Microsoft Corp. announced that it will acquire Groove Networks Inc. The addition of Groove products to the lineup of Microsoft Office System products, servers and services builds on the capabilities of Microsoft’s current collaboration products. The acquisition also brings to Microsoft founder Ray Ozzie, a creator of IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes. Ozzie will assume the role of chief technical officer, reporting to Bill Gates, with responsibility for influencing corporate-wide communication and collaboration offerings and associated platform infrastructure. Ozzie also will continue his work with the Groove team, which will be part of Microsoft’s Information Worker Group. Groove has worked closely with Microsoft for nearly five years. After the deal is completed, the nearly 200-person Groove organization will continue to operate from its Beverly, Mass., headquarters as part of Microsoft’s Information Worker Group. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2005. Groove will continue to operate as a separate company until regulatory requirements have been met and the acquisition is finalized. A free trial edition of Groove Virtual Office is available. www.groove.net, www.microsoft.com
Month: March 2005 (Page 7 of 9)
IBM unveiled a new software portfolio that extends the reach of content management using web services to enable all types of data to be captured, managed and searched. IBM is delivering a content and information integration platform to leverage information across diverse repositories, providing a single view of business critical information. The company also added new offerings for the banking and life sciences industries to its portfolio of more than 160 industry-specific content management solutions. IBM’s new software includes the improved performance and integration of Project Cinnamon, part of the company’s effort to improve the speed and efficiency with which XML documents are processed. The technology also delivers automated indexing and searching capabilities, providing better control over structured and unstructured data repositories. IBM’s enhanced content management portfolio includes: DB2 Content Manager 8.3, DB2 Document Manager 8.3, and DB2 CommonStore 8.3. Planned availability for DB2 Content Manager 8.3, DB2 Document Manager 8.3 and DB2 CommonStore 8.3 is March 25, 2005. IBM DB2 Content Management is available through IBM and through IBM Business Partners. www.software.ibm.com/data
Altova announced general availability of Altova software version 2005 release 3 (v2005r3), which features several significant enhancements to MapForce 2005, including expanded support for Electronic Data Integration (EDI) standards. MapForce 2005 now supports EDI output and the ANSI/ASC X12 standard. Additionally, MapForce 2005 and other products within the Altova product line have been updated to include support for the latest versions of the W3C XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 specification working drafts. The company also announced that the Altova SchemaAgent 2005 graphical schema management tool is now available to all customers as a standalone product and included within both the Enterprise and Professional Editions of the Altova XML Suite 2005. The updated products within Altova software version 2005 release 3 – XMLSpy 2005, MapForce 2005, StyleVision 2005, Authentic 2005, and SchemaAgent 2005 – are all immediately available for purchase. Customers with valid SMP are eligible for a free update to v2005r3 production software. A 30-day free trial may be downloaded. www.altova.com
Lauren’s report on enterprise blog and wiki use has been getting phenomenal attention. We have decided to probe a little more into actual corporate use of blog and wiki technology with a survey. We’ll pull the complete results together for our conference in San Francisco in April, but will also publish some of it on our site as it comes in. Take the survey!
Verity Inc. announced the appointment of Dataintro Software as a Verity Technology Partner. An immediate result of this alliance is the addition of Dataintro’s UltraForms technology for 2D barcode generation to Verity LiquidOffice business process management (BPM) software. UltraForms is a technology that allows online, PDF-based forms to generate 2D barcodes based on user data input. These dynamically-generated barcodes contain an encoded version of the information that was entered by a user into the fields of the Verity LiquidOffice, PDF-based electronic form. Using the UltraForms and LiquidOffice technologies, users are able to print out a paper version of the online form that contains the data in both readable text and barcode formats. They can review, sign and submit the paper form for processing. The paper form is scanned or captured from a fax transmission, and the information is automatically read from the barcode. The data is then directed to the appropriate business system, including an image of the signed form, then stored in an electronic records management system. This creates an ideal way for customers to process and electronically file forms that require a “wet” signature. UltraForms can work in Acrobat Reader from version 4.0 and higher. www.verity.com
Wrensoft has released Zoom Search Engine 4.0, a software package that allows enterprises to add a custom search engine to their website. There are no complicated server setup procedures. You can use Zoom to create search engines for your website, local Intranet or CD-ROM, and offline distributions. It is a self-contained solution and does not depend on any external web services, so you have control over the look and feel. There are no banners or advertisements, and with the use of HTML and CSS templates, you can customize the appearance of the search page without any scripting knowledge. Zoom can also run on a variety of server platforms (or without a server at all), and is compatible with all standard hosting packages. Zoom can index over 100,000 documents and satisfy up to 200 search requests per minute. It provides searching capabilities that include: results ranked by relevance, wildcard and exact phrase matching, “Google-like” context descriptions, results highlighting, category searching, and more. This is coupled with configurable indexing options such as: spider and offline indexing modes, stop words and skip pages, multiple domains support, word weighting options, and support for PDF, Word and Excel. The advanced features of Zoom allow you to log the searches made on your website, and analyze them with generated statistical reports, providing pie-charts on the Top 10 searches, and graphs of the number of searches per day, week, or month. Zoom Search Engine 4.0 is available for free for small websites (up to a 50 page limit), Standard Edition ($49 USD) and Professional Edition ($99 USD), which supports larger websites and more file formats. www.wrensoft.com
ScanSoft, Inc. announced the ScanSoft OmniPage Search Indexer for Google Desktop Search. The beta release of the plug-in, which is available free on the Google Web site, automatically creates text-index information from PDF files and faxes, as well as scanned books and documents – making them visible to Google Desktop Search. The OmniPage Search Indexer uses ScanSoft’s optical character recognition (OCR) and PDF conversion technology to recognize the text within image-based content, creating the index information needed by the search application. The OmniPage Search Indexer is based on technology found in ScanSoft OmniPage Pro Office 14. OmniPage is also used to batch convert various formats into searchable PDF archives for content management systems. ScanSoft also provides this capability to developers who wish to add imaging and PDF capabilities to their applications, via the OmniPage Capture SDK. The English language beta release of the OmniPage Search Indexer for Google Desktop Search is available via download. Versions for Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish will be made available within 30 days. Pricing for the final release of the plug-in has not been set. The plug-in indexes the image text found within PDF normal, PDF image, JPEG/JPG, TIFF/TIF (FAX), BMP and PaperPort MAX file formats, and supports personal computers running Microsoft Windows XP and Windows 2000. www.ScanSoft.com,
Authentica, Inc. announced that it has extended its Active Rights Management (ARM) platform with support for the newly released Adobe Acrobat 7.0 for Windows. Additionally, Authentica will support Acrobat 5.0 for Sun Solaris and digital certificate authentication with Sun Solaris workstations. This enables U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agency customers to leverage their existing PKI infrastructure to create and share sensitive data securely on Sun Solaris workstations. In addition to Adobe Acrobat, Authentica’s ARM platform integrates with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Netscape web browsers. The ARM platform also allows content owners to enforce information security policies and track access to information from their desktop applications, or organizations can automate protection and policy enforcement by integrating Authentica within content management systems, email gateways and portal applications. www.authentica.com
