DataTXT

DATA.TXT Corp. Credits Clarion with Their Success

Time Matters: an Industry-Leading Product

Time Matters for Windows software — produced by DATA.TXT — is the number one selling law office Personal Information Manager (PIM) and winner of the most recent Law Office Computing Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, which is the industry's top award from its top magazine. In this year's Legal PIM Software Shoppers Guide, Time Matters outscored major retail products including Lotus Organizer, GoldMine and Day-Timer. Legal Assistant Today Magazine included Time Matters on its list of the best software for paralegals.

"Time Matters could not have accomplished this success without [Clarion] tools. Our ability to rapidly add features without introducing defects, while still producing a lightning fast and totally reliable networked application, has left our competitors stunned," said Bob Butler, Technical Director for Time Matters.

The legal software market is one of the most -- if not the most -- technically advanced, demanding and competitive of the vertical software markets. Only the most advanced, reliable, and complete software survives in what many consider the number one vertical market. The number one application — Time Matters — in the number one vertical market — legal software — was developed using SoftVelocity's Clarion.

Clarion’s Vital Role

Many elements lead to this kind of success and SoftVelocity's technology played a vital role in virtually all of them. In the early stages, the Clarion Application Generator allowed Time Matters to quickly and easily prototype many approaches to the problems that the software would eventually address. Further, they were able to run field trials using fully-functional applications to get rapid, real-world feedback about their software design. Major revisions were made in days instead of weeks, which allowed for many more refinements and maintaining the continuity of the review process. This was invaluable to ensure the design concepts addressed problems in a powerful, consistent and flexible manner — and in a manner understood by real-world users.

As the software evolved, Time Matters took advantage of many industry standard technologies -- VBX, OCX, DLLs, and standard Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls -- to rapidly add features. Most recently, as the demands for performance, connectivity, and highly specialized features grew, Time Matters enhanced the product through extensive use of "hand coding," API calls and links to Software Development Kits (SDKs) in other programming languages.

"Our ability to rapidly add features without introducing defects, while still producing a lightning fast and totally reliable networked application, has left our competitors stunned"

The Competitive Edge

During its development, Time Matters enjoyed unprecedented programmer productivity. They had one set of source code for both 16- and 32-bit versions of its software. Both are capable of working on the same networked data to furnish a competitive edge in offices that have both operating systems. Further, Clarion technology enabled the developers to produce software that doesn't make any changes to the Windows setup (i.e., no changes to the SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, Windows Registry, etc.) or place any files (i.e., DLLs) outside its own directories. These advantages greatly reduced technical support costs. Lower development costs — fewer programmers working over a shorter period of time — and lower technical support costs have freed up resources that could be redirected to extensive marketing and first-rate customer service.

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