Press Release - 25 November 2005
New Cardbox Home Edition brings Cardbox within everyone's reach
Cardbox is a good, solid, reliable database. Ever since 1982 it has been regularly updated. It has been on every major operating system from CP/M to MSDOS, OS/2, VAX/VMS, and Windows. Cardbox 3.0 for Windows is its eighth major release. Over the past twenty years over 100,000 people have experienced the power, flexibility and simplicity of Cardbox databases. Cardbox is used for contact lists, address books, archives, photographic inventories, museum catalogues, personnel, recruitment, abstracts, academic research and criminal investigation. Cardbox is used by everyone from individuals and small businesses to multinational corporations and United Nations agencies. No business sector is immune to Cardbox, and there are Cardbox users on every continent including Antarctica. Cardbox users are fanatics: if their computer managers won't let them use Cardbox then they'll fight them until they do.
The only drawback with Cardbox has been its price. Cardbox users are the product's best salesmen, but however enthusiastic your friend is about the program that has changed his life, you may hesitate to buy software that costs as much as a weekend city break on his word alone.
Now all that has changed. With the coming of Cardbox 3.0, Cardbox Software Limited has released the Home Edition. Costing no more than a reasonable dinner for two, the Home Edition removes the last excuse of the hesitant Cardbox novice.
"Home Edition" is not another industry euphemism for "crippled version". The Home Edition of Cardbox is designed for home and small business use: anywhere where the user of the program is the owner of the data: it omits corporate and technical features such as encryption, password-protected profiles, networking, programming and automation, but the only actual restriction is that each database can have no more than 10,000 records in it (the Professional Edition's limit is 16,000,000). This is not much of a limitation, given that most people don't have more than 10,000 friends, or customers, or books, or invoices, or CDs.
Money is not the largest part of the cost of software. The biggest single investment you make in a new software package is the time you put into learning to make good use of it. Hence the other big innovation of the Cardbox Home Edition: bucking industry trends, it comes with a real manual: a 300-page colour book that is dedicated, from the start, to giving an intimate understanding of what Cardbox is and how it thinks. The book ("so interesting, you can read it on the train even if you don't own a computer") even has a special "inspiration" chapter dedicated to pictures and descriptions of how other people are using Cardbox.
The Home Edition shares all the advances of Cardbox 3.0, including unrivalled search capabilities and uniquely simple handling and indexing of photographs and scanned documents, giving individuals and small businesses document management abilities rivalling the largest corporations.
The Home Edition costs £54.99 including VAT.
For more information contact Martin Kochanski at press@cardbox.com. Review copies are available.
About Cardbox
Quick summary of Cardbox's features
Text: Indexes individual words in a piece of text (such as an address or description), allowing virtually instantaneous searches. Cardbox recognises and indexes numbers and dates without needing separate numeric or date fields.
Unlimited images can be attached to each record: photographs, drawings, documents of any size. Cardbox compresses images using JPEG for photographs and its own proprietary compression algorithm for documents and drawings.
Searching methods include keywords, full text, wildcards, fuzzy matching, Boolean search and phrase searching. Searches can be combined and refined, and can even be fine-tuned manually.
Display and output: a single concept of user-drawn "formats" replaces the traditional confusion of input forms, list views, and mail-merge templates. Creating mailing labels is as simple as choosing a paper size. Additionally, printed output can include special features such as bar codes.
Capacity and requirements
Records per database: 10,000 (Home Edition), 16,000,000 (Professional Edition).
Fields per record: 4,096.
Size of fields: no practical limit.
Images per record: no practical limit.
Database file size: 1,024GB (1TB).
Operating system: Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP and above
Memory: 32MB.
Disk space: 12MB.
Professional Edition
The Professional Edition of Cardbox adds high-end features for corporate, networking, and technical contexts, including encryption, password-protected profiles, macros, programming, and automated data validation.
Pricing
Home Edition: £54.99 including VAT.
Professional Edition: £299 plus VAT (single-user). Networks start at £575+VAT
(3-user network including the Cardbox Server).
Home Edition users can upgrade to the Professional Edition on payment of the
difference in price.
Contact details
Cardbox Software Limited • P.O. Box 91 • Tunbridge Wells • TN2 9GP • England
Tel: 020 7460 3179 • sales@cardbox.com • www.cardbox.com