From: robert.kelen@cray.com (Robert Kelen)
Subject: Re: MarcoPolo questions
Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.misc
Date: 13 Aug 92 17:17:02 CDT

In article <student_mis-100892164644@137.202.64.97>,
student_mis@mentorg.com (Arjan van der Valk) wrote:
> 
> Hi, at this moment I'm evaluating a tool named MarcoPolo.
> It looks OK, but can someone please send me some advantages/disadvantages
> and their experience with this tool?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Arjan.

I've used MarcoPolo fairly extensively, and have built a document center
with a few thousand things in it. When we looked at different products to
fulfill the needs of the project I'm working on, MarcoPolo stood out
because it has some features that you just can't find in other packages. It
really depends on what your priorities are though, and also how much
patience you have, and what applications you'll be using, as to whether or
not it's right for you.

The ability to put in complicated Mac documents as Mac documents (like a
spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint presentation) was really key to us.
Even the text in those is searchable. But if you're primarily interested in
putting in text documents, it's probably not the best thing. The searching
capabilities are definitely better and more sophisticated in other
packages.
For example, MarcoPolo cannot do proximity searching, nor can it do exact
string matches. So if you wanted to find something like 'Apple computer', a
document about that said something like 'although Bill was known around the
office as the human computer, he still had a domestic side, and was rumored
to make the best apple pie this side of the Mississippi', would also be
found.

And MarcoPolo is not without its bugs. For example, the current version of
the Document Creator is almost useless with Excel 3.0. In order to get
Excel documents in properly, you have to work through Apple's LinkSaver
utility. And it also works terribly with WordPerfect 2.x. And a couple of
the menu options in MarcoPolo itself have given me quite a bit of grief
too. For example, documents that you delete from the Document Center are
basically left behind, hogging space. They claim that using the Recover
Free Space option will solve this, but I've never gotten anything but a
complete system crash using that. And there are other little quirky things
that just seem to happen that are too silly to enumerate here. Suffice it
to say that it's not perfect (that's where the patience part comes in).

The folks at Mainstay are not always the most helpful either, though I have
finally found a few that I like speaking with. For the last 8 months they
have either told me that 'oh, I've never seen that problem before', or
'yes, we know about that, but you'll have to wait until version 2 for a
fix'. With the exception of the LinkSave workaround, I have generally only
found either consolation or frustration, not solutions, when dealing with
them.

Anyway, this might be a longer answer than you were looking for. Let me
just sum up by saying that it's often been very trying to work with, but
overall I think it is a cool product that has a great deal of potential.
I'm hoping that version 2 will be my savior. If I had to do it over again,
I'd (most likely) still buy it.

-Robert