Rremarkably little notice seems to have been taken of the impending acquisition of Orange Loft by BQE. As a recent subscriber to Archioffice because of its mac support I am more than a little concerned at this development since BQE seem to be a pc software vendor whose products seem to be primarily financially based. Our main interest in Archioffice has always been its document management capabilities rather than its financial capabilities and my current concern is that this acquisition will lead to a dilution of the company's practice maangement capability and a lack of future support for the mac platform. I wonder if other users share our concerns and also wonder if Orangeloft are prepared to provide guarantees of future development of the software's project management capabilities on both platforms.

Gareth,

While I can understand your concern, I would like to assure you that this merger will in no way impact the effectiveness of ArchiOffice in the Mac community. I am a total Mac fanatic. I don't own a PC and I would never have one sit on my lap. I created ArchiOffice on a Mac, I use it on a Mac and I would never allow my baby to be taken away from the Mac platform.

However, I can truly understand why you would be concerned about the merger considering BQE has not been known as a Mac friendly application. While they do support Mac users with their Web Suite product (runs in a browser), the application and database for BQE's flagship product, BillQuick is for the PC.

I encourage you to attend our December 3rd webinar (stay tuned for details on how to join), where Shafat and I will outline our roadmap. As you know, Orange Loft has been working on a totally new platform to deliver ArchiOffice and it is platform agnostic. This is the route most independent software vendors are moving (at least they are moving this way if they plan to survive).

BQE was interested in Orange Loft precisely because of our project management, contact management, document management and project workflow systems. It is part of their "built for my business" strategy.

This is a great move for Orange Loft, BQE and mostly for our ArchiOffice and EngineerOffice users. Join us on December 3rd and you will be excited by what you learn.

I am grateful to you for your comprehensive and total support of those elements of the acquisition over which I had some grave misgivings. I appreciate your response which has allayed my immediate concerns and will endeavour as you suggest to listen to the webinar on 3rd of December. I am still at a slight loss to understand the benefit to Orange loft of this acquisition since BQE seems to offer little beyond what's already included in Archioffice itself and I therefore look forward to hearing more about the benefits to Archioffice users.