I agree with the previous reviewer and CTM gets an F for support, but I disagree with his rating of the software with an A. I would give them a C+ at best.

It's quite expensive. Although its price is similar to Devon Think Pro Office, DTPO is a more refined product and a beta for version 2 will be released soon.

Indexing can take a very long time. This may be due to errors or due to the application actually working, but sometimes it's hard to tell. For example, after 5 hours indexing a 109 MB folder the index size was already 173 MB, which did not make sense. The folder I selected had less than 800 files, yet the index in FoxTrot Professional Search showed that almost 2,000 files had been indexed. I had to manually remove the "Main Index" file from my hard drive. For some reason it seems that removing it directly from within FoxTrot Professional's "Indexed Data" was not sufficient, although this process did work fine later with 2 other Indices.

Sometimes when indexing a folder certain files are Blacklisted. Unfortunately this is not consistent. Removing the index and indexing the same folder again has resulted in no files at all being Blacklisted.

Searches are lightning fast, but FoxTrot does not always find all the relevant documents. In one test it found many irrelevant results. I had a Folder named Influence, and searching for the word Influence showed the folder and all its contents. Half the contents were irrelevant and did not contain the word Influence. They were just random files I copied for the test. Typically all of the files inside my folders are already classified correctly, but I wanted to test this issue.

On another test, I copied a word from a PDF document inside an 85 MB subfolder and searched for it. Surprisingly, neither Spotlight nor Houdah Spot found the document. More surprisingly FoxTrot also failed to show any results. DTPO correctly showed the document.

One issue to consider is that although FoxTrot launches fast and the search speed is impressive, displaying the results may be very slow. For example, with one search it took less than a second to find all relevant results, but it took over a minute to actually display the result in the first PDF document. It was faster to launch the identified document and do a search withing Adobe Reader.

On a positive note, Index-size seems to be smaller in FoxTrot than in DTPO. This was noticeable especially with larger Folders.

Changing the name of an indexed folder in the Finder results in the folder no longer being recognized by FoxTrot as a "location." This is potentially a HUGE issue, since information will not be available for that Index. DTPO did not have that problem.

My overall impressions are that FoxTrot Professional Search feels like a beta version, unreliable, often unresponsive, and inconsistent in terms of behavior. Activity Monitor often showed FTStarter and FTIndexer as Not Responding. Apparently this is normal behavior, but to find out I had to browse the Internet. Their Help and Manual are not too useful. Emailing them directly apparently was a waste of my time.

FoxTrot has great potential, but based on my past experience with CTM I'm concerned that they'll release bug fixes as a version 2.5 or 3.0 and charge for an upgrade. I paid a few times for PowerMail and its respective "upgrades" and by version 5 I decided to move on to something else. If/when they fix this program, I'll give it a second look. As it is right now I would not purchase it.

Dual 2 GHz PPC G5
8 GB RAM
OS X 10.5.5
FoxTrot Professional Search 2.0.3