SoftQuad Software Inc. announced the release of XMetaL 1.2, a free upgrade for its advanced, yet easy-to-use, XML authoring solution. The upgrade increases XMetaL’s performance and productivity for users of all skill levels, and provides powerful new tools for publishing XMLdocuments to the Web. For content authors, XMetaL 1.2 includes a number of performance and productivity enhancements, including improved table handling, improved CSS rendering, improved spell checking and more intuitive editing functions. To help organizations produce Web-ready HTML from XML documents, XMetaL 1.2 includes a built-in XSL transformation engine. The engine is implemented as an XSLT COM object, which developers can access through scripts. Using XSL stylesheets, XML documents can easily be transformed to HTML for output to a browser or a file. In addition, developers can use the XSLT COM object for performing other complex document transformations on the fly, directly within XMetaL. Other improvements now found in XMetaL 1.2 give developers the ability to automate more processes to increase productivity when authoring XML documents. These include: Broader Event Trapping and Scriptable Entity Creation. XMetaL 1.2 is available December 10th as a downloadable upgrade for registered users of XMetaL 1.0. New users can purchase XMetaL 1.2 for $495.00 (U.S.) per single user license. www.softquad.com
Year: 1999 (Page 9 of 97)
Bowstreet delivered a universal directory service language for the Internet to three key Internet standards bodies. This language, called Directory Services Markup Language (DSML), is supported by the collective efforts of IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. By helping establish directories as the infrastructure for e-commerce applications, DSML enables easy sharing of valuable business data and processes within and across company boundaries. DSML will also accelerate the industry shift toward business-to-business applications built on Web services, modular units of software functionality located anywhere on the Internet. DSML and Web services will enable companies to develop dynamic e-commerce Web sites that can uniquely meet the needs of a company’s customers and business partners. The DSML 1.0 specification submission enables different vendors’ directory services to work together more easily by describing their contents – including data about people and computing resources – in XML. The announcement keeps the working group’s July 12 promise to reach consensus on a draft standard this year. The six companies turned over the DSML 1.0 specification draft to OASIS. In an effort to gain rapid and widespread acceptance, DSML 1.0 information is also being provided to the W3C and BizTalk. The DSML effort builds upon Bowstreet’s work over the past two years on the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory, a system for dynamically creating, managing, and linking mass-customized Web sites for B2B e-commerce. www.dsml.org, www.bowstreet.com
SAQQARA Systems, Inc. announced the SAQQARA Commerce Suite that enables a “Content for Commerce” solution featuring product information management, publishing and XML exchange applications. Extending SAQQARA’s catalog management software, the new SAQQARA Commerce Suite represents a offering that combines search and guided buying functionality for industrial manufacturers and suppliers to easily establish an e-business strategy and capitalize on the tremendous e-commerce sales opportunities. By deploying the new SAQQARA Commerce Suite, businesses have a front-end application to launch customized commerce strategies that include integration with existing enterprise systems and interoperability with supply chain partners. Specifically, the suite provides Global 2000 manufacturers with a set of complementary Web server applications that enable them to manage and publish detailed product information with advanced product selection capabilities, exchange product information with supply chain partners via emerging XML standards, analyze customers’ online selection processes and fully participate in business-to-business electronic commerce opportunities. The SAQQARA Commerce Suite is an evolution of the company’s Step Search catalog management software. The new SAQQARA Commerce Suite leverages that technology into a complete suite of applications that enables product information management for e-commerce. ProductServer and the ProductServer Author will be available January 2000 and together are priced starting at $60,000. For those companies seeking an outsourced services model, pricing for application hosting starts at $3,000 per month. SolutionServer and the SolutionServer Author will be available January 2000 as an outsourced services model. Pricing for application hosting starts at $5,000 per month. PIXServer is scheduled for release in April 2000. AnalysisServer will be available January 2000 and is priced starting at $7,500. www.saqqara.com
Informatica Corporation announced PowerCenter.e, an expanded version of its PowerCenter data-integration software with new features added to enable e-business analysis. PowerCenter.e will help companies leverage their data across multiple sales, supplier and customer-interaction channels for business intelligence by integrating huge volumes of Web-transactionand clickstream data with information from more traditional enterprise sources such as ERP systems, relational databases, mainframe systems and external demographic databases. Informatica PowerCenter.e offers a set of unique capabilities that effectively extend PowerCenter’s reach to address the e-business market. By adding support for IBM’s MQSeries PowerCenter.e will provide near real-time support for extraction and loading of data from a company’s message queue infrastructure. PowerCenter.e’s support for message queuing will provide the vital framework for asynchronous, event-based, real-time e-business analytics. With PowerCenter.e, e-businesses will be able to import their XML data into a relational format while importing the metadata about that XML file into the data warehouse repository. As XML begins to gain widespread adoption, companies’ ability to source XML data will be vital to enabling e-business analysis. PowerCenter.e will ease the process of retrieving data from Web logs by providing tools to import and consolidate Web logs, and transform proprietary Web-log formats into standard, readable structures. PowerCenter.e will support sourcing and parsing of data from today’s three leading Web server products from Microsoft, Netscape and Apache. PowerCenter.e will be generally available in Q1 ’00. Pricing will start at $100,000, with upgrades for current PowerCenter customers starting at $50,000. www.informatica.com
Scriptics Corporation announced the release of a full-production version of Scriptics Connect, the company’s business-to-business integration server. Scriptics also unveiled a beta release of Scriptics Connect v1.1, which provides support for the Red Hat Linux operating system and Netscape Enterprise Web servers. Scriptics Connect is an XML infrastructure for developing business-to-business applications. Scriptics Connectfeatures a number of innovative new technologies that significantly reduce the programming skill level required to capture business logic and create business integration applications. It provides a simple point-and-click mechanism for mapping between differing data structures. Scriptics Connect Author enables business and data analysts to create applications by dragging and dropping elements in a schematic view of an XML document. Much like pasting “Post-It” notes on a paper form to indicate how it should be processed, Scriptics Connect Author makes it easy for the analyst to attach actions to XML elements indicating how to process the corresponding elements. Many actions are pre-defined with action wizards, and because Scriptics Connect is built on the popular Tcl scripting language, developers can write simple scripts or develop custom wizards for custom actions. Unlike lower-level approaches that restrict programming to just one language, Scriptics Connect allows programming in a variety of languages, so users can use the language that is most appropriate to the task or that they’re most familiar with. Scriptics Connect 1.0 includes the Apache Web server on UNIX and contains an interface to Microsoft IIS Web server on Windows NT. Scriptics Connect 1.1 also provides support for the Red Hat Linux operating system and Netscape Web servers. With XML translation functionality. Scriptics Connect 1.0 is immediately available. Prices start at $62,500 for a complete development and deployment environment. Scriptics Connect 1.1 is currently available as a beta release and will be available for general release before the end of 1999. www.scriptics.com
Interwoven, Inc. launched TeamSite 4.0, the latest version of its product. With a range of new features, TeamSite 4.0 builds on Interwoven
Arbortext, Inc., announced that Epic 3.0 and Adept 9.0, now support key Web standards aimed at easing customer and third-party developer efforts and maintaining interoperability with other key software platforms. In addition to extended Java support, Epic and Adept now support XSL, XSLT, DOM and COM standards. Combined with support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and additional scripting languages, these new standards offer Epic and Adept users a wide new range of interoperability options for developing XML-based e-Content. In addition, Arbortext software can now run as COM servers to provide Windows applications access to the DOM. This allows Windows programmers to write document-processing applications in Visual Basic, C, C++ and Java. With these new releases, developers on Windows can now write programs in Java that call, or are called by, Arbortext Command Language (ACL) scripts. Arbortext supports XSLT for those customers who have complex electronic publishing requirements that require the transformation of multiple types of tag sets. For customers who want to continue to use their existing stylesheets for their electronic publishing needs, Arbortext will continue to support them in both Epic and Adept. Arbortext uses CSS in the published output for the Web. CSS allows users to customize the display of HTML in a Web browser without having to edit transformation stylesheets. Arbortext also announced that in upcoming releases, it plans to support additional scripting languages such as Perl, TCL, Python and Microsoft scripting languages. Support for these scripting languages will provide another option to programmers who write document-processing functions. Pricing for Epic 3.0 and Adept 9.0 varies, depending on number of seats purchased, type of licensing, and number of modules. Epic 3.0 and Adept 9.0 will be available Dec. 15. www.arbortext.com
The Graphic Communications Association announced the creation of the not-for-profit International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance). IDEAlliance will provide comprehensive support to working groups engaged in developing industry- specific applications of both vertical and cross-industry open information standards. Current member groups of the IDEAlliance include: the Information and Content Exchange (ICE), which establishes standards for the syndication and aggregation of information across industries; the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM), which is developing a standard XML metadata vocabulary for the publishing industry; the Customer Profile Exchange Network, a vendor-neutral open standard for the privacy-enabled exchange of customer profile information across disparate systems and applications; and the Independent Consultants Cooperative (ICC), an organization of XML/SGML consultants. Like its predecessor, the Graphic Communications Association Research Institute, IDEAlliance will serve as a host for meetings of the committees and other working groups of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), OASIS, ANSI, and W3C – groups responsible for the development and maintenance of structured information standards, XML, SGML, and their derivatives. www.IDEAlliance.org
