Our company is considering the introduction of an internet based integrated management system called 'Entropy', and I wondered if there was anyone out there who had experience with this or a similar product? If anyone has, I would really appreciate your opinion. Thanks

We've been dabbling with this for years so have looked at loads. At present we have a decent system in the process of moving to tender stage. Three other very large players in this field have dropped out! It is not necessarily a case of getting what you pay for, in fact, more often a case of how much they think you will pay!!! Accordingly, we have quotes ranging from £16,000 to £50,000+ for the same criteria system. We have not looked at Enropy. What is you time scale?

I work for AssessNET who offer a similar system to the one you described. I don't wish to use this as a marketing tool but with regards to some of the comments raised here there are a number of things to be aware of when considering such systems. With regards to company's providing such systems going under it is always worth asking about Escrow agreements that they may have in place meaning that if the worst would happen your data and the code you need to access it would be passed to a 3rd party who would then be able to supply it to you. Don't forget internal IT department's have problems too, I know of at least one organisation that previously used an internally hosted solution who's IT department lost 3 years worth of data. At least you have a contract and terms and conditions with an external provider. As pointed out by Paul there are other pitfalls to building inhouse such as changes to legistlation etc and regular back ups and upgrades. I hope you find a system that fits your requirements. Tim

I also work for a software provider (Rivo) and we would always encourage you to do a thorough market test of the solutions available. In our experience without this it is impossible to see if you are truly comparing like with like. For example, we specialise in large-scale, tailored solutions, and others specialise in out-of-the-box, 'what you see is what you get' software. There are differences in all solutions, and you should expect a provider to tell you if they don't think they are right for you. To some it may not be 'rocket science' but to other organisations it is business critical that certain functionality is provided. You should also expect any potential provider to fully alleviate your concerns in detail, such as data backup, what would happen to your data should they go under, or you choose to leave. I hope you find the best solution for your unique requirements.