Dynamic-CD
 : 
  Powered by FindinSite

    
What they say

Charles Kerr, November 2014 : www.regs4ships.com
"Dynamic-CD has been an extremely useful (and trouble free) addition to our disc product, and is much liked by our end users."

Pete Mooney of Turner Facilities Management Solutions from Cincinnati USA
Re Dynamic-CD.Net:
"What used to take an hour to set up I can now do in 30 seconds by handing clients a flash drive. Thank you for designing an excellent product!"

Madhulika Liddle, Analyst at NIIT, the global IT Learning Solutions Corporation
NIIT specialises in knowledge management for large corporate clients, and as part of an ongoing project, we decided to use Dynamic-CD to deliver a searchable repository of reference material. The target audience would, in most cases, not be able to access the Net, so Dynamic CD proved to be the perfect solution.

What was even more heartening was the fact that PHDCC never made us feel that we were actually halfway across the world from them. Every time we had a problem or needed clarifications (which was often), we could rely upon the team at PHDCC to respond promptly and efficiently.


Unilock Pro DVD
Dynamic-CD has been chosen by Unilock to power their DVD - based catalog. Unilock has been supplying paving stone to North America for over 30 years.

The Unilock Pro DVD uses Dynamic-CD to serve over 4 gigabytes of data from databases, images, PDF and DWG files.


Alden Streeter, Senior Programmer, Safety Research Corporation of America. (www.srca.net).
The way we are using Dynamic-CD is to put a website we developed,  www.dantescatalogs.com , on CD. DANTES is a program for distance learning and education. Our web site is a database-driven site where different schools can keep their course information up-to-date, and then users can browse the information in catalog form. We also publish printed versions of the catalogs.

Our client has a lot of computers and proprietary networks that are not connected to the outside internet, and in most cases users are not allowed to install any outside software on them either, so they asked us also this year to create an HTML CD version of the catalogs in parallel with the printed catalogs, and your Dynamic-CD product allowed me to accomplish this in just a couple of days by using only a slightly modified version of our existing web site.

If not for that we would have had to painstakingly generate hundreds of static HTML pages from the database-driven site, which likely would have required weeks or more of tedious drudgework. So thank you very much for an excellent and useful product.


Evelyn Miller, Senior MarComm Manager, Sylantro Systems Corp. (www.sylantro.com).
I've been a Dynamic-CD user for about a year now, with great results -- I've created press kits, sales kits and other projects, all very quickly and with the comfort of knowing that our data is protected from misuse. The product is very straightforward to use, and in the few times that I've needed it, customer support has been terrific. This product is a winner!

Gerald McCormack, Cook Islands Natural Heritage Project
(Cook Islands biodiversity database).
Cook Islands biodiversity database We produced a Cook Islands multimedia biodiversity database on MS ACCESS®. The Bishop Museum made it available globally by putting it on the web in March (2003). Unfortunately, in the Cook Islands people on remote islands have limited or no web access, and for others access is too slow and expensive to enable them to browse the web-database and download images.

After a long Web search we found Dynamic-CD, which looked as though it might enable us to put the web database on a CD for schools and Government agencies, and to sell to the general public and visitors. The website has various HTML pages for general information, and a few ASP pages extracting data from 4,000 records (eventually 6,000). About 2,000 records had a thumbnail image and, one or more, larger images (and a few had video and sound files!). The database is growing continuously and we intend to upgrade the website every six months.

I cannot find a computer programmer within 10km of my office, and I had a few problems using the Dynamic- CD Wizard to make the CD image. I contacted PHD, thinking that I would probably get into one of those runaround black holes that software manufactures have available. I was very surprised to get immediate and excellent assistance from PHD, and my little misunderstandings evaporated.

However, we did have one particularly serious problem. We could not get our website nor Dynamic-CD to represent the unicode macron-vowels and glottal (chr 2018) used in Cook Islands’ Maori words. PHD soon showed us how to solve our website problem, and they also modified Dynamic-CD to handle the unicode macron-vowels and glottal.

The first fix on Dynamic-CD was not perfect because it interfered with the display of French names, such that "Sergent à Tache Noire" appeared as "Sergent [] ache Noire". PHD further modified its support for unicode and this problem was also solved.

Dynamic-CD has enabled us to distribute our biodiversity database to the people that really need it - the people of the Cook Islands. PHD have been great to deal with - friendly, supportive, competent, and generous. Many many thanks.


Herman Knoops of KnoMan b.v., The Netherlands
KnoMan have used Dynamic-CD to make an Intranet-based search & retrieval system also run from a stand-alone CD-ROM (currently approx. 15,000 pages in PDF/XLS/DOC/AutoCAD, updated every six months). Since hit-highlighting in native PDF documents was demanded, a webserver was required.

Due to the stringent requirements of the KnoMan's client, Dynamic-CD had to be modified to work in a "locked down" secure environment, since users were not allowed to install/setup any program. Even registration of COM-components was prohibited. With excellent help from Herman, PHD added volatile registration facilities and support for optimised PDF files via byte-serving technology.

"The Dynamic-CD based CD-ROM, has been in the field now for several years, and very minimum of support activities have been required, so this is great (and we know that the CD-ROM is used intensively). Even the "volatile registration" seems to give no problems at all. I know it took a lot of effort/study to make it work smoothly on all Windows platforms, but the result is obviously OK, thanks to the excellent support and quick responses from PHDCC."


Review by Mike James in Computer Shopper (Computer Shopper) :
Computer Shopper Not so long ago it was relatively easy to put your website on a CD-ROM and expect it to work just as it did over the internet. Today's scenario is different because most websites use dynamic pages that are constructed and customised by the web server. This means that web pages saved to CD-ROM don't work any more because the browser isn't able to do the work of the web server. Dynamic-CD changes this by acting as a web server for ASP pages on a CD. Its ASP scripting, in VBScript, uses ActiveX components, cookies and session variables. In other words, you can access a database, create a shopping cart and password-protect and encrypt your script.

To run the website on CD, no installation is needed on the target machine but the browser has to be Internet Explorer 4 or later. Other browsers might work, but only if the VBScript engine is installed. A wizard is used to install the necessary run-times on your CD and to encrypt and protect files . At the moment there is no automatic support for multi - CD applications. The ASP support is good but there are some omissions and you might need to make some minor changes for it all to work. There are also some CD-specific extensions such as the ability to pop up message boxes.

Spy-CD is a useful companion to Dynamic-CD, although it can be used on its own. It is a website search engine that can be used with a website stored on CD. If you want to use the same search engine on both internet-hosted and CD-hosted websites, then there is also Spy-Server, which you can use if you have Spy-CD. Both versions of the search engines are Java applets, which means that the client has to have a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed.

The Spy-Wizard is used to build the search index. From there it can find web pages based on queries that include logical operators, wild cards (such as '?' and '*'), stemming and synonyms. It supports a range of international character sets and multiple indices for searching subsets of the site. It can search HTML pages, PDF, DOC/RTF, Excel, PowerPoint and plain text files. When searching HTML pages the text is highlighted and links inserted. This works in a frameset as well as a simple page.

Using both products together you can transfer websites to CD or create CD-based applications from scratch. A number of examples are available that show how it can host a complete e-commerce site on CD. Sites created with Dreamweaver can be transferred to CD with no change and you can use CD-RW or DVDs just as easily. A 30-day free trial can be downloaded from the PHDCC website.

(In fact, the support for multiple CDs has never been an issue and it is of course possible to use DVDs for larger storage capacity. We are always happy to consider adding facilities when requested by customers - phdcc).

Midlothian Voluntary Action (MVA).
Midlothian Voluntary Action The MVA Resource Guide is a local resource directory of voluntary organisations. We have already produced the guide on the web and on hard paper copy. One aspect of this project we wanted to develop was a CD version. We decided to keep things simple and to just transfer our database driven website onto a CD.

Being a voluntary organisation with limited funding, we weren't really able to afford the MS Developers Pack required for creating MS Access databases for distributions. So when we discovered Dynamic CD, we were excited at the possibilities.

The product itself was very useful and certainly what we needed. The technical support we received was tremendous. We had some problems with getting the DSN-less connection correct, and we were very impressed and grateful to the incredibly detailed help.

We highly recommend the product, both for the product itself, and for the after sales technical support.


David Todd of Sharp Electronics (UK) Limited.
We use Dynamic-CD to replicate SharpSearch - a searchable database on our Technical Website used by our dealers' engineers in the UK.

When our engineers visit customers to fix problems, their laptop PCs do not have internet access, and it is unprofessional to ask the customer to access the Sharp Technical Website from the customer's PC.

Consequently, we use Dynamic-CD as part of the engineers' support pack, allowing them to access SharpSearch while travelling, or on-site to resolve our customers' problems.

Dynamic-CD has provided a straightforward and cost effective solution.


Review by By Mark Gibbs in Network World Fusion ( Network World Fusion).
There could be all sorts of reasons why you might want to provide a Web site on a CD-ROM.

For example, it might be that the target user has a low-bandwidth connection or no connection at all. It might be that the content to be distributed is sensitive, and you and the user don't want it transported across the ‘Net.

Whatever the reason, there are a couple of systems that allow you to put a Web site on a CD along with a minimal local server, such that more than just static content can be delivered. Of all the tools for this that I've seen so far for building these systems under Windows, the most promising looks to be Dynamic-CD from PHD Computer Consultants.

Dynamic-CD includes a CD-based, locally launched HTTP server that can handle Microsoft ASP scripting (the system requires IE 4+ for scripting support) through a proprietary scripting language called GASP - essentially an emulation of Active Server Pages (ASP).

Scripting allows for handling Form and Query data, incorporating ActiveX components, setting and retrieving cookies, and handling session variables. Because the server is running locally, GASP can do things that ASP can't, such as support user-interface calls like MsgBox to display a message to the user.

In fact, Dynamic-CD's scripting is powerful enough, the authors claim, to support the Comersus shopping-cart system we discussed in the last Web Applications newsletter. Dynamic-CD offers database access, password protection of scripts, and content encryption. No installation is required on the target machine.


Notes
I can't thank you enough for your prompt replies and willingness to help solve our problems. Dynamic-CD is a great product. Frans, CreoScitex

This is a great application and the developers deserve both credit and recognition! Ian Noble, Hydrasun

I have purchased your software and it is brilliant! We are having great success in distributing an electronic price book thanks to you! John Hamrick, Hamrick Consulting

Makes short work of stand-alone demo cd presentations. Gralin



 
   Home     Purchase     Licenses     Limitations     Version details     Site map     Contact     Copyright © 2000-2022 phdcc
  Dynamic-CD : the web server on CD Learn more | What's new