Announcing Abraquest Release 2.6.3

Announcing Abraquest 2.6.3, a maintenance release following the recent release of Abraquest online. It is recommended that all users upgrade to this release (how to upgrade? ... run Abraquest as per normal - it checks every 4 times you start it - or if you can't wait go to Abraquest online and download the trial version from there).

We are sorry to say that some users have experienced problems adding books (usually a problem for new users or schools trailling Abraquest). This follows fairly major changes to the add books program over the past few months to incorporate Abraquest Online.

With Abraquest 2.6.3, we think we are at the end of these problems now and recommend that all users download the latest version, as Add Books is now much faster and more reliable than it was.

What concerned me is that due to the fact that existing customers use Add Books only rarely, it took two weeks or more for the problems to be reported, which is unacceptable to me personally. So in order to help improve this, we already have put an online support option into Abraquest, but the next release of Abraquest will concentrate on error reporting at all levels (behind the scenes) and a couple of new options that the user will see on the menu.

Option 1: A new option will be added to the menu to allow the user to make suggestions or report issues. This will work via Abraquest online and the user will be able to see previous suggestions and the replies and conclusions from the Abraquest support team.

Option 2: If an error actually occurs (which unfortunately has happened from time to time in add books over the last couple of weeks), the user will be prompted not with "An error has occurred..please email the Abraquest errors file from My Documents", but it will bring up a box that allows you to say in one sentence what it was you were doing, and this will generate an email along with the necessary error details for our support team to be able to deal with. Sometimes just a workaround is needed, sometimes it is more serious and a patch or new release of Abraquest is required (in the worst case). We would like to be able to do this as efficiently and smoothly as if the customer telephones us normally.

Watch out for the next release of Abraquest and also the one after that, which is planned for March, and further upcoming announcements regarding Abraquest online.

Finally, any users who would like their 30 day trial extending by a further 30 days, please contact us via the usual methods.

About the author

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson has been a software developer since 1983 and has been involved with Abraquest since 2004. He is the director of Spherical Software Limited (www.sphericalsoftware.com), the company that owns Abraquest.