Month: April 2000 (Page 3 of 6)

HAHT Software, Inc. and Commerce One, Inc. announced the execution of a preliminary, non-binding memorandum of understanding to facilitate the creation of “open” dynamic B2B trading communities. The two companies intend to work together to make it possible for sellers to gain immediate access to a broad range of buying organizations. HAHT is integrating its entire e-commerce suite with the Commerce One MarketSite Global Trading Portal for exchanging goods and services among businesses worldwide. The suite includes all of the HAHT Commerce e-Scenarios, plus HAHT Sellside Links and HAHT Sellside Exchange. The joint effort will enable HAHT’s enterprise e-sellers to connect once to Commerce One MarketSite, reaching a vast number of buyers on MarketSite as well as other business-to-business Internet portals on the Commerce One Global Trading Web. This will allow for more efficient intra-company workflow, enhanced information-sharing capabilities, and more closely integrated buyer-seller relationships. HAHT and Commerce One will define open XML-based solutions spanning product configuration, quotation, requisition, order management, fulfillment and payment processes. In addition, HAHT and Commerce One intend to collaborate on XML schemas and business document definitions and interfaces, enabling accurate document exchange between heterogeneous systems and multiple trading partners. HAHT’s solutions will support Commerce One’s XML-standard, xCBL (Common Business Library), and utilize Commerce One’s XCC (XML Commerce Connector) toolkit to implement the joint business libraries. XML-based solutions provide a basis for rapid development and deployment of transactions and business processes across dissimilar applications, systems and software. www.commerceone.com, www.haht.com

Documentum announced the release of Documentum 4i eBusiness Edition, a content management platform for creating, personalizing, managing, and delivering web and enterprise content. Documentum 4i eBusiness Edition provides a common enterprise infrastructure that dynamically combines business-critical enterprise content with web content to fuel every e-business initiative: B2B, B2C and B2E. This release also introduces advanced content personalization that can target rich content to an individual, a local geography or a target device in a closed loop system that can, based on user profile and usage, “learn” from past behavior to enrich subsequent interactions and further personalize content delivery. At the heart of the 4i eBusiness Edition is the eContent server. In addition to version control, audit trail, and security capabilities, the eContent server automates and implements the business policies and workflows to manage all types of content stored in the content repository. Complementing the eContent server is WebPublisher which streamlines and expedites the entire process of content creation, contribution, and collaboration with an easy-to-use user interface. Documentum 4i includes the new Web Development Kit, offering Java application classes and components. 4i Web Development Kit takes advantage of standards such as ASP, JSP and Java. 4i eBusiness Edition also comes with a set of eCommerce integrators to integrate with application servers and commerce servers such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, ATG Dynamo, and BroadVision one-to-one Enterprise.

The World Wide Web Consortium announced the release of the first Public Working Draft of the XForms Data Model. The XForms Data Model Working Draft, along with the XForms Requirements document, provide the first cross-industry efforts in seven years to produce the next generation of Web-based forms. When HTML Forms were introduced to the Web in 1993, they provided a means to gather information and perform transactions. The structure of forms served the needs of many users at that time, as well as the devices used to access the Web. Seven years later, the Web is a space where hundreds of millions of users expect to use many different devices to perform increasingly complex transactions, many of which exceed the limitations of the original forms technology. The XForms Subgroup has produced a forms architecture that separates data modeling, logic, and presentation. XForms aims to ease the transition of the Web from HTML to XML. As XHTML 1.0 allows HTML content authors to make a smooth entry into the XML world, XForms allow Web application authors to combine the modularity of XML with the simplicity of HTML to gain key advantages in the areas of device independence, accessibility, business-to-business and consumer e-commerce, and embedded devices. The XForms Data Model deliberately separates the purpose of a form from its presentation. This allows the application author to rigorously define the form data, independent of how end-users interact with the application. The separation facilitates the development of Web applications with user interaction components, and provides advantages to Web application developers. In the XForms suite of specifications, the rules for describing, validating, and submitting application data are expressed in XML, as well as the submitted data. By providing the rules and data in XML, XForms lays the foundation for combinations with other XML applications, supporting the extensible Web. Separating purpose and presentation also makes device independence easier to achieve by allowing Web application authors to write the data model once for all devices. Because the data model is not tied to presentation, developers may customize the presentation in a way that best suits each device’s user interface. Support for device independence paves the way for a Web that is accessible to all users. www.w3c.org