Tony, thanks for the honest comments. We rated Agilent's 'Optim' quite highly too. Any 'Optim' users out there with comments; , or ? Cheers.

Give the chief tech at Hemel Hempstead a call. His department is the development site for Optim. He rates it highly too. We are developing our own from ACCESS

Yep, we've been there for a demo. Alan there was very helpful, but also wanted some more opinions from other users...

No, the naughty filter didn't cut in I just pressed the * key a few times........

We were using the old DOS version , but we were using a modem link to our server with the main database.This could have been a contributing factor for the poor response for the searches and report functions. Otherwise providing you can understand the SEMS logic it works but cumbersome .......

Paisley Royal Infirmary I believe is using SEMS. Contact Dr Roger Thomas or Jack Watson in Med Physics

I worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley until 9 months ago and was the Deputy Systems Administrator on our SEMS system.

From an administration point of view (we were running it on SCO Unix until April last year when we switched to Red Hat) its not the most friendly of environments if you've not much experience it these types of OS's, although moving to Red Hat was a step forward. The writing of reports using RGEN seems like a bit of a black art at first, but take time to get to know it and its quite powerfull. On the plus side, Red Hat is much more stable and secure than any of Bill Gate's offering to date, and once you get your head round Linux it's relatively easy to follow.

We didnt use any of tha additional modules for SEMS and certainely didn't use it to anything like its full capacity, but for the job we used it for it proved functional and stable.

Around the time I left they were in the market to change / update the system, either to the windows version or a competitors product. Each of the other products had pro's and con's since our system was already tailored around SEMS. As far as I konw they are no further down the line as the Systems Administrator left the month after me and niether of us have been replaced yet.

From a users point of view, ther terminal window look wasnt liked to much and the layout wasnt everyones cup of tea, but after several years of getting used to it, it became the norm and other systems we tested 'seemed' awkward to use.

I'm not sure how IBS stand as far as demoing the product but I wouldn't rule it out without speaking to existing users and taking a look at the product in use, possibly even by visiting another site that implements it.

As a final note, where I work now uses its own in house database written in Access by the Physicist here, which I have found a lot more restrictive than SEMS was.

We could be in the marketplace for a replacement for our SEMS database..
Not including HECS, has anyone out there changed from SEMS to another? If so, was the transfer of data from SEMS to the other done easily..ish?

Please, email me..we would like to see some demo's.

cheers

We use Emat.

Hi Mark.
We have done exactly that. When moving to EMAT extracting data from SEMS to a spreadsheet was easy. Transfer of that data into EMAT by Barwick was very accurate and painless. The only painfull thing we had to do was start our PPM's and external contracts from scratch. To be honest that wasn't such a bad thing.