What edition is right for me?

The answer depends on your needs and should become fairly obvious once you have downloaded the 30-day trial version and familiarized yourself with all of its features. We will try to offer some guidelines and thoughts below.


An individual user would likely be most interested in Alventis Standard Edition. Alventis comes with a number of useful pre-built tables and forms, so if they satisfy your needs for information management, this may be the edition for you. It is worth noting that even with Alventis Standard, you are strictly speaking not limited to the tables/forms that are packaged with it: you can import tables and forms created by other users if they choose to share them with you. If you want to modify or create tables and forms yourself, you need to step up to Alventis Professional.


A user who wants complete control over the structure of data tables and the design of the corresponding data-entry forms will find everything he needs in Alventis Professional Edition. Business users will likely want to mix-and-match all three editions depending on the number of users and their needs. It is quite difficult to generalize things and offer specific advice, so we will simply examine some possible scenarios.

A small business with 2 to 5 users or so could in fact get by with just Alventis Standard (as many copies/licenses as there are users). You would be limited to sharing data in the peer-to-peer (shared access) mode, and using only the tables and forms that come packaged with the application. All users would also be seen as a single user, and there would be no security policies. It should also be noted that peer-to-peer access mode is inherently less reliable than client/server mode (this is true of any application, not just Alventis). A small team on a tight budget could probably overlook these limitations and still benefit from sharing data between multiple users.

Replacing one of the Alventis Standard licenses by a Professional license would in effect add a copy of Alventis Designer to the setup described above. This would obviously give the team the ability to modify or create new tables and forms. These tables and forms would be accessible to all users, but the overall limitations of this setup would still remain.


An enterprise that wishes to benefit from the full power of Alventis Database will want to have a copy of Alventis Enterprise Edition. The Enterprise edition comes with the server, which provides you with a robust and secure multi-user client/server platform. Also included is a license for Alventis, which offers the necessary administration interface, as well as a license for Alventis Designer. These two applications would likely be most appropriate for a user designated as the system administrator. All you need to add to the above is as many copies of Alventis Standard Edition as there are "ordinary" database users. A company that wants to have more than a single user creating or modifying tables and forms only needs to replace one or more Standard licenses by the corresponding number of Professional licenses that would include Alventis Designer. Users can use multiple copies of Designer to work concurrently in the same database, but not on the same object - be it table or form.

A larger company may benefit from having multiple servers. Some users would probably access data on a single server, while others could connect to as many servers as necessary simultaneously. You can have as many servers as you want on the same network - all you need is one Enterprise license per server.