Preactor v10.0 brings unparalleled developments in underlying technology and User Interface

Preactor International has unveiled Preactor v10.0. Three years in the making, Preactor V10 represents the greatest investment in time and resource since the product's first release in 1993. Mike Novels, Chairman and Managing Director, commented on the milestone in the development of what he regards as the definitive APS solution.  "v10.0 is the result of planning decisions made within Preactor over 3 years ago as we recognised the impact that the .NET environment would have within manufacturing IT. As our ethos has always been to provide enabling technology to allow manufacturers get the best from their IT investment, it was important for us to develop Preactor to continue to be able to do this for those manufacturers going in this direction."

While the complete product has benefited from this major redevelopment, the 3 main areas of increased benefit are a new tabbed window sequencer User Interface (UI), a new calendar editor and a new database for storage of data in MS SQL 2005.

The new sequencer UI takes Preactor to news levels of excellence which when combined with the graphical calendar editor provides an "Outlook Like" UI familiar to most users. Tool bars have been simplified but remain completely customisable with data views now being possible to place in separate tabbed windows that can be made part of other window groups or displayed independently. Users will also benefit from the ability to set up complex shift patterns as templates that can then be assigned for defined periods to both primary and secondary resources.

The use of SQL 2005 as the underlying database structure opens up much greater reporting and data analysis possibilities whilst retaining all the flexibility and functionality of the Preactor data tables, widely regarded as a key Preactor strength. A migration tool exists to assist the migration of 9.x versions of Preactor to the new version 10.

Choice of Version

Whilst recognising that many customers will want to take advantage of Preactor v10.0 from the outset, Preactor will also be releasing Preactor 9.4 for those users unable to benefit from the latest Microsoft advances in SQL 2005 and/or the .NET Framework 2. Preactor 9.4 will focus on speed enhancements with the majority of the new functionality being only available in v10.0.

Technical Director Graham Hackwell has been responsible for overseeing the development of Preactor V10 and anticipates very strong interest in the new version. "As a solution, Preactor has been widely recognised for its proven abilities to deliver benefits to customers across all manufacturing disciplines, irrespective of size. Version 10 takes the existing traditional Preactor strengths, and adds to them in terms of power and flexibility, providing the assurance of a long-term APS solution that can adapt perfectly in step with any business."

Deliveries are expected to commence at end of March 2007.