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
Year: 2004 (Page 60 of 75)
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
Pound Hill Software announced the availability of three new tools for using metadata to automate workflows and creating digital asset management systems. The new tools support AppleScript, Filemaker, and PHP. Each incorporates Adobe’s XMP toolkit and scanning technology. Metadata created in Adobe applications or custom Catalyst-defined metadata from Adobe applications or QuarkXPress can be read and piped into external databases such as Filemaker or used to trigger actions in an automated network workflow with AppleScript or PHP. The Filemaker plug-in provides the technology to turn any Filemaker Pro 6 or 7 database into a digital asset management system. Since the Filemaker XMP plug-in also incorporates XMP Toolkit and scanning technology, standard and custom metadata can be read and used in new or existing Filemaker database records. Each of the plug-in kits costs USD$350 per server (Filemaker) or machine (development use) and is available now. www.poundhill.com
Documentum announced the availability of Documentum ApplicationXtender 5 Channel Edition — Content Management for Windows. The AX5 solution is a new integrated suite of document imaging, document management, computer output to laser disk (COLD) report management and workflow services. An out-of-box solution built on a central information repository, Documentum AX5 allows customers to create an “electronic file cabinet” for information, enabling the capture, organization and delivery of fixed content images, documents, reports and other business-critical information. Documentum AX5 is the next-generation of the LEGATO ApplicationXtender product suite. Available through channel partners only, Documentum AX5 is suited for value-added resellers (VARs) and distributors seeking an image, report capture and archiving solution. With the new Web client, organizations can provide end users with full access to the central repository and content services through Internet Explorer or other browsers. Documentum AX5 now offers support for Windows Server 2003 and takes advantage of NT and LDAP security services — offering access controls, secure communications, verifiable transactions and support for digital signatures. www.documentum.com
CambridgeDocs announced the xDoc SDK. Aimed at providing programmatic access to the xDoc Server’s APIs, the xDoc SDK is designed to reduce the time it takes for developers to build custom business applications that take advantage of the rich content stored in unstructured documents. CambridgeDocs’ xDoc Server functionality not only automates the conversion of files to XML, but is also capable of transforming XML documents into desired output XML schemas or even to end-user documents like MS Word, PDF or XHTML. The xDoc SDK contains access to all of CambridgeDocs’ APIs including .NET, Command Line, and COM as well as an enhanced Java API, and Servlet Interface for EJB connections. With the xDoc SDK content-centric applications can be built on top of either Linux or Windows systems. CambridgeDocs’ Server support XSLT, and XSL:FO. It can also use any XML-schema or DTD as the target or source for transformation, including DocBook XML, 3001 MIL STD, Legal XML or customer-specific schemas or DTDs.
www.cambridgedocs.com
Vignette Corp. announced that it is shipping a suite of content management, integration and portal applications that natively support the Linux operating system. The recent addition of Linux support to Vignette Content Management and Vignette Business Integration Studio join existing support for Linux in Vignette Application Portal to enhance Vignette support for Linux.
www.vignette.com
