PIVOTAL RELEASES VERSION 5.7

Pivotal Corporation has recently released version 5.7 for its products. There are four major enhancements to the product suite from the previous version 5.1. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new.

Unicode Support – Version 5.7 will support Unicode, making it possible for global corporations to support several different languages. Previous versions of Pivotal supported different languages without Unicode, but this could lead to corruption if data was passed between different languages because their encoding methods conflicted. With Unicode, every character has a unique number, regardless of the program, platform or language, so there are no encoding conflicts between languages.

Enhanced Office Integration for Windows Client Users – Version 5.7 is the “catch-up” release for Windows Client users where they now have access to the same integration provided for Rich (browser) Client users in 5.1. This includes one-click access to information in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as the one-click storage of Outlook email messages in Pivotal. This type of email integration has been sorely missing from Pivotal and is a welcome addition for Windows Client users.

New Product: Pivotal Analytics – Pivotal has offered business analytics before through technology OEM’d from Epiphany. It was originally called Intelligence Engine and never really caught on. However with Business Intelligence (BI) becoming more and more popular, Pivotal has now developed its own Analytics software module. It is based on the Microsoft BI framework and is designed to drastically reduce the time and effort needed to set up and use a comprehensive, multi-data source business decision support system.

Increased .NET Support – Pivotal takes another step toward a completely .NET technology stack in 5.7 by rewriting two code libraries in C#. Pivotal continues to be “.NET compliant”, but in future releases will be “.NET embedded”. The intention is to let customers become familiar with .NET by using these new libraries as more and more .NET functionality is added to the program through future releases. Pivotal’s .NET strategy will result in sweeping changes to the product’s underlying technology, which we’ll discuss in a future article. These future changes will have a huge impact on every Pivotal customer whether or not they currently write any programming code.

So Pivotal 5.7 basically catches up the Windows Client to the Rich Client in functionality, adds a new Analytics product and a couple of potentially important under-the-hood features. Nothing really earth-shattering for the average user, but Windows Client customers may want to take a look at the new email integration. Just be prepared to customize your existing system to get that to work – it will be expecting to see tables and fields that of course don’t exist in anything but an out-of-box Version 5.7 database. But it could be well worth the effort.