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There are a number of useful programs available for serious chemists to help cope with drawing and analysing structures. But more and more chemists, having experienced the advantages of compatible software 'suites' such as Microsoft Office, are now wondering if it's necessary to have collections of odd, incompatible utilities when it comes to more technical work.
Which is where ChemOffice comes in: a complete package of powerful and compatible software for drawing, modelling and information handling in the chemical environment. Like Microsoft Office, it gathers together several indispensable applications and seamlessly integrates them with each other: useful not only for individual users, but in collaborative working and in networked environments.
The many current ChemOffice users will be quite at home with the new ChemOffice 2000 Ultra. The three main applications - ChemDraw, Chem3D, and ChemFinder - are still there, but they have new features and improved speed, reliability, and capacity. And they're accompanied by the compatible databases of ChemInfo.
To give an idea of the breadth of the ChemDraw chemical structure drawing application, take a look at the enhancements included with the latest ChemDraw Version 5.0, a major component of ChemOffice 2000 Ultra. They include a new version of the ChemDraw Plugin for web operation; estimated NMR line spectra; spectral file viewing; a name-to-structure generator; naming services from Beilstein's AutoNom Version 2.1 program; and improved programming interfaces.
When a two-dimensional drawing doesn't tell you everything about a molecule (What does it look like in three dimensions? What local minima can be reached, and how flexible are different parts of the molecule?) ChemDraw sketches can be pasted into Chem3D, the visual modeling component of ChemOffice 2000 Ultra.
Chem3D is a 'window' to MOPAC and Gaussian electronic structure calculations, offering easy job set-up and visual analysis of the results. Chem3D Ultra includes MOPAC 97 and an interface to the new Gaussian 98W.
Then there's ChemFinder, the component of the suite which manages chemical information. It now has expanded abilities to execute complex searches over huge databases without requiring expensive server hardware.
Searching is faster than ever, but users are going to be particularly impressed with the Excel spreadsheet integration. ChemFinder for Excel is an extension of Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows, which adds meaningful chemical structures which can be searched with ChemFinder. Calculations can be performed to populate corresponding cells of the spreadsheet. In essence, the ChemFinder database can be run from Excel, and it looks like any other Excel spreadsheet.
ChemInfo includes ChemACX, the database of commercially available chemicals, which now includes 120 catalogues and some 450,000 chemical products. ChemMSDX puts valuable Material Safety Data Sheets at your fingertips, and ChemINDEX provides identification, physical properties, and web info sources for over 180,000 chemicals, including the contents of the popular chemfinder.com database.
The ChemOffice WebServer turns a PC into a web based chemical information server and includes five licenses for the ChemDraw and Chem3D plugins so that connected PCs can access the server as query clients. It provides compound registration (something many smaller companies often do not enjoy), structure searching and access to relational data stored in Oracle databases - from an easily understood web interface.
We think ChemOffice 2000 Ultra should make every serious chemist's life easier. And we think you'll agree when you see it. |
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