Viapoint is not a desktop search tool. So it is not fair to compare Viapoint with search tools like X1, GDS, Copernic. I tried the program myself and here is my opinion on this promising app.
After installing Viapoint in demo mode, it connected to the internet to activate the demo license. Then it scanned my system (really quick at that) though it did not give me any option to select folders that I wish to get scanned. It could be a limitation of the demo version.
The main interface of the Viapoint application is neat and it is easy to understand what each of the items might contain.
The Calendar item is a collapsible tree and lets you find emails, files which are grouped in the order of date when they were created. Double clicking on the file or email item lets you open it in the associated application. They might also include an option to view the properties of files via right click. I was surprised to see that my Firefox bookmarks file was showing a create date of 1-Jan-1601 though it was relatively very recent. Could be a small bug.
There are times when you want every single email that you sent/received to an individual, this is when the Contact node comes to your rescue. As you might notice in the screenshot below, this same information is available in three different styles - this is useful feature though it is very cluttered - same information presented at the same place so many times.
Viapoint comes with an in-built news reader - just drag a feed URL over the News Sites node and Viapoint will do the rest for you. I think they let you drag OPML files as well. If you read a news story about your contact, you can drag that news item into the Contact Company folder so it is filed with other relevant information. This way you never loose information or news stories about people.Viapoint scanned my IE favorites folder and grouped the favorites by domain. I didn't find this approach very useful as if I have several sites in the geocities.com domain, all will fall under the same category (Geocities.com) though they some sites may be personal and some may be tech related. Also, I use Firefox as my primary browser and would have preferred that Viapoint scans my Firefox favorites. It could ask for browser preference during the program installation.
All the Office files were grouped in the Types node of the Navigation panel - You cannot search for file contents but only for file names. Until and unless they provide the Content Search facility for Office, PDF files - Types not is not required as even Windows Explorer and Windows Find can do the same purpose.
Viapoint sits in your system tray and monitors your files and folders. Sometimes, Viapoint tries to connect to the internet in the background. I guess it checks for news updates. Turn this off in the "News Feeds" tab of the Options dialog.
Overall, Viapoint, at this stage is an organizer built for Outlook but at the same time, it allows you to store information which you might encounter while web surfing - this is otherwise lost once you close your browser. It has some nice innovative features like building Contacts and Companies from Outlook files, and comes with a neat interface. But for an advanced Office user or technical person, the same information can be readily extracted from Outlook with little or no programming.
Viapoint requires a Windows-compatible PC running the Microsoft .NET platform on Windows 98, 2000 or XP. The product is available for $29 for an annual license and $49 for a perpetual license.
Viapoint adds Google integration: Viapoint Organizer with integration to Google Desktop Search was released on Thursday March 17th. Viapoint's strategy is to assume that desktop search is a service you can use as a component for organizing the stuff/information you need from your desktop but it isn't going to make a good workspace because it needs to keep it's role to an indexing agent simple. So we work with the GDS APIs to make a "smart organizer" - which might be the RSS, email, web page, contact, company, file, web service, app, intranet client people are looking for to be their unstructured data lifesaver.
Download a trial version of Viapoint here.
Visit company website here.
The press release about the integrated release with Google Desktop Search is at http://www.viapoint.com/news.html.
You can find the product listed on Google's plug-in page at http://desktop.google.com/plugins/viapointorg.html.