OnDuty, from Digital Instrumentation Technologies (DIT), is a personal-contact organizer, sort of halfway between a Sharp Wizard pocket organizer and a private secretary. Naturally, it provides a Rolodex-like function; it also offers a Contact tool for tracking all the details of any interaction with clients or friends. Also included are tools for building personal calendars, which handle your "to-do" list and appointments, a calculator, and a telephone interface. DIT says that it plans to add more tools later through an extensible architecture.
OnDuty also comes with 15 predefined report formats. These formats are not easily customizable, but cover many (if not all) of the bases. The program has a fine on-line help system; a hard-copy manual is supplied as well.
OnDuty is copy-protected, but DIT has a special license program that lets registered users receive a second license to use at home.
The user interface breaks no new ground with its traditional one-record-at-a-time, one-item-in-each-field approach to personal organizers. Performance is adequate to the task. You install OnDuty using a standard NeXT installer program. No acrobatics are required to install a multiuser network version Ð a big plus for busy sysadmins. .
OnDuty is aimed at individual NeXT users and small workgroups who don't have the work load or disk space for a full SQL database. This is the major difference between OnDuty and Adamation's Who's Calling, with its heavy-duty Ingres SQL engine. Appropriately, the program is priced to capture the lower end of the contact-management market.
by Rick Reynolds
A light-duty contact organizer designed for individual NeXT users and small workgroups. Straightforward with reasonable performance. This first version is a nice start, but take a closer look after it is updated for NeXTstep 3.0.
$395
Digital Instrumentation Technologies,127 Eastgate Dr. #20500, Los Alamos, NM 87544.
505/662-1459; e-mail: od request@dit.com.