Usually corporations and power users don't mix.  Corporations want to restrict what their users do and power users don't want to be restricted.  Object Desktop Professional provides the features both groups want.  With powerful security features, Object Desktop Professional can keep users from mangling their system or desktop objects.  For power users and IS managers, Object Desktop Professional provides a great deal of features that most would agree saves time, money, training, and effort.

What is in Object Desktop Professional that isn't in Object Desktop 1.5?

 Object Desktop Professionl contains all the features of Object Desktop 
PLUS:

Object Viewing
   Object Desktop Professional integrates document viewing into the base operating system. Hundreds of file formats are now recognized automatically when you double click an object on the desktop. Using Object Desktop Professional, computer users will no longer have to worry whether they have Word Perfect 5.1 on their system when someone gives them a disk full of documents. Presenters will no longer have to worry whether the presentation they give is in PowerPoint or Freelance. Object Desktop Professional doesn't just support a few of the most common file types, it supports hundreds of file types from databases, word processors, spread sheets, internet, graphics, presentation packages, and more. The basic rule of thumb is, if the format has ever had an installed base of more than 50,000 users, it's probably supported.

Object Security
   Both IS managers and end users often find it necessary to secure and protect their desktops. Object Security offers an impressive array of features that allow administrators to prevent custom desktop environments from tampering. Object Security can keep icons from being moved, deleted, changed, etc. IS managers in particular will like the ability to "keep their users from messing up their system." Any end user that shares his or her system with others will also appreciate the ability of securing and protecting their desktop.

Desktop Backup Advisor
   One of the more anticipated features of Object Desktop Professional is the Desktop Backup Advisor which can perform two important functions.
   First, It allows users to quickly and easily manage, backup, and restore packaged desktops. Having a "wizard-like" user interface, the desktop backup advisor is very easy to work with. Users and/or IS managers can easily package and distribute desktops across the enterprise using the Desktop Backup Advisor which uses Stardock s advanced Object Packaging technology. Corporations looking to deploy a standard desktop will find the Desktop Backup Advisor an essential tool to this end.
   One test site has used the Desktop Backup Advisor to deploy a standardized desktop with three variations - one for technical users, one for their end users, and one for managers. When a new machine goes on the network, they open the Desktop Backup Advisor, choose the desktop they want and it unpackages it.
   Secondly, it completely repairs OS/2 INI files. The most common cause of system instability and performance loss are damaged INI files (os2.ini, os2sys.ini). Over time, OS/2 INI files collect a great deal of unused 'junk' that can slow OS/2 down and make odd behavior creep in. While INI repair programs go far to help the situation, there is no replacement to being able to totally cleanse the INI files without losing user customizations. The desktop backup advisor, simply by restoring a desktop, completely cleanses the INI file and ignores all the damaged and unused data. The net result is that a system that has used the desktop backup advisor behaves like a freshly installed OS/2 system without losing any of their class registrations, customizations, or their desktop.
   The beauty of the Desktop Backup Advisor is that it itself is a tool used to backup and restore your desktops but the very fact that when you use the tool it cleans your INI files almost sounds too good to be true but it's not.. "I have seen 486 systems that were crawling and would have weird errors pop up on a daily basis get a big performance boost and become rock solid simply by using the desktop backup advisor. It s a lot easier than reinstalling OS/2 from scratch and a lot cheaper than buying a new machine." said one user.

Object Schedule
   A user may want to do a backup, a virus scan, a defragmentation of the hard disk, and begin compiling in the background. Another user may want to run a script that resorts the database and charges batches. Another user may want to run a program that downloads email automatically. What do all these have in common? They are tasks in which human intervention is not necessary. Yet, users end up having to have these tasks running in the background during the day. Luckily, OS/2 is a great operating system for multitasking but even OS/2 will slow down if you have tasks running in the background.
   Enter Object Schedule. With Object Schedule, a special OS/2 folder that has much in common with the Startup folder, users simply drag and drop their programs into the Object Schedule folder and assign a date and time for the program or job to run. In the above examples, the virus scan, backup, and database update could be scheduled to run at 3:00am when no one is using the PC. When the user returns in the morning, the job is completed. Object Schedule is easy to use and helps automate your office as well as your desktop.

Object Advisor
   The Object Advisor is possibly the most innovative feature of Object Desktop Professional. This advanced technology is intended to address the huge costs associated with training and re-training end users in corporations that have any amount of turnover. The Object Advisor feature allows corporations to develop custom computer based training materials that display when a user doesn't understand how to perform desktop operations. The on-line help technology provided with Object Advisor is authored with industry standard Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which allows for leveraging next generation internet/intranet technologies in a corporate environment, including new internet features such as JAVA. It truly demonstrates the benefits of the web/internet in a way that anyone can appreciate.

Object Backup
   While backup solutions exist in many forms on OS/2, the powerful easy to use Object Backup feature integrates itself with the OS/2 desktop and even supports the new ATAPI/IDE standard. Users can now backup their system to floppy, tape, and/or network drives. Object Backup is not a "lite" backup package-feel free to compare the included Object Backup features head-to-head against any backup package on any platform. 

Object Navigator Professional
   Object Navigator Professional not only is a powerful and intuitive file manager that can see long file names on FAT, works with OS/2's associations (and is the only commercial OS/2 file manager available that does that), makes working with multiple drives easy, but now, in Object Desktop Professional, users can quickly and easily view virtually any type of file. Object Navigator Professional allows users to open of a "View Pane" that is part of Object Navigator Professional. When the user double clicks on a file (any file) it will read it, interpret it and display it. Whether it's an Excel95 spreadsheet, a TIFF graphics files, a Power Point for Macintosh presentation, or even a Windows 3.1 DLL. Object Navigator will read and display it in a flash. The view pane's performance is quite impressive. Within a second, users can jump from file to file and it displays that file with all the appropriate formatting, embedded graphics, etc.
   Object Navigator Professional works very well with compressed files such as PKZIP (.ZIP) files. It can view a ZIP file even faster than Object Desktop's own Object Archives by trading off the folder metaphor for raw speed. Users who have a large library of documents, graphics, etc. in ZIP files can now quickly browse them and view the files they want saving many megabytes of disk storage.

Object Inspector
   Anyone trying to manage an OS/2 desktop knows the difficulty of working with Workplace Shell objects. Finding out an object's "low level" settings can be frustrating and time consuming. Network managers spend countless hours setting up workstations so that they are easily used but standardized to a corporate reference point. Object Inspector provides the tool to make these chores easy.
   To discover any object's "under-the-cover" properties, simply load the Object Inspector and Workplace Shell objects are instantly displayed and presented in an easily manageable form. Users can even create REXX or RC scripts to regenerate objects across an enterprise.

Conclusions
 Special Upgrade pricing is available to customers who have Object Desktop 1.5.  Because Object Desktop Professional comes so soon after the release of Object Desktop 1.5, users who already have Object Desktop 1.5 can upgrade to Professional for only $99 (over 60% off the list price!).
Those who are still using v1.0 of Object Desktop can move up to Object Desktop
