Software Publishing Corp is terribly proud of its new InfoAlliance client-server utility designed to make it easier for personal computer users on a network to access and manipulate data located in disparate databases throughout the organisation: it includes a graphical user interface, an applications generator and report-writing capabilities and data security and integrity features: databases currently supported are IBM’s OS/2 Extended Edition Database Manager and Ashton-Tate Corp’s dBase III Plus and dBase IV, and it can also import and export to Lotus 1-2-3 file formats and delimited ASCII files, and can export to Harvard Graphics charts; it includes field validation formulae, transaction commit control and rollback, including a two-phase commit protocol for distributed updates and a Datasource Integrator Server Administration Program monitors one or multiple servers on the network and offers network and data administrators a new means to monitor information flow within an organisation; downside is that the server has to be running the unfancied OS/2 operating system, although the client end can be Microsoft Windows 3.0 as an alternative to OS/2 Presentation Manager – but only the latter is available now; server support is planned for Microsoft SQL Server and server support for IBM DB2; a corporate installation with 200 clients and nine servers costs$100,000 with further clients $415.
