Subject: Re: CCL-Personal Structure/B

From: "Craig Shelley" <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 May 1995 13:39:41 -0700

Reply to:   RE>CCL:Personal Structure/Bioassay/I
Entropy from SoftShell will ship in late May.  It is intended for personal or
small project databases and fits most of your requirements.  The price is $599
business, $399 academic or government, $99 student.  It requires our structure
drawing programs, ChemIntosh or ChemWindow, .  

- allow storage and search of 2D chemical structures, numerical data
  such as bioassay results and inventory data, textual data such as 
  comments and planned steps in a project, reference data such as 
  literature references etc.  A really *good* system would allow 
  intelligent handling of semi-quantitative data such as "IC50 > 100uM"
  for the purposes of queries, sorting etc.;

>>It should satisfy these needs, or at least most of them - it is not entirely
clear to me based on this comment.

- allow "upward linking", i.e. to molecular modeling (programs).  It
  may, but need not, be a module of a molecular modeling package;

>> You can save structures as MDL molfiles that can be transferred to many
molecular modeling packages.  It also supports SCF, a nonproprietary chemistry
standard that we are glad to share with others.

- allow "horizontal linking", i.e. to other, larger-scale database
  systems such as Oracle or INGRESS;

>> It cannot do this in the first release.  MDL SDfiles can be imported into
Entropy.

- allow "downward linking", i.e. to word processing, DTP and similar
  programs for the purpose of manuscript and presentation preparation.
  It should at least allow printing of publication-quality output such
  as tables containing 2D structures etc., but should ideally allow to
  create, e.g., PostScript files and/or export output to the common 
  word processor formats such as WordPerfect, Word etc. [this is a 
  very important requirement for what *our* group is looking for];

>> Yes.  This is what we specialize in.

- be available on, and allow seamless data transfer between, the
  platforms/OS's Unix, PC's (DOS(?) / Windows / OS/2), Mac's;

>> Available for Windows and Macintosh.  The Entropy file format is the same for
both platforms.  The files can be transferred or placed on servers accessible to
both Window and Macintosh computers.

- be easy to install, maintain, and use even for a non-database expert;
  in particular, the database definition (number, order, name of columns,
  type of data etc.) should be easily changeable as the project evolves;

>> We have tried to make this product simple.  We had 400 Entropy beta testers
that were very helpful.  Entropy excels at creating databases without formatting
too.

- be as low-cost as possible, or even an outright public domain program.

>> It's not free.  No matter how simple a database program is, you invest time
in creating the data for it.  Would you really want an unsupported product that
you invest a significant amount of time in?

For information on Entropy or our spring catalog of chemistry products, send
email to [email-masked].  Please don't send general information requests to
me.

Craig Shelley, President
SoftShell
[email-masked]