Day: March 12, 2006

Cignex, a deployment sppecialist in open source consulting and software services, announced the completion of the first phase of the Goldegg Initiative, Goldegg One. The Goldegg One project team worked to establish a roadmap for Plone to encourage enterprises who have not yet adopted the Plone stack for Content Management System to try the technology, and to protect the technology and resource investments made by existing users. Co-funded by a large Cignex customer in the public sector, Goldegg included more than 26 developers from about 17 companies across 6 countries, and the involvement of community leaders, one of the largest groups of open source experts and innovators in the content management industry, to make the open source Plone CMS a viable alternative for enterprise content management. Plone is an out-of-the-box ready content management system that is built on the open source Zope Application server for managing web content for application portals, extranets, intranets, and custom web applications. In order to be adopted broadly by enterprises however, the Plone application must be more tightly integrated with its underlying stack and supported by a migration path for future upgrades. Zope 3 is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language built on “component architecture.” It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database (RDBMS) connections and code. It features a through-the-web development model, allowing you to update your web site from anywhere in the world. http://www.cignex.com,

Pound Hill Software extended the MetaGrove product line and announced the general availability of the MetaGrove toolset for Mac OS. The MetaGrove toolset for Mac is now available for immediate delivery. As previously announced, it includes MetaGrove Developer and MetaGrove Plug-ins for Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. The company extended the toolset by unveiling a new plug-in for Adobe InCopy, which is also available for immediate delivery. The MetaGrove toolset for Windows, as well as Mac and Windows XTensions for QuarkXPress, will ship in the second quarter of 2006. MetaGrove enhances Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) by making it easier to define, capture and display the descriptive metadata that make digital media files more intelligent. XMP is an open-source labeling technology that can embed metadata into the file itself to enable more efficient digital asset management, including job processing, workflow automation and rights description. Pricing for the toolset is based on the quantity purchased, with typical enterprise pricing of $470 for MetaGrove Developer and $65 to $85 per MetaGrove Plug-in.

Infostoria Inc. announced general availability of its Content Integration Suite. The suite lets companies bring together people from different groups and business critical content from different sources. With help of the integration suite, companies in media, publishing, advertising, and financial services can implement content driven business processes that span organizational and system boundaries. Infostoria Content Integration Suite consists of two products: Infostoria Content Integrator – a middleware platform that enables people and applications to manage, search, and securely share digital assets regardless of where they are physically stored; and Infostoria Workgroups – a collaboration portal that helps people form ad-hoc workgroups and populate them with digital assets from disparate repositories. Key features of the Content Integration Suite include: Full-text indexing and search that spans content repositories; Extensive set of media services for image thumbnail creation, video storyboard extraction, format transcoding, and others; Meta-data extraction, auto-tagging, and categorization of content across repositories; Transparent and secure access to content stored in shared file folders and content management systems from different vendors; Integration with managed file transfer products for efficient content delivery and network traffic optimization; and a workflow engine capable of orchestrating business processes driven by content stored in different repositories.