Thursday, April 20, 2006

Product Review: A2i xCat 4.0

Product Review: A2i xCat 4.0: "A2i comes from a background of supporting large industrial catalogs that may have hundreds of thousands of items. The xCat is a high-performance, highly scalable product.
xCat combines several functions, including a front end to a SQL database, a data mining and presentation tool, a table creation and formatting tool, media management and consolidation tools, and a catalog creation tool. It takes data from one or more sources, including SQL databases, documents stored on a server, media files stored on a server, and data presented through Web services or XML. Print, Web, and CD-ROM catalogs can be created easily. The data can be sorted by a wide variety of categories to create specialized catalogs. Graphics can be standardized for the type of catalog, and searches can be preconfigured for the end-user.
A few of xCat's tools perform their specialized functions so well that they would be noteworthy as separate products. The data mining tool quickly and easily refines databases with over 500,000 entries, narrowing a very large multivendor product database to allow users to find specific items in less than a second."

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