By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, March 26, 2008 - 5:05:00

It’s time to give you an oversight of what is available on the site, and what will be published over the next few weeks. First of all, if we learned one thing from the cross-media publishing report, it must be that information is becoming a commodity. Business intelligence or information that will help people and businesses to do a job faster or better, is going to become mainstream. Another conclusion from the report was that trade magazines will probably survive on having “industry libraries” in place.

In one word: if your information is only going to be “interesting” but not “helpful” as well, you might as well give up your efforts. On IT Enquirer we’re doing our best to be helpful as well as interesting. Sometimes we fail; we only hope it’s not too often. 

The last couple of weeks we added a preliminary test of the Camera RAW decoders in more than half a dozen applications. We used the Sony Alpha 700 as our guinea pig; the reason why we chose the Alpha 700 is its on-board noise reduction capabilities which stirred quite some heated debate with the serious amateur community out there. The RAW decoder (or demosaicing) comparison shows some applications have less problems with the Alpha 700’s RAW format than others, but the camera itself does a great job.

We published a technology primer on a large Digital Asset Management system, called Elvis. Elvis is a Dutch product and it’s so innovative we couldn’t resist writing about it despite it is still in beta phase. Elvis shows much promise and has the potential to hurt Canto’s and Extensis’ sales.

The ProofMaster Basic Calibration tutorial is free as well --if you’re willing to subscribe to Level 1, that is. Now I do know it’s a pain in the butt to have to register and do something in return to get your hands on a tutorial that really solves a problem. You shouldn’t have to really, but unfortunately I saw my hard work being shamelessly copied all over the web without any reference made to where it originally comes from at all. I too hate it when a web site asks for something in return from me wen I’m trying to grab their software or information for my own use.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves if this totally-free-or-not-at-all approach would work when we want to buy a loaf of bread, or when we want to get some professional advice from a consultancy firm. I know the answer to that one, as I’m sure we all do.

That’s why I only ask for some service in return for the download of training packs or tutorials if they help you solve a problem faster than anything else (except for taking a training or paying for support yourself--which means you’ll have to pay real money...). The ProofMaster training is such a tutorial. That’s also the case with the Quark Job Jackets Training packs.

The Advanced Quark Job Jackets Training pack and the InDesign XML Primer --the latter explains how to set up and use InDesign’s XML built-in capabilities-- are again more elaborate and more specialised, which is why I reserved these for V.I.P. subscribers. The Advanced ProofMaster Training will be reserved to V.I.P. subscribers as well. These training packs save you a lot of money. You can only get your hands on the information they contain by attending an actual training at the vendors’ site or by buying technical support, and you’ll be hard-pressed finding the information for less than what is being charged here.

Reports are in the same league. They cost a lot of time and energy, and have value that normally costs a lot more than the V.I.P. subscription --which, by the way, is for a whole year, and for all the V.I.P. material we are churning out. The last addition we recently reserved for V.I.P. subscribers was the cross-media publishing report from which we quoted when we started writing this article. 

We are thinking about offering stock photos to V.I.P.s as well. If you would be interested, do let me know.

In the next couple of days and weeks, we will be adding to our regular reviews, but we will also be publishing a report on Unified Communications & Collaboration, a report on the Pentax mobile document scanner, the advanced ProofMaster training pack, and more.

Finally, we took the decision to split up IT Enquirer in a publishing and graphics only website with a sub-site concentrated on Mac OS X technologies. You can find links on different locations on each page, especially in the sidebar.