iUpload announced that its enterprise blogging solution is now integrated with NetSuite’s on-demand business application software. This integration is driven by iUpload’s membership in NetSuite’s recently launched NetFlex Applications Program, which is an on-demand development environment to allow third party applications to integrate rich transaction data such as orders, inventory, invoices and shipments with their applications. The iUpload integration lets NetSuite users leverage iUpload’s blog and wiki technology to securely transform corporate blogs into sophisticated personalized web sites that feed customer and company information into the NetSuite platform. By providing this flexible and rich format of communication, iUpload gives NetSuite customers the opportunity to broadly collaborate with contacts, customers, workgroups and partners. With iUpload, sales and customer support personnel can share information securely through posting to their blog without ever leaving the NetSuite service. By choosing which NetSuite accounts and contacts they would like to give access to, users can invite customers or other employees to comment on or even edit information within the blog. The user can share a variety of information with customers and allow the attendees to add or edit its contents. With a customer login, customers can even contribute new content like product suggestions and industry news by simply posting to the blog. iUpload’s NetSuite integration is available immediately to NetSuite customers. , http://www.netsuite.com
Month: January 2006 (Page 6 of 8)
I am in the DITA webinar now, enjoying Bill Rabkin’s demo of Idiom World Server. If you would like my slides (PDF form) please click here..
Workshare announced DeltaView 3.0. DeltaView 3.0 features Word Act on Changes from DeltaView redlines, more than 100 enhancements to document comparison quality and accuracy, and updated email and document management platform integrations. The Act on Changes feature, also now available in the Workshare Professional suite, has been the #1 feature request from current DeltaView users. Workshare also announced the Workshare Customer Choice Program, a set of tools and resources to assist DeltaView 2.x customers in making their future plans for upgrading to DeltaView 3.0 or for migrating to the Workshare Professional 4.5 platform. In addition, Workshare introduced the Workshare Platform Migration Incentive, which provides up to 70 percent off of the list price of migrating from DeltaView to Workshare Professional. For a perpetual license, pricing starts at $1,495 for a five-seat minimum plus a $299 annual software support subscription for upgrades and hotline support. All DeltaView customers on a current software support subscription will receive DeltaView 3.0. DeltaView 3.0 will be released in March 2006 through all Workshare channels including value-added resellers, corporate resellers, online resellers and the Workshare online store. Volume purchase discounts are available. http://www.workshare.com
dtSearch Corp. announced Version 7.2 of its product line for searching terabytes of documents across a desktop, network, Internet or Intranet. The new version adds a .NET Spider API for the dtSearch Engine for Win & .NET, and updates the dtSearch Engine for Linux to the “terabyte indexer” code base. The new release also adds OpenOffice to the list of supported file types. dtSearch Desktop with Spider searches files on a PC. dtSearch Network with Spider searches across a network running in a client/server capacity. Both search and display with highlighted hits: email messages (Outlook, Outlook Express, Exchange, Eudora and other .MSG formats) along with the full text of email attachments, MS Office and now OpenOffice files, PDF, XML, HTML, ZIP, CSV, Unicode and other content. Through the dtSearch Spider, both applications can also add Web-based content to a local or network search. The dtSearch Engine for Win and .NET supports SQL, C++, Delphi, Java, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, C++.NET, and ADO.NET. The new release adds additional .NET APIs, including a new .NET Spider API. The new release also updates the dtSearch Engine for Linux, with C++ and Java APIs, to the current “terabyte indexer” code base. Pricing is $199 for dtSearch Desktop with Spider, from $800 for dtSearch Network with Spider, from $999 for dtSearch Web with Spider, and from $2,500 for dtSearch Publish. dtSearch offers a variety of royalty-based and royalty-free pricing options for the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine. http://www.dtsearch.com
Centric Software, Inc., leading provider of OpenPLM for the extended enterprise, announced that it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Product Sight Corporation of Bellevue, WA, a privately held developer of product data and enterprise search technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Centric will immediately integrate Product Sight’s data search technology into its existing product line to offer solutions that leverage existing product data and resolve immediate, high-value product development challenges common to all manufacturers. Centric InSight searches for information in multiple sources of product data content and other enterprise data and classifies the results presenting a unified view of information sources. Centric MultiSight BOM manages global part and BOM data from multiple sources delivering different BOM views to different teams in different locations, based on their role and function in the product development process. Centric Software is now a PLM vendor with the ability to search, classify and connect to multiple MCAD, EDA, CAE, PDM, ERP, SCM and document management systems for related pieces of product data. The combination of search, classification and connectivity provides distributed product and project teams with automatic extraction and aggregation of real-time product and operational data, presenting cross-disciplinary information that enables more informed decision making. http://www.centricsoftware.com
CambridgeDocs announced that it would provide out-of-the-box support for the DITA XML standard in all of its upcoming content migration and distribution products. DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML standard that is both a set of DTD’s (Document Type Definitions) and an architecture for re-using and dynamically assembling content. Developed by IBM, DITA is widely regarded as an ideal architecture for fragmenting XML content and enabling content re-use. CambridgeDocs’ xDoc Converter product will include sample content and templates for transforming Microsoft Word content into DITA XML, including transformation into DITA topics and topicmaps. These samples can be customized to convert any legacy content, such as Microsoft Word, Framemaker, HTML, and PDF files, into the database DTD or into their own DTD-based DTD’s and architecture. The sample templates will also automatically break up DITA topics into separate XML fragments and generate a DITA topicmap for the source content. The fragmented content can then be put into an XML repository, Enterprise Content/Document Management System or other XML based publishing system. By combining xDoc Converter with the DITA Toolkit available from IBM, the fragments can then be re-displayed or re-assembled into new documents.
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) begins testing this month on NewsML 2 Architecture, a proposed standard for news exchange formats. Developed by a consortium of more than 40 of the world’s major news agencies and news system vendors, NewsML 2 Architecture is based on XML. The basic goal of the NewsML 2 Architecture is to provide a single generic model for exchanging all kinds of newsworthy information. Not only will this give news agencies and software developers a unified method for handling news, but it will also provide an XML framework for a future family of IPTC news exchange standards covering such diverse specialties as sports, entertainment and financial news. Under the IPTC model, text, photo, graphics, video or any combination of media types, can be bundled into packages that neatly wrap the news content, information about the content and a management layer. Senders can make the XML wrapper as simple or complex as desired, tailoring the final package to the exact needs of their customers. As with all IPTC standards, when work is completed NewsML 2 standards will be released for use without payment or royalties. In addition, it is compatible with the World Wide Web Consortium’s “Semantic Web” framework, building a universal data exchange using XML and other standard tools. NewsML 2 Architecture Version 1.0, Experimental Phase 1, will end on 15 February 2006. Although testing is generally intended for IPTC members, non-members may be invited to join. All documents and specification files for the current draft of the NewsML 2 Architecture are available at http://www.iptc.org
So I will be participating in Wednesday’s webinar with Idiom and Blast Radius, “DITA Directions: Topic-Oriented Single Source Publishing for the Web and Beyond.” Most of my presentation will be based on our upcoming white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies, which is subtitled, “Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).” The white paper focuses on two highly successful case studies of DITA in use at Adobe and Autodesk. Both of these companies have already produced tens of thousands of pages of documentation and Help using DITA. In both cases, the documentation is being simultaneously, or near simultaneously, released in more than 15 languages. The case studies are impressive and offer a lot of insight for other companies who are considering going down this path.
We continue to be struck by the rapid adoption of DITA across the product support marketplace, and are starting to see uses of DITA outside this specific application. We are hard pressed to come up with other document-management or content-management standards or technologies that have enjoyed such rapid adoption and widespread use. So one of my slides, sampled below, has a litle fun with Gartner’s now classic Hype Cycle chart. Has DITA avoided the Hype Cycle, where the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is followed necessarily by a steep drop to a “Trough of Disillusionment”? Here we are in the midst of the hype over DITA (indeed, the standard was only formally published in May 2005), and the case studies show productive work being done in advance of the approved standard. Impressive, don’t you think?
