General Electric Co’s Rockville, Maryland GE Information Services has announced availability of BusinessTalk 2000, the latest upgrade to its communications and information management system tool running under MS-DOS, Macintosh and Windows. The six-year-old BusinessTalk software was originally developed by Apple Com-uter Inc, its implementation being called AppleLink. However it is GE Information Services – GEIS – that provides the worldwide dial-up communications network, and it is GEIS’s server in Ohio which processes and controls the service. GEIS’s own implementation, BusinessTalk, is available to any large international company, or business that is considering going international. GEIS claims to have some 1,000 companies using the service, Nov-ll Inc being one of them. Like Apple, Novell has customised BusinessTalk as NetWare Express, an information service for communicating with its dealers, re-sellers and customers around the world on pre- and post-sales technical support of NetWare. Another user is Knight-Ridder’s PressLink subsidiary, an international electronic publishing service which has customised BusinessTalk to provide newspapers with access to photographs, news stories and graphics. And the King of Sweden has recently inau-urated the service on behalf of the Scout and Guide organisation, which will use it for communication between its 750 around the world. What GEIS actually provides is an engine, or shell – the customer simply supplies the data. BusinessTalk 2000 offers electronic messaging, databases for a variety of industries, customer-specific bulletin boards and search-retrieval services, customised business intelligence and electronic news-clipping services. It can’t communicate with all local area network-based electronic mail offerings, but GEIS does have an entire service line called BusinessConnect, which enables GEIS to connect with most local network-based electronic mail packages. Each front-end software product presents services in icon and menu formats. An individual can access the same data anywhere in the world, since his personal identification code is not geographically specified. BusinessTalk 2000 features file compression and decompression; QuikView, a tool that combines the features of a bulletin board with a database’s hierarchical organisation and search capability; an Alert icon which contains urgent information; scheduled and automatic mail; and system usage tracking. The hardware requirements for the MS-DOS version of the system are an MS-DOS computer with a minimum 2Mb hard disk capacity and 520Kb RAM; the Mac version requires 1.2Mb disk and 600K RAM; the Windows version needs 2Mb free disk and 4Mb RAM. Each version requires an internal or external modem. There are no plans to develop vers-ions for other operating en-vi-ronments, unless demand arises. Prices for the service vary according to the customer and the amount of data he wants up on the network. GEIS’s shrink-wrapp-ed personal computer software tool costs UKP205; hourly access to the dial-up network is UKP14.50 and there is an additional charge per 1,000 characters of eight pence. For a firm’s internal communication, a local area network would be more appropriate, since there is no access charge.
