Dr Caroline Wilkins has been using Omnis since 2000 and has worked on a wide range of Omnis development projects. She brings particular experience to the area of Omnis web development and was responsible for developing some of the earliest Omnis web applications. She is a popular member of the Omnis community and has been a frequent invited speaker on the subject of Omnis web development at the various Omnis conferences in Europe, Australia and North America. Caroline's company Artificia offers a range of Omnis contract development services, including Omnis thin client and ultra-thin client web development, Multi-language support for Omnis applications, Distributed web database systems, Desktop application development, Conversion and re-engineering of Omnis 7 applications, as well as providing full CMS based websites, Search Engine Optimisation and Web Marketing.

In addition to Omnis development services, Artificia provides a number of Omnis externals and components. Perhaps of most general interest is the Application Distribution Control System which allows developers to protect their Omnis applications against in-house piracy. The system locks an installation of any Omnis application against the hard-drive of the user and prevents end users from cloning an application. Whilst it is a Windows-only system, it can be deployed in a cross-platform environment by enabling it only for windows based installations. For more information about Artificia, see www.artificia.co.uk, or for Caroline's web services, see www.newforestweb.com

This year is a very special year for Omnis: it's our 30th anniversary year! To be precise, the company that created Omnis is 30 years old this year, but we think this is a great reason to celebrate Omnis. Formed by Paul Wright back in 1979, the company began life as a computer seller, called Blyth Computers (the first HQ was on the banks of the River Blyth in Suffolk, UK), and it became one of the first Apple Dealers in the UK selling the popular Apple II to local small businesses. It became clear early on that most customers needed good software to run their business, so Paul advertised for programmers and found Cambridge graduate David Seaman, who wrote what became the first version of Omnis. The full history of the Omnis product can be seen on Wikipedia.

If you are an Omnis developer and would like to tell us about your experiences with Omnis, then we'd really like to hear from you: it would be good to hear from developers who have recently started using Omnis, as well as those who've been using it for many years (over 20 years in some cases). We will compile all your stories into a dossier and make it available on our website. Please email your comments and recollections to: theeditor@omnis.net

Here's some of the early Omnis product history:
• 1982: Blyth released its first "OMNIS" product (the original logo is above), a database manager for the Apple 2 designed by David Seaman, written in Apple Pascal.
• 1984: Omnis 1, 2 and 3 released together in April 1984 as a suite of Omnis products. Omnis 1 ("the file manager"), was intended to be an easy to use way of handling simple data, i.e. non-relational data. Omnis 2 ("the information manager"), was similar to the original Omnis but had more programmability. Omnis 3 was one of the first cross-platform database application tools for Apple computers and IBM compatibles running under MS-DOS.
• 1985: Omnis 3 Plus was released, one of the first database generation tools for the newly released Apple Macintosh.

In March, the RD Germany team exhibited at CeBIT in Hannover (3rd to 8th March), and considering the economic climate it was a very successful show for them. The number of exhibitors and visitors was down on previous years, which is to be expected, but the CeBIT trade fair remains the largest Computing and Technology fair in the world and always provides a pointer to future trends (this year Green IT and Mobile computing were highlights). And despite the downturn, there was considerable optimism and a feeling that the IT and computing sector is more immune to the recession compared to many other sectors.

The German sales team managed to get plenty of good sales leads and considerable interest for our upcoming release of Omnis Studio 5, which includes support for Windows Mobile® based Smartphones and other devices. We also received a lot of interest from Computing & IT journalists, while several universities were interested in looking at the potential of teaching Omnis to their IT students. All round, a great 6 days in Hannover!
More info: www.cebit.de

The RD Germany team provide 20 minute demos of Omnis Studio showing how easy it is in Omnis to connect to a SQL database or create a form for Web access.

Bremen Software has created a useful tool which adds extra features to SQL database management capabilities in Omnis, including the following: Foreign keys in schemas, helping the user to create a fully relational data structure; and Queries with a full ANSI 92 compliant FROM clause. The tool is called Q92, and it allows you to define relationships between the tables (schemas) and store them into the schema itself (in Omnis you can use $extraquerytext and $fromclause to augment the standard SQL commands).

Q92 automates the process of creating customized FROM clauses, storing it into the $userinfo property of the query class and allowing the developer to create it in an easier way. If the developer is already using the $userinfo, Q92 allows the developer's info in $userinfo to reside alongside the Q92 info in the same class. The new product has two tools, a Schema editor, and Query editor.

Q92 was created by Bremen Software (Stefano Querze) but is sold by Omnis Italian distributor Software Products Italia (SPI). For more information about Q92, please email: mktg@softpi.it. For more information about buying Omnis products in Italy, please see: www.omnis.it

Learn Omnis with the experts...
Long-standing Omnis developers and all-round product evangelists Mophilly & Associates provide training in Omnis, in addition to their development services (many of you will know their principal developer, Mark Phillips). The company has been asked to present an Omnis Training class in the Arlington, Virginia, area, and would welcome enquiries from anyone interested in attending such a class. They have provided training in North America a number of times, which has proved very popular and successful in the past.

The class will provide hands-on training for various levels of expertise and development techniques. The Mophilly instructors are well qualified and experienced with over a decade of advanced Omnis design experience. Whether users are new to Omnis Studio, or want to continue learning to work within the Omnis environment, this class will help expand a user's skill and understanding of the Omnis development tools. No firm dates have been set, but the class is expected to take place within the coming few weeks.

So if you are seriously interested in this training opportunity, you should contact Mophilly directly, or visit their website here for more information.

Omnis is used by millions of end users across the world, and has been used by thousands of developers over the years to create many market leading solutions. The Omnis website has information about some of these solutions listed under the Success Stories section. We also produce a book with some of the best or most interesting Omnis applications, showing the great diversity of business solutions created in Omnis, and for many different market areas.

We have just updated our 'Omnis Case Study' book (printed copies were available to customers at CeBIT) and it is available to download from this website here. It's possible that you will find a solution for your company from this handy guide, or if you are a developer evaluating Omnis, then the book gives you a good idea of what is possible with Omnis. (It also contains a nice pic of our team in Germany, in case you want a peek!)

Meanwhile, we have created a new page on this website containing all the various comments we've been lucky enough to receive from Omnis developers. Click here to see all the comments, and maybe after reading them you'd like to drop a comment about Omnis to theeditor@omnis.net (nice ones of course, pls)