Greetings to one and all…. Long time, no chat.

I realize this usergroup on Yahoo is somewhat dormant, however,….  I have a few questions that maybe a few of you can answer….or at least point me in the right direction.

Lately, I’ve been receiving messages from European colleagues that look like:

“Compared to MrStudio where we have got NN licences in the group so far and having in mind the change of the current pricing model of SPSS stepping away from the tier model to single licences we would need NN MrStudio+ IOM licences at single cost of NNNNN EUR = NNN,NNN EUR  + maintenance NN,NNN EUR which sums up to NNN,NNN EUR in the first year.  It seems to me an opportunity to save money by centralizing work in one of these countries - but they all speak different languages which is only one aspect making it difficult.”

Or in other words, mrStudio is damn expensive….and getting more expensive.  In our cases, there are lots and lots of survey authors across all countries… but many of them generate far few projects per licensed copy of mrStudio.   

You’d think SPSS would give away mrStudio to promote the usage of mrInterview and their data model…  don’t you want more people doing more things in mrscript and not less?

“So what’s your question Zotter,” you ask?

My question is….  How can one reduce the cost exposure to mrStudio licenses? 
Is there a good substitute for 90% of the IDE functionality?

1)    I’ve heard rumors of people using Eclipse IDE with custom plugin’s for mrscript. 

2)    Others are saying they are moving towards using Visual Studio 2008 Shell to deal with mrscript. 
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb510103.aspx
The performance, familiarity, refinement tend to side with vStudio over mrStudio, I’d guess.

3)    Some have even suggested using JEdit with an mrScript Plugin

4)    Still others have suggested the wave of the future is an AJAX based IDE that is hosted on a web server sitting right next to mrInterview in our server farm, such as something from BungeeLabs or whatever  
http://www.bungeelabs.com/
http://www.podtech.net/home/3064/bungee-labs-and-their-ajax-based-ide
http://codepress.org/
etc, etc, etc….

5)    Some sort of Citrix setup?

Any info about what approach you are taking would be great appreciated….

Thanks for your time,

Kind regards,

E. David Zotter – david@...

P.S.

Link to me on LinkedIN

http://www.linkedin.com/in/zotter