Software Spotlight: Policies Now!
Well, here is another delightful piece of corporate drek: Policies Now!
https://winworldpc.com/product/policies-now/130
Policies Now, by KnowledgePoint, is a document creation wizard that specializes in corporate policies. It provides general purpose templates with carefully constructed language that are customized via a series of questions. The results may be manually customized further with a built in text editor.
Gone are the days of fretting over every word to wring the most from your peons. Gone are the days of copying your competitor's evil boot-face-stomping formula. Gone are the days that you even have to think about your lowly miserable employees. With Policies Now, you too can be an epic metric nazi moose douche in 5 minutes or less!
It appears that this specific title was first released in 1987 under the name "PoliciesWrite Now!", alongside "DescriptionsWrite Now!" (A job description writing tool), and "Personal Policy Expert". These were renamed to "Description Now!", "Policies Now!", and "Policies Now! HR Pro Edition" respectively.
Although 1.30 was released in 1993 it remains for MS-DOS rather than Windows. A Windows 3.1 version was released later.
Today this sort of thing would probably be part of a larger, cloudy, webby, enterprise style, business solution.
There were a large number of similar products that provided similar document generation, based on simple question or wizard input, especially involving legal documents.
This version is not copy protected, but does require an "unlock" code. The documentation mentions that earlier versions require the disk in the drive while unlocking, suggesting that earlier versions may have copy protection or at least serialization.
Requires IBM PC,XT,AT,PS/2 or compatible, Color or mono monitor, Hard disk, 512k RAM, DOS 2.11 or higher.
Note: to fully activate the software, you must run "pn.exe /u" and enter the activation code (syj273). It can be installed and run without, but some functionality will not be available.
Winworld also has Performance Now!, a performance report writer that perfect for reminding your employees what epic FAILURES they are: https://winworldpc.com/product/performance-now/2x
Wanted: "DescriptionsWrite Now!" that will let you make job descriptions that no human can ever meet, allowing you to outsource everyone to India!
Comments
I love this stuff. It's fun to screw around with win16/early win32 corporate software when you get bored with pinball and minesweeper.
5.01 also needs some sort of unlock code, but only if you want to make multiple manuals simultaneously.
Where are they now? An outfit called Insperity now owns Descriptions Now, Performance Now and Policies Now (which is up to v8).
If anyone really, really, really wants DescriptionsWrite Now!, you have 4 hours and 56 minutes to BUY IT NOW:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/1992-Descriptions-Write-Now-Customized-Job-Descriptions-Software/133076387288?hash=item1efbf885d8:g:P68AAOSwE9hcY2ww?nordt=true
I also found Descriptions Now! 5.1 and Policies Now! 6.0, which were made not long after Windows 2000 came out.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Policies-Now-6-0-PC-CD-write-publish-employee-business-employment-handbooks/392210356519?hash=item5b518f1927:g:3p0AAOSwxrJcM~-5?nordt=true
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Descriptions-Now-5-1-PC-CD-design-work-job-qualifications-human-resources-suite/392144060457?hash=item5b4d9b8029:g:FXkAAOSwRRVbvO8R?nordt=true