ISYS Desktop

A very powerful program. Considering it’s capacities and the way it’s filled with various features, it takes place somewhere around the next in the list search engine from SearchInform. One thing that’s not quite clear is what takes whole 40 Mb in the installation file, when even SearchInform with a very similar functionality takes only 15Mb.

The installation process itself isn’t exactly pleasant either. Before you start downloading the program you are asked to register, otherwise — no program. Next, the interface. It looks quite interesting, there is no “fifth wheel”, although those are only impressions of a person who has already got used to the program. A newbie will have a hard time determining what’s where and where to click to conduct the actual search. Reading help files would be a good idea and is highly recommended as it’ll save your time and nerves. On top of all that there’s no support of Russian language in the program whatsoever. The windows are not excessively overloaded with information, although the cost of that was making the program multi-moduled and using additional windows. For instance, you input search queries using one program and the index management is conducted with the help of another program. Results also appear in a different from the query window. It’s hard to say what’s better though: overloaded interface or massive multi-windowness.

As for the possibilities of index creation, the program offers options on easing the process. There options include templates for creating index by folder: “My Documents”, “Mail”, “Mail and Documents”, “Specific Folder”, “Folder with the choice of file types” etc. These templates make the process of creating an index simpler in the beginning. The utility for working with indexes has a somewhat clumsy interface, which may seem too complicated (although that’s a subjective POV). But if you get a grasp of how it works, it offers a lot of useful options and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to use it. ISYS Desktop can index information from different sources and offers a variety of settings for it. Additional functions: support of SQL, FTP, TRIM, Context, WORLDOX 2002, scripts, index planner. If when creating your index you checked “Folder with the choice of file types”, you have an option of chosing types of files for manual indexing (by extension). It’s also important to note that the number of supported file types is huge, but you can’t add you own type (extension) into an already-existing list. Indexing planner is also an interesting feature. ISYS Desktop took 6 hours and 13 minutes to index 20 gigabytes of information and the size of created index came to 7.9 Gb, which is not bad at all.