Relationship with DBI
I’ve been in the Pick market for 24 years, originally a Chicagoan, now based in southern California. Among other activities, at Pick Systems I held the titles of Quality Assurance Manager and Corporate Technical Account Manager, and continuing with Raining Data I was DBMS Product Manager. I’ve pretty much always specialized in advanced development with MV applications. These days as President of Nebula Research and Development I strive to help other developers to link their applications with the outside world. That includes GUI, B2B and B2C exchanges, .NET development, and anything else you can think of.
As an independent agency, Nebula R&D has other clients which include DesignBais developers, and outside of our relationship with DBI we provide training, development, add-on software, and other services.
We have begun the process of training Nebula R&D associates to use the product across all platforms that are supported for DesignBais. This increases our value to our clients and provides additional coverage for you and future user/developers. During this entire process Nebula associates will intentionally beat up the software and the documentation (with the goal of finding bugs before you do), file enhancmement requests which are beneficial for all of us, and learn what we can to become more valuable as assets to the DesignBais community.
We will also produce custom documentation and tutorials based on in-depth research into the software and installation processes. For example, one document already in final editing provides detailed step-by-step information for installing DesignBais with D3, and configuration with mv.NET. It also includes some tips for maintenance. We hope these supplemental documents, like books in any technical bookstore, will prove to be valuable assets to resellers, new users, and those of you who want to get extra milage from your software.
Finally, we will also make available tools to be used with DesignBais to supplement the existing features and simplify common processes. Here are examples which were written for v3.3 – (since v4.x already has these features though you probably won’t see them) 
– Ability to duplicate areas from one form into another.
– Cleansing process for Field Properties Load Dict to remove characters from field names that don’t work with equates or in other areas. (underscores, dashes, dollar signs, ampersands, percent signs, etc)
– A program to assign all fields in a given area of a form with a specific section name.
– A program to globally replace program names, styles, or other parameters which usually require manual change.
If you have any ideas for custom add-ons, please let me know. I’ll be sure to file it as an official enhancement request, but if you need something quickly or highly customized then we can work independently.
Regards,
Tony