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February 28, 2007

IBM to Make Google Gadgets and Sitemaps Available to Corporate Portal Users

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is bringing Google Gadgets - or consumer-style web utilities - into commercial portal software. Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These features can be offered through a company's portal with a click of a button. IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol, agreed on by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost. Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007. http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal,
http://www.sitemaps.org/

Atlassian Announces Confluence Hosted Enterprise Wiki

Atlassian announced the release of Confluence Hosted, a new hosted service to make wiki-based collaboration more accessible for small, mid, or large organisations or groups with limited IT resources. Confluence Hosted is based on the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Features include: Immediate accessibility with no installation required, Unlimited pages and unlimited spaces, WYSIWYG interface, Ability to store and search across all types of files (PPT, Word, PDF, GIF, etc), Enterprise-grade security and permissioning, and Email and RSS integration and support. Confluence Hosted customers can remain on Hosted indefinitely or they can bring the wiki on-premise at any time. Contegix, a provider of managed hosting applications, was selected to provide hosting services. A free, fully functional 30-day evaluation of Confluence Hosted is available. Its tiered pricing model starts at US$49 per month. http://www.atlassian.com

Gilbane Group Announces Expansion: New Analysts, New IT Blogs, New Consulting Practices

Gilbane Group Inc. announced the completion of the first phase of its planned expansion for 2007. In the first quarter of this year, the Gilbane group has added three new analysts, four new consulting practices, and six new analyst blogs. Enterprise Search expert Lynda Moulton, Collaboration expert Geoffrey Bock, and Web Content Management expert Tony White join the Gilbane roster of industry veterans: New Enterprise Search Practice & Blog - Lead Analyst Lynda Moulton covers enterprise search and information access technologies and applications at http://gilbane.com/search_blog/; New Collaboration Practice & Blog - Lead Analyst Geoffrey Bock covers tools and practices for business collaboration, including the use of "social media" tools such as blogs and wikis at http://gilbane.com/collaboration/; New Globalization Practice & Blog - Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone and Mary Laplante with Contributor Kaija Poysti cover content globalization & localization at http://gilbane.com/globalization/; New Web Content Management Practice & Blog –Lead Analyst Tony White covers web content management technologies and strategies at http://gilbane.com/web_content_management_blog/; New Publishing Technology & Strategy Blog –Our existing Publishing Practice led by Steve Paxhia, with Senior Analysts Bill Trippe, Bill Rosenblatt, and Thad McIlroy now has a blog to complement their service at http://gilbane.com/publishing_blog/; and our New Industry News Blog seamlessly continues our 8-year coverage of hype-free information and content management technology news, but with added “Web 2.0” features for finding, organizing and sharing news at http://gilbane.com/news/. In addition to growing the analyst team to meet the increasing demand for reliable information and advice on the information technology areas they cover, the Gilbane group has built a new platform for collaborating with customers and partners using enterprise blog technology. The new platform includes tagging, comments, trackbacks, and topic-oriented newsfeeds, allowing Gilbane Group analysts to collaborate more dynamically, and combined with the Gilbane series of conferences and webinars, to do so all year round. Analyst biographies, contact information, and links to all Gilbane Group content are at http://gilbane.com.

HiSoftware Unveils Compliance Sheriff for Managing Web Content and Regulatory Governance

HiSoftware, a provider of software, services and managed operation solutions that monitor and optimize Web content governance, quality and regulatory compliance, today announced the release of Compliance Sheriff, a hosted management solution that provides testing and reporting for standards-based policies including accessibility and privacy. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff allows organizations to integrate an automated solution for managing Web Governance standards as part of a corporate Risk Management strategy. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff’s modules allow users to test for standards-based and custom factors including: Accessibility Compliance module can report on Section 508, WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0, CLF, XAG and any standard derived from WCAG or Section 508; Privacy Policy Compliance module can report on a number of multi-national regulatory and compliancy standards including: Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), US Privacy Act and other key US and international standards; Custom Guideline and Policy Compliance for all content including but not limited to: HTML, XHTML, SVG, XML and any other text or element based content. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff provides an integrated digital Dashboard Reporting System that provides access to executive level summary reports. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff is available immediately through HiSoftware and its authorized resellers as a hosted server solution. Solutions start at $4,995 for SMB offerings to $25,000 per module. http://www.hisoftware.com

February 27, 2007

Surety and SRC Solutions to Deliver Data Integrity Services for Xerox DocuShare

Surety, LLC, a provider of data integrity solutions, announced an exclusive technology partnership with SRC Solutions, a Xerox business partner. The alliance focuses on the integration of Surety’s AbsoluteProof digital time-stamp solution with the Xerox DocuShare enterprise content management (ECM) solution to enable SRC's customers to protect their intellectual property, defend their electronic evidence in litigation and comply with regulatory mandates by proving that their electronic records have never been tampered. The integration of Surety's AbsoluteProof service into the Xerox DocuShare platform provides an electronic document solution that offers an independent, third-party means of validating the date and time of generation as well as the integrity of any electronic record within the system. Surety's AbsoluteProof is a time-stamping method that offers long-lasting protection, provides objective proof of record integrity independent of a company's people, processes and systems, and complies with domestic and international standards. The AbsoluteProof timestamp service is compatible with any file format. Development of the integration module is now complete, and the joint solution is available to the general market immediately.
http://www.surety.com, http://www.src-solutions.com

February 26, 2007

OmniUpdate Launches CMS to Handle the Transition of College and University Websites to XML

WebsiteASP, Inc., provider of web content management systems (CMS) for higher education, announced the release of OmniUpdate version 7. OmniUpdate 7 is a CMS that allows institutions to manage both legacy HTML content and XML-based content within a single environment. This ability to support both static web pages and dynamic XSLT template-controlled publishing targets the need for all-or-nothing site conversions and the risks of implementing an XML-based CMS. OmniUpdate 7 supports full page, in-context editing for all data content types including XML, rather than having to choose between full page editing and no XML support, or XML support with restricted forms-based editing. Based on XML/XSLT standards, OmniUpdate version 7 provides template controlled publishing and repurposing to multiple outputs including XML, XHTML, HTML, text, and virtually any other file type. The ability to mix HTML/XHTML and XML, with output controlled via XSL transformation templates, offers institutions a complete solution for handling legacy content while utilizing the latest technologies. OmniUpdate version 7 is available immediately and is delivered as an on-demand service. http://www.omniupdate.com

EMC Releases EMC Documentum Process Suite

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) announced the availability of the EMC Documentum Process Suite, a comprehensive business process management (BPM) solution for analyzing, modeling, orchestrating and optimizing a wide range of enterprise processes involving people, systems, content and data. The Documentum Process Suite provide organizations with the ability to manage both processes and the information that drives them. The introduction of the Documentum Process Suite marks the integration of the process analysis and business activity monitoring software gained from EMC's June 2006 acquisition of Proactivity Inc., with EMC's existing Documentum business process management capabilities. Designed to work with the Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) platform, the Documentum Process Suite allows both structured data and unstructured content to be captured and utilized to improve operational efficiency, then archived and stored to meet regulatory compliance requirements. The software also provides process lifecycle management, with capabilities to optimize process performance at each stage in the process lifecycle, from design and analysis through execution and monitoring. EMC Documentum Process Suite is available immediately. http://www.software.emc.com/bpm

February 23, 2007

Alfresco to Move to GPL

Alfresco Software, Inc. announced that it will offer its next release under the GNU Public License (GPL). Alfresco previously licensed its software under the Mozilla Public License with a clause requiring attribution. Alfresco provides its software under a number of flexible licenses, designed to meet the particular requirements of different types of customers. For Open Source Projects: If customers are developing and distributing open source software under the GPL they are free to use Alfresco under the GPL License. If they are developing and distributing open source software under an OSI-Approved License, but not the GPL, and want to link Alfresco's GPL software with theirs, Alfresco provides the GPL License with a FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) Exception. For Commercial OEMs, ISVs and VARs who distribute Alfresco with their proprietary products, and do not wish to license and distribute their source code under the GPL, Alfresco provides a flexible OEM Commercial License. For Enterprises, Government Organizations, Small-to-Medium-sized Businesses, Alfresco licenses Alfresco Enterprise under a Commercial License to paid subscribers, similar to how MySQL, Red Hat, and other open source companies license their technology. Those wishing to use Alfresco for free under the GPL are able to download Alfresco Community. The re-licensing will not affect community users' rights in code they have accepted under the modified MPL prior to February 2007. However, if community customers download an update from Alfresco after the February 2007 release of Alfresco Community 2.0, the update will be covered by the GPL plus FLOSS exception. The Alfresco FLOSS Exception enables software provided under existing OSI-approved open source licenses to incorporate the Alfresco Community software without having to license the entire software package under the terms of the GPL. The license change does not affect Alfresco Enterprise customers or use of any software customers received from Alfresco prior to February release of Alfresco 2.0. http://www.alfresco.com/legal/licensing/faq

February 22, 2007

Postini Announces Solutions for Communications Compliance & Management with Google Apps

Postini, Inc. announced that it has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program. Postini is offering new communications management and compliance solutions that are designed to allow businesses worldwide to recover lost messages, control business policies, protect from threats, and comply with legal and industry mandates for e-discovery and production of email. These new Postini solutions are integrated with Google Apps Premier Edition, and are available as unified and on-demand services. Postini is offering a range of communications compliance and management solutions for customers of Google Apps Premier Edition. They include: Message recovery - providing the ability for administrators to restore accidentally deleted messages; Centralized management of all user accounts - allowing administrators to centrally control policy and content; Threat management - delivering protection from a broad range of threats to critical business communications; Archiving for compliance and e-discovery - helping businesses comply with legal and industry mandates to archive, discover, and produce electronic communications. http://www.postini.com/google_apps/

Coveo Introduces Audio Video Content Search for Microsoft SharePoint

Coveo Solutions Inc. announced the extension of its secure search solutions by introducing Coveo Audio Video Search (CAVS), a rich media content search application. CAVS accesses rich media content, enabling users to search across this content just as they would in document content. The new search application integrates with Coveo Enterprise Search using a technology that leverages enterprise knowledge to improve search precision, and enables proper names, employee names and domain terms to be automatically recognized. CAVS is seamlessly integrated with the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration and content management platform, transforming it into a multimedia content management system. http://www.coveo.com

Medicity Announces Open Source Content Management Strategy

Medicity announced it will provide portal applications and support to healthcare organizations for an open source, content management system. Medicity’s portal offering, called ProAccess CMS, combines the Company’s healthcare expertise with open source technology to help organizations address the communication requirements of employees, patients, and consumers. Medicity will market its library of modules and applications to healthcare organizations for developing managed content for both public and private web portals. The company has converted all of its most popular modules from their proprietary infrastructure for deployment on the DotNetNuke open source framework. Medicity will host a new web site to support its strategy. The site will offer details about DotNetNuke and the ProAccess CMS modules, including commonly asked questions and an open forum to post messages. Interested organizations can register for a log-in to the ProAccess CMS demonstration site to begin using the product. For organizations interested in traditional vendor implementation and support for their content management systems, Medicity will continue to provide professional services including project management, development, graphic design, help desk support, and hosting. ProAccess CMS is a major component in the Medicity line of products that manages the complex issues of clinical data integration between legacy systems within a healthcare enterprise and in cross-enterprise care communities. The complete Medicity product offering includes both MediTrust infrastructure and ProAccess clinical application components. http://cms.medicity.com

Version 2.0 of Inmagic's Presto Adds RSS, Alerts and Event Logging Capabilities

Inmagic, Inc. announced the general release of v2.0 of Inmagic Presto, its research asset management software. Presto is a Web-based enterprise software application that enables organizations with dynamic content in diverse formats and locations to actively manage that content and provide 24 x 7 access to it. Presto v2.0’s event logging capabilities enable information professionals to track all changes to Presto content and provide an audit trail. Through Presto v2.0’s alerts capability, individual Presto users can define multiple personalized alerts based on system or user events, or on search queries. End users may want to be alerted when information matching designated criteria or a previous search query is added to Presto. Information professionals who administer the Presto system may want to be alerted when end users make certain kinds of changes to Presto. Alerts can be received via email, through a "My Alerts" section of a portlet or by using an RSS reader. In Presto v2.0, non-technical users can configure each content type and determine how search results will be ranked for each of those types. Presto "puts a wrapper around" HTML and XML functionality so that non-technical users can work with a straightforward, easily-grasped user interface to configure how various types of content are presented in Presto. A preview screen shows how the resulting configuration would appear. Presto is a permission-based system. Presto v2.0 continues to support Microsoft SQL Server, and now supports Microsoft SQL Server Express as well. Inmagic offers both licensed and hosted SaaS delivery models. Presto can be installed locally on an organization’s own servers or hosted at Inmagic’s datacenter. http://www.inmagic.com

Google Introduces New Business Version of Office Applications

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a new version of Google’s hosted services for communication and collaboration designed for businesses of all sizes. Google Apps Premier Edition is available for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration and business integration capabilities. Google Apps, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite of applications that includes Gmail webmail services, Google Calendar shared calendaring, Google Talk instant messaging and voice-over-IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. Google Apps Premier Edition now joins Google Apps Standard Edition and Google Apps Education Edition, both of which will continue to be offered for free to organizations. Google also announced that all editions of Google Apps now include Google Docs & Spreadsheets. In addition, Google Apps now supports Gmail for mobile on BlackBerry handheld devices. Features unique to Google Apps Premier Edition include: 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support, advertising optional, and $50 per user account per year. In addition to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Start Page, all editions of Google Apps now include: Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail for mobile devices on BlackBerry, and Application-level control. Google Enterprise Professional partners like Avaya and Postini are developing solutions based on Google APIs, including email gateways, enhanced security, Google Calendar synchronization, third-party integration with Google Talk, as well as offering deployment, migration, and additional support services. Google hosted applications are available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. http://www.google.com/

February 20, 2007

Flatirons Solutions Launches XML DITA Dynamic Content Delivery Solution

Flatirons Solutions their Dynamic Content Delivery Solution. This XML-based technology offering will provide enterprises with the ability to meet personalized content needs of their customers, vendors and partners. The Dynamic Content Delivery Solution leverages the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and XQuery standards and the search and retrieval capabilities provided by the MarkLogic Server. This solution provides for dynamically customizing content, and will give organizations the ability to deliver content, relevance and value to "an audience of one". The Dynamic Delivery Solution is designed for enterprises and government organizations publishing complex XML-based content to multiple audiences and formats. Industries include but are not limited to: computer hardware, software, semiconductors, medical devices, telecom, financial services, and manufacturing. http://www.FlatironsSolutions.com

Convera Releases Publisher Control Panel Beta

Convera Corporation (NASDAQ:CNVR) launched the beta phase of Convera Publisher Control Panel. The new service enables print and online publishers to add, manage and refine vertical search capabilities so they can develop search-based revenues for their Web sites. Convera Publisher Control Panel is available for customers of Convera's hosted vertical search service that provides a customized search engine for content publishers serving professional markets. With Convera Publisher Control Panel, publishers can apply their industry and editorial expertise to define a list of relevant sites to improve the relevancy of search results. Convera also provides publishers with appropriate whitelists based on exhaustive industry specific taxonomies. Publishers can manage the indexing of their own content and provide refined search access to it. Publishers can rank Web sites to refine the relevancy of search results and determine the depth and frequency at which specific Web sites can be crawled. Through crawl and traffic reports, publishers can monitor the relevance of specific Web content and refine search capabilities based on search usage. Coming features will offer publishers the ability to manage site advertising; the capability to boost the ranking of the content based on time, popularity, authority and the relevance of individual sites; site and search analytics tools; and the capability to customize the look and feel of the user interface to best fit the needs of the online communities they serve. http://www.convera.com/

February 19, 2007

Mediasurface Launches Pepperio v4.4 to Improve Website Search Engine Optimisation

Mediasuraface announced Pepperio v4.4, the new version of their web content management solution for small and medium sized businesses. Pepperio v4.4 broadens introduces enterprise software concepts such as a taxonomy browser, blogs and RSS feeds. Customers can exploit the relationship between metadata and search engine optimisation with the Pepperio v4.4 Taxonomy Browser from Mediasurface. Enabling SME’s to leverage meta tagging, the taxonomy browser works to create a uniform approach to keywords so that each individual web page is accurately related to the business’s selected taxonomy tree. For example: tagging an item as 'Cheese' may also indicate it is a 'Dairy Product', related to 'Milk' or even 'Cows' Pepperio v4.4 allows content authors to upload and browse a taxonomy structure and add terms to their pages to work in conjunction with metadata driving better SEO, as well as improving the customer search experience. The latest version of Pepperio enables business users to select RSS feeds and blogs to display on their own site, within their own branding. In addition to improving external search and influencing search engine rankings through the use of the taxonomy browser, Pepperio v4.4 introduces the Google Site Map to SMB’s. The Google standard site map format is automatically generated with Pepperio v4.4 so that Google search algorithms can navigate through a website more easily. Pepperio is a hosted solution available through selected partners. http://www.pepperio.co.uk

February 16, 2007

XHTML 1.1 Second Edition: Working Draft

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group released the second edition of "XHTML 1.1 - Module-based XHTML" as a Working Draft in preparation for Proposed Edited Recommendation. XHTML 1.1 is a reformulation of XHTML 1.0 Strict based on XHTML modules. Not a new version, the second edition incorporates all known corrections and adds a new description in XML schemas. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

February 14, 2007

OASIS Updates ODF to Version 1.1

OASIS announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. The result of a collaboration between advocacy groups for the disabled and open source and commercial software vendors, this new version of the standard provides key accessibility enhancements to ensure that the OpenDocument format (ODF) addresses the needs of people with disabilities. OpenDocument 1.1 supports users who have low or no vision or who suffer from cognitive impairments. The standard not only provides short alternative descriptive text for document elements such as hyperlinks, drawing objects and image map hot spots, it also offers lengthy descriptions for the same objects should additional help be needed. Other OpenDocument accessibility features include the preservation of structural semantics imported from other file formats, such as headings in tables, and associations between drawings and their captions. The new version of OpenDocument reflects the work of the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility Subcommittee, which is made up of accessibility experts from IBM, the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI), RNIB, Sun Microsystems, and others. The Subcommittee's recommendations were incorporated into the OpenDocument specification by members of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee, which includes representatives from Adobe Systems, IBM, Intel, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and others. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/, http://www.oasis-open.org

Oracle Supports W3C's XQuery 1.0 Standard

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced support for the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) XQuery 1.0, a standard for accessing XML data. A query language for XML data, XQuery enables the data mining of structured and unstructured data sources ranging from emails, photos and Web pages to multi-terabyte relational databases. The integration of XQuery with Oracle Databases broadens Oracle's ability to manage all types of data with a database-native XQuery engine. Oracle has continued to enhance its XML-support through Oracle Database 10g with XQuery specification support and XML DB. Additionally, Oracle will continue to actively participate in the W3C XML XQuery Working Group. Oracle XQuery is included in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition at no additional cost.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/xml/xquery/index.html