Day: March 8, 2004

Quadralay Corporation, announced WebWorks FinalDraft, a new product that helps writers produce high-quality content by streamlining the edit-and-review process. FinalDraft gives technical writers, documentation departments,
engineering groups, marketing organizations, and other content providers the ability to achieve accurate and complete documents. FinalDraft offers functionality designed to address the entire edit-and-review process from first draft to final. Instead of printing out numerous documents, keeping track of colors, or e-mailing different versions of a document to multiple reviewers, all drafts are automatically generated from a single source document, authored in Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker. FinalDraft is an e-mail-based system, so a Web server is not required. Drafts are sent to reviewers as WebWorks Archive files (HTML), requiring only a small plug-in
installed into Microsoft Internet Explorer, available at no additional
cost. FinalDraft is based on .NET. FinalDraft uses a well-planned graphical user interface with toolbars, menus, and keyboard shortcuts. WebWorks FinalDraft will be shipping in April 2004. It will be available for purchase by authors for US$399 at www.webworks.com

Blackboard Inc. announced the general availability of the Blackboard Content System. The Blackboard Content System benefits students, faculty and campus IT administrators by lowering the costs and increasing the simplicity of managing learning content, digital assets and e-Portfolios in an enterprise learning environment. The Blackboard Content System is one system in the Blackboard Academic Suite, a family of integrated applications that provides a unified enterprise environment for teaching, learning, research, knowledge-sharing, communication, and student life. The three solutions that make up the Blackboard Academic Suite, the Blackboard Learning System, Blackboard Content System and Blackboard Portal System, have a shared architecture, consistent interfaces, file sharing, and administration features. www.blackboard.com

Industrial Medium unveiled Version 2.7 of its Expressroom content management system, the first major upgrade to the software since it was acquired from Borland Software last year. Version 2.7 includes major enhancements to the core product, including new automation tools, an embedded search engine for searches both within Expressroom and on the resulting Web site, lower resource utilization for higher performance, and significant improvements to all major software modules. An optional module, the Expressroom Document Assistant, allows content authors and other contributors to create and edit documents in Microsoft Office programs and transform them into Web content designed specifically for their sites. The module automatically handles the reformatting and conversion tasks for a range of text, image, presentation and other file formats. Expressroom was originally developed in 1997 by Worldweb.net, based in Alexandria, VA. Worldweb, along with Expressroom, was acquired in 2001 by Starbase Corp. Two years later, in January, 2003, Starbase was in turn bought by Borland Software. Last May, Industrial Medium finalized an agreement with Borland to acquire the Expressroom product line. Expressroom 2.7 is available for immediate deployment. www.industrialmedium.com

IBM announced it has agreed to acquire all the shares of Trigo Technologies, Inc., a provider of product information management middleware. Financial details were not disclosed. Trigo’s product information management middleware enables companies to integrate and centrally manage comprehensive product information that is typically scattered across an enterprise and a supply chain. Trigo’s middleware also links product-related information with terms of trade such as pricing and then synchronizes this information internally with existing enterprise systems and externally with business partners. The acquisition of Trigo’s technology will extend IBM’s portfolio of integration middleware as part of the WebSphere brand of products. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including government regulatory approval. The two companies expect to close the deal in the second quarter of 2004. www.software.ibm.com, www.trigo.com

Datawatch Corporation released VorteXML Designer V3, with W3C XML schema support and other features that make it easier to convert data into valid XML for Web Services, content management, online bill presentment, application integration, and many other applications that require XML. VorteXML Designer allows users to visually extract, map and transform data from structured text output (including invoices, purchase orders, reports, log files and HTML documents) into valid XML, without programming. The desktop application extracts and interprets a variety of string, numeric and datetime formats from text data, and enables transformation and derivation of that data. VorteXML Designer is part of a solution suite that also includes VorteXML Server, a product that automates the extraction and conversion of text documents into XML. Pricing starts at $599 for a single user license of VorteXML Designer. VorteXML Server starts at $7,999 per server. VorteXML Designer V3 system requirements are Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT 4.0+ or XP, Internet Explorer 5.5 with SP2+, and MSXML 4.0. A free evaluation copy of VorteXML Designer V3 can be downloaded. www.datawatch.com