The noise that one hears round the office here concerns the volume of sales leads that are arriving for both Daybook Publisher and Daybook Enterprise.

This, of course is music to ears of any business person and will probably wind up gladdening the wallet as well as the heart.

Marketing is, of course, a black art and it always difficult to find out what is working and what is not. In our case, it is a pretty safe bet that we were found using Google searches. This, of course, pleases us no end, since we attribute this noticeable improvement to our decision to develop Caliban and use it to power virtually our entire website.

Readers of the e-letter will have concluded, correctly, that we bang on about Caliban at every opportunity, and this is one of the reasons why. Apart from the results, the nice thing is that Caliban keeps a log of visitor searches and IP numbers, so you can find out who your searchers were and why they came.

Check out Caliban »

Much of our time over recent weeks has been spent dealing with the hundreds of items of user feedback on Enterprise 6.1 and making tweaks and fixes. Our latest release is 6.1.05, and this is our recommended release for all Enterprise 6 users.

We have also been working on an enhanced signup procedure for Caliban and this is now active at www.calibanweb.com. You can now set up a test account completely free of charge and try it out for 60 days.

Finally, we have released Daybook Publisher 5.52. This contains much-improved support for Adobe InDesign, in terms of image and text box placement. This version also has the ability to export data as an Excel spreadsheet and embed calculations into it. And, a feature that will please many users, the system can now create a picture box based upon the size of the placed image. There's a download of a Daybook Publisher 5.52 demo on our website, together with some excellent demo tutorials.

Download a demo of Publisher »

In Daybook Enterprise and Modulus, when you are searching for data, for instance for a mailing, it is sometimes useful to exclude certain things from the search.

Learn more about how to power up your searches... »

SuperReports have always been an important feature of both Modulus and Daybook Enterprise, since they allow the production of bespoke reports, which can do virtually any job you want. Combined with the power of the Daybook macro language, SuperReports have enormous power to scour your database for information, analyse it, sift it and present it in any form you like. The possibilities are virtually unlimited.

Find out more about these Daybook reports... »

This freely downloadable macro is a good example of how quite a simple script can make a laborious task very quick indeed. It is designed for a Sales Manager who wants to control a sales campaign by feeding call lists to sales people.

By putting them in the person's diary automatically, it makes it a very quick and easy process for the sales person to record the call and its result. This macro runs from a preselected list of companies, finds the right contact(s) within those companies to call and creates the diary entry of your choice in the sales person's diary, for each contact.

Find out about allocating sales calls with a macro... »

Mac owners will probably have heard by now that Apple has released its latest big cat, Tiger, a.k.a. Mac OS 10.4. Billed by Apple as the world's most advanced operating system, industry pundits have given it a great reception and speculate that it could be even more important for the company than the ubiquitous iPod.

Enterprise 6, Modulus and Daybook Publisher users - anyone running a system based on the 4D RDBMS engine, in fact - should approach this animal with caution. If you are running 4D 2004, you will need to wait until late June to get you hands on 4D 2004.2, the 'Tiger-certified' version, while 4D 2003 users will have to wait longer still (no release date as yet) for 4D 2003.7, which is billed as 'Tiger-compatible'.

Watch the CNBC broadcast segment about Tiger »

We are looking for a small number of companies to form a Working Party to help with feedback, ideas and testing when we begin the next round of enhancements to the Stock Manager. This project is currently in its second stage and we have already consulted extensively with a wide range of users, and have drawn up an outline specification for the project.

We will be giving the Stock Manager an underlying architecture that will allow greatly improved reporting, tracking and general flexibility. It will be an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary approach, in order to preserve compatibility with the existing Stock Manager.

Find out more about the working party... »

No matter how minor or trivial it may seem, your feedback is always important to us. With software small things make a big difference.

If you have any suggestions for any Daybook product, if there is anything that would make your life easier, or if you come across anything at all that you think could work better, then please let us know.

And finally, if you have ideas for e-letter content, then we will do what we can to oblige.

Either email: support@daybook.co.uk or call Daybook Customer Support on: 020 7371 7161.

Email us now! »

If you need to publish catalogues, prices lists, classified ads - anything that starts with a set of data in fact - then check out our online Publisher overview tutorials.

They are quick to read and self explanatory and give you an excellent idea of how Publisher works and how much it can speed up the longwinded process of getting data to paper or web. And there is always a demo database and sample data to go with them. It will only take a few minutes to investigate - they could be some of the most valuable minutes you ever spend!

Have look at the Publisher overview tutorials »