>What are Great Elks and Vantives?

The Great Elk is a contact management system created in Ponsonby, New Zealand and sold around the world (3M in the states use it big time). It started life in fox 2.6 and is now OOP'ed in VFP5. It's totally customisable and you can do amazing things with it. In the 2.6 version I wrote a freight quoting system for a BAX Global. They are so pleased with it they've recommended it to their American masters to take the Elk on as their international platform. They wouldn't take my work because it's quite specific to the NZ market but I'm still quite chuffed. Licenses start at about $2000, used to be cheaper so every man and his dog could use it but I guess they're now targetting the big boys.

Vantive is a major step up (don't tell that to the guys at the Elk, they'd say otherwise) and runs on Informix, Oracle, SQL server and Sybase. It's mostly help desk and support systems although their Sales and Marketing is coming along well. Telecom have bought it for lots of areas including Xtra. The big bonus is that it handles workflow really well. It doesn't feel quite as much like "programming" but I'm getting good experience in SQL Server, stored procedures and VBA so that can't be a bad thing. Vantive Corp's in Santa Clara, CA.

Sarah