Following the Open Desktop announcements at Uniforum earlier this month, the Santa Cruz Operation has withdrawn its multi-user version of SCO Xenix System V for 8086 AT architectures. Instead, a ‘Personal Xenix’ is now available, supporting a maximum of two concurrent users. The rationale behind this move appears to be a perception that with the rising power of 80286 and 80386 multi-user machines, 8086/8088 machines are now being pressed into service as single user workstations or intelligent terminals to servers. Personal Xenix – a chopped down version of SCO Xenix System V which cannot be upgraded from its two user format – is aimed primarily at the workstation and market. In addition it will be used as the basis of Santa Cruz’s future ‘Workstation Xenix’ for 80386 machines, due for release in April. This will include SCO TCP/IP, SCO X-Sight and SCO NFS, the latter two also available from the spring. Santa Cruz is to inaugurate a revised pricing system for complete SCO operating system bundles in an attempt to make Personal Xenix attractive to customers. On an 80386 AT-bus machine the price is UKP450 – the complete operating system, including development and text processing systems, costs UKP1,100. Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Watford, Hertfordshire European division has also released SCO Professional 2.0, a 1-2-3-alike package for Xenix and Unix. The application can be used as an MS-DOS communications tool, and is not bound by the the 640Kb memory limit. It has increased worksheet size, extended macro function, and integrates with SCO’s Office Portfolio applications. SCO Professional 2.0 costs UKP600, and an upgrade from version 1.1 is available. The product is one of the tools that can be integrated into Santa Cruz’s recently launched Office Portfolio system, which can be used to combine word processor, spreadsheet and database packages from SCO or third parties. The core of the product is SCO Manager, which apart from providing tools such as agenda, calender and electronic mail, controls the menus and includes an intelligent clipboard that can transfer data between different packages. Santa Cruz offers its own Office Portfolio suite as a package including Professional, the SCO Lyrix word processor, and SCO Integra SQL relational database: prices start at UKP500 for the Portfolio Manager, UKP900 for SCO Xenix 386 with the Portfolio Manager and UKP1,700 for the full suite. Santa Cruz says it is working with third party software houses to do support for popular word processors, spreadsheets and databases.
