                             Visual Recall 1.01
                         Reviewed by Dale L. Larson

        Xerox, besides being known for copiers, has long been known for
having several neat laboratories (most notably Xerox PARC, their Palo Alto
Research Center) which produce wonderful technological innovations that make
other companies rich. For example, Apple got rich with the Mac, using
technology borrowed from the Xerox Star (if you've never heard of the Star,
you can make an educated guess about its commercial success). Recently,
Xerox has been trying to reshape itself, focusing on solutions for all types
of documents in all media, and making effective transfers from the research
labs to the commercial marketplace. XSoft is a software division of Xerox,
and Visual Recall is one of its new products, moving technology from the
labs to the desktop. Is Xerox's new push is working? From this user's
vantage point, that question still lacks a definitive answer.
        An important part of the new Xerox has to be marketing. Without it,
the best mousetrap won't sell, with it, even inferior old technology can
become "industry standard." Before looking at the box, I knew nothing about
Visual Recall, and the outside of the box is sparse. There is almost no
descriptive text, just "Visual Recall for Windows," "New Dimensions in
Document Management," "TextBridge inside!", a picture of hundreds of
documents with a magnifying glass over a few XSoft addresses, and fine
print about trademarks. Same front and back, with no additional details. In
their defense, perhaps it wasn't really intended for display on the retail
shelf. I quickly got the impression that this software would be a way to
visually locate scanned documents on my hard drive, and that this was the
Windows version of software available for several platforms. I was wrong on
both counts.
        Fortunately, once you stop looking for marketing to tell you what it
is, you open the box and find that Visual Recall has good documentation. The
Visual Recall System Administration and Installation Guide describes VR as
follows:
        "Visual Recall from XSoft is an application that runs in the
MicroSoft Windows environment. It is a collaborative document management
system that lets you index, search, retrieve, store, view, and modify
documents and images stored on your local disk or on Novell file servers.
You can also work with CD-ROM and non-electronic documents. Visual Recall
can run in networked or stand-alone mode."
        Really, it seems to have more to do with organization than with
recall. VR works in terms of files, documents and drawers. Any file on your
HD can be a VR file. Once a file is indexed into VR, it is a document (a
document can also contain multiple files). VR documents point to one or more
files, contain properties such as Author, Date, Revision, Contact (all of
which are user definable), and documents may have their text content indexed
for fast text searches. Finally, cabinets are databases with their own
directory for all of the database files for all documents within that
cabinet. Each document belongs to a cabinet. You don't have to have multiple
cabinets. Files aren't moved to a cabinet, they stay where they were on your
HD, only the indexing information for documents is stored in the cabinets.
Each cabinet has its own property set, so you might store different types of
documents in different cabinets in order to index them with different
properties. You can include multiple cabinets in searches.

Indexing, Searching and Viewing

        Visual Recall has easy to use mechanisms for indexing existing
files, making them VR documents. You can even index files with aren't on
your system (magazine articles, for example), but you won't be able to do a
context search unless you scan and OCR these documents to get them onto your
HD.
        Once you've indexed a number of documents, VR allows you to easily
search for or look at a particular file. The "Visual" in Visual Recall comes
in with the GUI you use to specify searches, the different views with which
you can browse 'hits,' and the viewer that allows you to display your
documents on-screen, even without the application the documents were created
with.
        You can specify simple or complex searches based on document
properties and document content. VR content searches are driven with
advanced linguistic technology (the TextDataBase engine developed at Xerox
PARC) that matches roots and derivations. It is easy to narrow a search if
you find that you've too many 'hits' with your initial query.
        You can look at the results of your search as a simple list of hits,
or in two unique views. The Tree View shows hits in a hierarchy of
properties, and the Grid View shows a 3-dimensional wall with hits laid out
linearly by a property like date or version.
        As soon as I saw the Grid View, I recalled having read a paper on it
in the Human Computer Interface literature within the last few years and
that the paper had come out of Xerox PARC. I wish I'd been using a tool like
VR in 1991. I might not have had to spend 20 minutes searching my shelves
for the paper (Mackinlay, et al., "The Perspective Wall: Detail and Context
Smoothly Integrated", in proceedings of CHI, 1991, ACM, New York, 1991.  pp.
173 179.).
        The animated 3d view is even more attractive than the picture makes
it look, and it is a great way to visualize a large set of data all at once
(without scroll bars). In 1991, most desktop PCs didn't have the graphics
power required for such animation to work effectively, but today it is
effective.
        The Tree View also comes out of work at PARC. I am glad to see the
results of Xerox research more quickly winding up in commercially viable
Xerox products. To view a particular document, VR has conversion and display
routines for a large number of common Windows application file formats: word
processors, spreadsheets, graphics, and more. You don't have to have the
application that a file was created in to see the contents of the file. From
the viewers, users can fax, print, copy to clipboard, or check out for
editing.

Creating and Editing Documents

        Visual Recall allows you to create or edit a document by launching
an application from within VR. Existing documents can be checked out such
that other users can not edit them until they are checked back in. Multiple
revisions are stored so that you always know what the current version of a
given document was on a given date, and what changed. When a document is
checked back in, it is automatically re-indexed so that the indexing stays
up-to-date. If you do edit a file associated with a VR document outside of a
VR session, you'll have to manually re-index that file later (using VR's
System Administration Tool).
        If you start moving VR document files in the file system (with File
Manager, for example) but don't tell VR about it, you're looking for
trouble. Perhaps VR should have file management capabilities build-in. Heck,
you could almost use it as a Program Manager replacement at that point.

Bonus

        XSofts' TextBridge OCR software is included as a free bonus with
Visual Recall. It works with faxes or other files you already have
digitized, and it also works directly with ISIS and TWAIN scanners.

Limitations

        The formatted viewer was poor at formatting and printing one of the
sample Word 2.0 documents, causing strange pagination, and apparently using
courier when the document appeared to have been written with something else.
If I'd needed that document, I would have had to move to a system with Word
to work with it acceptably. This kind of thing is to be expected in release
1.0 software though, and I'd gladly put up with it if it weren't for other
limitations.
        Visual Recall is only available for Windows, and only works
stand-alone or with NetWare. I was surprised to find that my network drives
(mounted from a Sun via TCP/IP and NFS) were inaccessible via Visual Recall.
VR was the first app that behaved at all differently with my NFS drives than
with my local hard drives. According to the documentation, VR also "Cannot
access [W4WG peer drives] through Visual Recall."
        Since VR is Windows-only, it can't deal with long file names (as
used by OS/2, for example), and workgroups with Macs and PCs are out of
luck. As you will see, both are important limitations for this kind of
application.
        VR currently does most of its work on the client, and is thus
limited to use in workgroups rather than in large enterprises. Version 2.0
of Visual Recall is expected to add server-driven indexing and searching.
VR will then be suitable for whole-enterprise use (at least in enterprises
with few non-Windows workstations).
        VR does not currently support OLE 2.0, and that might be an
important limitation if you use it extensively in creating your files.

Conclusions

        Xerox is making strong moves to live up to it's new motto of "The
Document Company." When Xerox recognizes that the world of documents isn't
Windows only and NetWare only, Visual Recall will be an excellent solution
for common problems in document indexing, retrieval, display and editing.
Until then, if you need a solution for your NetWare workgroup (not your
whole enterprise), Visual Recall is worth a long hard look. If I had a
NetWare workgroup, I wouldn't hesitate to use VR, and I'd love to see an
OS/2 version which understands NFS and LANManager.

Requires: Dos 5.0 or later, Windows 3.1 or later, 386SX20 or better (486DX33 or better
recommended), 4MB RAM (16MB recommended), 15MB free disk space

                                   Xsoft
                          Division of Xerox Corp.
                               1.800.428.2995
                                415.424.0111

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