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Hi everyone,

If you're getting this, it's because you or somebody else has signed you up for the EQL Data newsletter. We send this out about once a month. If you don't want to receive this mailing anymore, please reply and let us know; we'll take you off the list right away.

In this ongoing chronicle of our adventures:

• EQL Data Live at Conferences
• The EQL Blog and Documentation
• New Pricing: Reducing Variable Costs
• EQL Appliance Part Deux - Pricing & Development Models
• More Features for Your Buck

EQL Data Live at Conferences

Thanks to the tremendous support we've gotten from you, our friends, testers, and customers, EQL is getting noticed more and more. This made the months of November and early December exciting: we were invited to present at two conferences, showing off OnWeb and proving that Access is a viable platform for Web Applications.

First, some of you caught Liz and myself at the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, ON, Canada on November 21, talking to young entrepreneurs at the Impact National Conference. After wrestling the power cord away from the Sun Microsystems guys, we had a great time talking about how our product is not only an example of innovation gone good, but a platform upon which new entrepreneurs can prototype and build their own applications. Thanks to everyone who came out!

On December 9, I took our interns, Matt and Ashok, down to the Microsoft campus in Farmington, CT, U.S.A. to present EQL Access OnWeb to the Connecticut Access User Group. A big thank you to the group for inviting us down, and giving us two hours to show off and brag about everything we've made Access do. All of our customers will get to reap the benefits of the suggestions and feedback we received.

Want to promote EQL in your area? Know of a gathering you think would further EQL sales and feed us future growth ideas? Let us know, and we'll do our best to be there.

UPDATE: While I was finishing off this newsletter, we received an invite to present in Surrey, BC, Canada, to school district representatives about OnWeb, and to students at Guildford Park Secondary School about the challenges and rewards of entrepreneurship. The tentative date is set for between January 4 and 6.

The EQL Blog and Documentation

In order to consolidate the many news briefs and updates we create about EQL, we've decided to start a new EQL Blog, available at http://eqldata.com/blog. We also have an RSS feed for your syndication needs:
http://eqldata.com/blog/rss. The month of November centered a lot around documentation, and so we produced product overviews and pamphlets galore. More work is in the pipeline for publication, but you can see some technical documents highlighting the way OnWeb really works at http://eqldata.com/kb/1070/onweb-technology-overview. If you've been wondering how we designed a system packed so full of incredible that your Access databases materialize in your browser with no effort at all: this is where we answer such questions.

New Pricing: Reducing Variable Costs

One thing we haven't gotten around to announcing well is our new pricing structure. Based on your feedback, particularly regarding your concerns that OnWeb costs could spiral out of control if you have a sudden increase in your number of users, we've decided that an easier way to conceptualize and bill for OnWeb costs is to limit the number of simultaenous connections to your applications, and give unlimited usage time to those connected. The modified pricing structure is:

• $30/month for only 1 logon at a time.
• $120/month for up to 5 concurrent users.
• $200/month for up to 10 concurrent users.

We will cap your OnWeb database at your pre-paid number of simultaneous sessions and ensure that you pay a fixed rate every month - no overcharge risk! We want to know what you think of the new pricing, so please get in touch, and for all our existing customers: if your current payment plan suit your needs, you can continue with it, or alternatively, let us know if you'd like to change to one of the new billing options.

EQL Appliance Part Deux - Pricing & Development Models

Now that we've started promoting and offering the EQL Appliance, which lets you host an OnWeb server and data in your own physical installation, we've also started promoting its pricing. In order to offer our customers the most possible value with the hardware, we've put together some beefy servers, capable of running up to 80 simultaneous OnWeb sessions and over a hundred Access databases. We've also put together some hardware for internal use rather than OnWeb resale, and priced that accordingly. The suggested prices are:

• Enterprise-level rackmount server: $11000
• Small business application server: $3350
• Virtual appliance (capabilities restricted by your hardware): $2000

Please contact us if you're interested in more information or for specifications.

... Furthermore, for those interested in OnWeb application resale, but with a tighter starting budget: we now offer development appliances!

Physically identical to the servers above, these appliances are nearly full-featured (lacking a few details, such as SSL support), and marked as not for resale, but allow for affordable development and testing of OnWeb solutions.

• Small business development variant: $1200
• Virtual development version (limited to 3 GB of memory): $500

If you've considered developing your own OnWeb hub, now is your chance to give it a shot for a low price. Of course, development versions are upgradable to full resale versions automatically, without complicated shipping or RMA schemes.

More Features for Your Buck

In our ongoing quest to better our product, we even snuck some features in under the radar while we were busy promoting EQL.

The battle to fully support Access 2007 got a large boost with a lot of newer form controls properly rendering in the OnWeb system.

Those of you with hidden tables in your applications have also found that they no longer appear (if you use Access OnWeb plugin versions 1.9.6f5p or later, available as always from your initial download link) in your WebView.

As for things which do show up in WebView, we've added a new option to let you beta-test some of our exciting new features. These features don't cause any data loss or corruption, but maybe aren't as polished as we envisioned them out to be, or their interfaces might be changed before we roll them out publically. You can try them yourself by changing the URL you use to access WebView.

If you currently use: http://eqldata.com/db// You can view beta features at: http://eqldata.com/db//?beta=1

Current beta projects:

• For Windows users: if you use plugin versions 1.9.6f4p or later, try the exciting "Run in external client" link in the EQL Access OnWeb section. We've been developing our very own browser-free native client for remote Access manipulation: this will eventually be fully integrated into the plugin, but for now, still requires some website interaction. If you try it, let us know how you like it! NOTE: This viewer does not support printing yet, but will definitely do so before a full release.

• For everyone: we finally implemented time zone support for your database Date/Times! While we regrettably can't change past inserted Date/Times, if you modify your OnWeb Timezone (by selecting the appropriate zone from the drop-down menu), any future auto-created dates (as created by ie. the Now() builtin function) will match the selected zone.

... and we plan to keep the goodies coming. We're glad that you're enjoying OnWeb, and providing a lot of great suggestions and feedback! We welcome more of your comments at any time - you can simply reply to this email to get in touch with us.

Thanks for using EQL Data!

Regards, and happy holidays from Toronto, ON, Canada,

Luke Kosewski
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

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