Sharps Bedrooms is the leading fitted bedroom retailer in the UK home improvement market, and enjoys a reputation for an end-to-end customer service which incorporates an initial survey and consultation, the design and manufacture of the bedroom, through to a finished and fully fitted product. The ability to deliver a complete service is heavily dependant on their Midlands based manufacturing facility, which relies on several Omnis applications developed and maintained in-house for daily operations.

We have recently published a new Success Story (case study) about this Omnis solution; click here to view it, and take a look at the other new case studies we've added.

"The flexibility and power of Omnis affords us the agility to react to new product developments with limited developer resources at a speed that simply would not be possible in any other development environment."
James Welsh, Systems Developer, Sharps Bedrooms Ltd. More info: www.sharps.co.uk

Based in the UK, Brainy Data was setup in 2003 by Michael Monschau, who was until that time a key member of the Omnis engineering team for Raining Data UK and based at Mitford House development centre - he was instrumental in creating the External component interface and Omnis web client, both important features in the continuing success of Omnis Studio. It's no surprise then that his company specialises in creating Omnis components for the desktop and web client version in Omnis. After four years of continuous development and investment, Brainy Data now has an impressive list of components, used by many Omnis development companies to develop their own market leading products deployed worldwide. Amongst them is: OWrite, a complete word-processor and spellchecker which you can embed into Omnis applications; OCal, a full-featured calendar component; PDFDevice for outputting data as PDF in Omnis; and all these components are available for Omnis on desktops and on the web via the Web Client, plus many are currently being ported to Unicode, and a full GANTT chart component OGantt is to follow shortly.

OWrite is a full-featured word-processor that supports Page Layout view, Styles, RTF, Spell Checker, Calculated fields, Tables, Document stats, Label printing, and much more

Michael Monschau will be appearing as a speaker at the 2007 EurOmnis conference in Valkenburg. There he will be mentoring on various advanced Studio programming techniques that cover areas such as notation, event handling, optimization, web-client and the external print manager, devices and image handling - also expect to see some cool stuff for ultra-thin client development. Not content with giving his time at the conference, Michael is offering all attendees an exclusive 20% Brainy Data discount voucher (valid until 31 Dec 2007) redeemable when ordering new licenses for the following Omnis Studio components: OWrite, OSpell2, PDFDevice, OCal and OGantt. Contact michael@brainydata.com for more info about the offer, or to arrange a meeting with him at EurOmnis.

Based in Switzerland, with offices in Bern, Chur and St. Gallen, W&W IMMO INFORMATIK AG use Omnis to develop an entire range of solutions for managing property investments and lettings. Houses and apartments are typically rented in Switzerland and W&W has a strong position in this market with over 1500 customers across the country. Their ImmoTop® property management solution comprises several modules for accounting, administration, wages, CRM, investment planning, project management and client support services.

Two key personnel from W&W recently visited Mitford House in the UK, which is our main office for all Omnis engineering and product development. Urs Laeubli, Senior Consultant with W&W, and Luciano D'Agostini, Development Manager (right) spent the day at Mitford talking to Engineering and Support staff - they were invited to meet development staff as part of their Omnis Developer Program package (afforded to members of the highest program levels in mainland Europe). For more info about W&W, see: www.wwimmo.ch

Urs Laeubli (left), Senior Consultant with W&W, and Luciano D'Agostini (right), Development Manager, seen here at Mitford House in the UK with Bob Whiting, General Manager of Raining Data UK Ltd.

Together with the usual Studio 101 training sessions, taught by respected Omnis trainer and tech writer David Swain, the EurOmnis 2007 conference in mid-October will feature a number of technical 'clinics', whereby each clinic will explore one topic in great depth, and developers are free to attend whichever clinics they like, whenever they can during the conference – and many of the speakers are bilingual (including English), so the sessions will be truly interactive. The conference organiser, Fred Brinkman, hopes that this format will provide developers with a better and more useful experience, and the chance to learn more about Omnis - all parts of Omnis Studio are covered so you are sure to find all the sessions of interest to you.
More info here: www.euromnis.org

The other conference, OmnisCentral Europe 2007, is in late October and organised by long-term Omnis developers, and hosts of the OmnisCentral developer portal, David Ferri and Clifford Ilkay - it follows the same successful format of the conference they organised in Palm Springs back in August 2006. Dr Michael Hufschmidt from RD Germany will provide Omnis Studio training sessions in English and in German, while some of the other technical sessions will be presented at the conference in French and Italian. The whole array of Omnis topics are covered at the conference including Web development, SQL, interface design, conversion, as well as some useful business oriented discussion.
More info here: www.omniscentral.com

We recently published a White paper on the subject of client-side technologies available in Omnis. We are pleased to let you know that this paper is now available in German and French, as well as the original English version. The white paper provides a general introduction to the Omnis Web Client plug-in and the HTML-only or so-called 'Ultra-thin' Client technology in Omnis, and it contains a number of interesting case studies showing how developers have used the Web Client technologies in Omnis to build some market leading applications. An increasing number of Omnis developers are using the web capabilities in Omnis, so you should take a look at our new white paper to find out how they may benefit you. Get it here.

This month, readers of MacUser and PC Pro in the UK have been given the opportunity of acquiring a copy of Omnis Studio 4.1 for free. Purchasers of the magazines are given full details of how to download/install and register a full, unrestricted copy of Omnis Studio 4.1 Standard Edition, with a very generous offer to upgrade to the Web Edition of the latest version of Studio 4.2/3. In MacUser (Vol 23 #18, 31 Aug 2007), they provide a virtual CD for you to download and a 3-page masterclass showing you how to build a small picture database application. PC Pro (Issue 156, Oct 2007) has Omnis on the cover-mounted DVD and is featured inside the mag. If you want to try out Omnis, getting one of these magazines would be an easy way to do so.