Preactor scheduling gets new .Net technology and Outlook interface

It’s taken three years of development work, and the company says it represents the greatest investment in time and resource since the product’s first release in 1993. The most obvious improvements are around the system’s new tabbed window sequencer user interface, a new calendar editor and a new database based on Microsoft SQL 2005. Preactor chairman and managing director Mike Novels claims this is a milestone in Preactor’s history. “v10.0 is the result of planning decisions made over three years ago as we recognised the impact the .Net environment would have within manufacturing IT. As our ethos has always been to provide enabling technology to allow manufacturers get the best from their IT, it was important for us to develop Preactor to continue to be able to do this.” Specifically, the new sequencer interface gives a new level of sophistication to Preactor, particularly when combined with its Outlook-like graphical calendar editor. It means, for example, that data views can be placed in tabbed windows and grouped or displayed independently. Users can also set up complex shift patterns as templates that can then be assigned for defined periods to both primary and secondary resources. Incidentally, Preactor will also be releasing Preactor 9.4 for users unable to harness the latest Microsoft advances in SQL 2005 and/or the .Net Framework 2. The improvements here are around speed: most of the new functionality is only available in v10.0.