall: Detail and Context Smoothly Integrated", in proceedings of CHI, 1991, ACM, New York, 1991. pp. 173 179.). The animated 3d view is even more attractive than the picture makes it look, and it is a great way to visualize a large set of data all at once (without scroll bars). In 1991, most desktop PCs didn't have the graphics power required for such animation to work effectively, but today it is effective. The Tree View also comes out of work at PARC. I am glad to see the results of Xerox research more quickly winding up in commercially viable Xerox products. To view a particular document, VR has conversion and display routines for a large number of common Windows application file formats: word processors, spreadsheets, graphics, and more. You don't have to have the application that a file was created in to see the contents of the file. From the viewers, users can fax, print, copy to clipboard, or check out for editing. Creating and Editing Documents Visual Recall allows you to create or edit a document by launching an application from within VR. Existing documents can be checked out such that other users can not edit them until they are checked back in. Multiple revisions are stored so that you always know what the current version of a given document was on a given date, and what changed. When a document is checked back in, it is automatically re-indexed so that the indexing stays up-to-date. If you do edit a file associated with a VR document outside of a VR session, you'll have to manually re-index that file later (using VR's System Administration Tool). If you start moving VR document files in the file system (with File Manager, for example) but don't tell VR about it, you're looking for trouble. Perhaps VR should have file management capabilities build-in. Heck, you could almost use it as a Program Manager replacement at that point. Bonus XSofts' TextBridge OCR software is included as a free bonus with Visual Recall. It works with faxes or other files you already have digitized, and it also works directly with ISIS and TWAIN scanners. Limitations The formatted viewer was poor at formatting and printing one of the sample Word 2.0 documents, causing strange pagination, and apparently using courier when the document appeared to have been written with something else. If I'd needed that document, I would have had to move to a system with Word to work with it acceptably. This kind of thing is to be expected in release 1.0 software though, and I'd gladly put up with it if it weren't for other limitations. Visual Recall is only available for Windows, and only works stand-alone or with NetWare. I was surprised to find that my network drives (mounted from a Sun via TCP/IP and NFS) were inaccessible via Visual Recall. VR was the first app that behaved at all differently with my NFS drives than with my local hard drives. According to the documentation, VR also "Cannot access [W4WG peer drives] through Visual Recall." Since VR is Windows-only, it can't deal with long file names (as used by OS/2, for example), and workgroups with Macs and PCs are out of luck. As you will see, both are important limitations for this kind of application. VR currently does most of its work on the client, and is thus limited to use in workgroups rather than in large enterprises. Version 2.0 of Visual Recall is expected to add server-driven indexing and searching. VR will then be suitable for whole-enterprise use (at least in enterprises with few non-Windows workstations). VR does not currently support OLE 2.0, and that might be an important limitation if you use it extensively in creating your files. Conclusions Xerox is making strong moves to live up to it's new motto of "The Document Company." When Xerox recognizes that the world of documents isn't Windows only and NetWare only, Visual Recall will be an excellent solution for common problems in document indexing, retrieval, display and editing. Until then, if you need a solution for your NetWare workgroup (not your whole enterprise), Visual Recall is worth a long hard look. If I had a NetWare workgroup, I wouldn't hesitate to use VR, and I'd love to see an OS/2 version which understands NFS and LANManager. Requires: Dos 5.0 or later, Windows 3.1 or later, 386SX20 or better (486DX33 or better recommended), 4MB RAM (16MB recommended), 15MB free disk space Xsoft Division of Xerox Corp. 1.800.428.2995 415.424.0111 Send your postal name, address, city, state, zip to 16prod@supportu.com for product literature to be sent to you via postal mail.