Chewing Out SPAM

I'd like to commend Ron Anderson for his story "Taking a Bite Out of Spam." His test criteria and writing style made for a useful article. Also, his approach and conclusion corroborate my own analysis. However, there's a twist.

The Editor's Choice award went to a worthy product, but we were specifically interested in a hosted service. Anderson rated SpamStopsHere.com No. 1 in accuracy, and we believe that's the right conclusion. In the future, it would be interesting to have separate categories in the same article for products and services.
DAVE DUCHESNEAU, CTO

Scrutiny
[email protected]

Others Don't ...

No one likes e-mail spam, point taken. But to place chewed-up Spam on the cover of your magazine and table of contents, and then ask me to take your magazine seriously, is ridiculous.Your May 13 issue, like the Spam, will end up in the trash--not because of its content, but because of its appearance.
ERIC NEUENSCHWANDER, Senior Technical Analyst
Company name and e-mail address withheld by request

I appreciate meaningful magazine art as much as the next person. And I have a fairly high tolerance level. Furthermore, I hate the e-mail variety of spam.

However, I was completely grossed out by your May 13 cover with the picture of the half-masticated Spamlike material in the man's mouth. Both the cover and the related photos inside the issue are disgusting and in poor taste (pun intended).
RICHARD K. BORDEN, IT Director
Heritage Credit Union
[email protected]

Doc-Tor WantedSean Doherty's March 18 2004 companion cover story on document-management software ("Averting Document Disaster,") was terrific. I wonder: Are there any programs that can help a small (but extremely busy) nonprofit like ours organize libraries of documents? In my former life as a lawyer with a large firm, we used DocsOpen, but maybe there's a better choice.

SUSAN HELMSING, Gift Planning Officer
Greater St. Louis Community Foundation
[email protected]

Sean Doherty replies: DocsOpen is part of the Hummingbird solution. Although I looked at the Enterprise version, the vendor's document-management platform is a subset of the whole. I'd recommend Hummingbird products without reservation.

Don't be put off by the prices published in the review. You may be able to get a much better price as a nonprofit. And remember, it's a buyer's market out there. Companies are looking for business-- perhaps they'd even be willing to donate the software for the tax incentive.

Entopia, a dark horse in my review, is worthy of investigation. It offers full features and an advanced search tool at a good price. I looked at its enterprise package. Once you break off the document-management piece and possibly the K2 search engine, you'll see an even better price.

If you don't need a full-fledged document-management system and simply want something that tracks and shares files, look at NXT from NextPage. It's a secure peer-to-peer file-sharing system that might fit your needs.

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