Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of the Adobe Acrobat Connect software product line for communicating and collaborating instantly through real-time, interactive web conferencing. The Acrobat Connect product line addresses online collaboration needs from casual to intensive web conferencing users. The entry-level Acrobat Connect hosted service provides users with essential collaboration tools, such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, chat, video conferencing, and audio conferencingall for unlimited usage for up to 15 participants for one low monthly fee. Additionally, with one-button “Start Meeting” access from Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 software, users can launch Acrobat Connect directly from a document to start collaborating immediately. The entire Acrobat family consists of Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, Acrobat 8 Elements, Acrobat 3D Version 8, Acrobat Connect, and Acrobat Connect Professional. The Acrobat Connect hosted service is currently available as a free trial version through the end of the current calendar year. The commercial release of Acrobat Connect, initially available in English, is expected to be available in January 2007 for a subscription price of US$39 per month, or US$395 per year per personal meeting room. Acrobat Connect Professional is available in English, French, German, Japanese, and Korean, starting at US$15,000 depending on configuration, and is licensed on a named user, as well as concurrent port basis. Existing licensed customers of the Macromedia Breeze solution with up-to-date maintenance plans may be eligible for updates to Acrobat Connect Professional and new versions of the Adobe Connect servers. Adobe also released Reader 8, which features a new, streamlined interface with user customizable toolbars. Adobe Acrobat Professional users can now enable Adobe Reader users to fill and submit forms, save data and digitally sign documents. Adobe Reader 8 also has graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, which boosts performance when viewing graphics-intense PDF files, such as 3D content. A free trial version of Acrobat Connect Professional is available at http://www.adobe.com/go/tryconnectpro, http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader/
Author: NewsShark (Page 198 of 730)
Bitrix Inc. announces the release of new Bitrix Site Manager 5.1 – web content management system. The new version has been globally tested and optimized. There is a new AJAX-enabled user interface, and a new module to create blogs, training courses, examination tests, and manage affiliate networks. The e-Store now features a flexible system of discounts and coupons. Version 5.1 offers a new tabbed Control Panel with the three modes: “Public section” to view the site as-is; “Edit site” in which system control areas are highlighted and powered with management tools; and the common “Control Panel.” The new interface provides for fast switching between the three modes. For convenience, the tab bar can be pinned on top of the browser window. All product editions now can import and export data from/to information blocks in the CSV format (e.g. for communication with MS Excel). The Small Business edition now contains the Forum and Newsletter modules. The Professional and Enterprise editions now include the Blogs and e-Learning modules. Additionally, the Enterprise edition is empowered with the AD/LDAP module. All users of older versions of Bitrix Site Manager whose techsupport subscription is active can update their systems for free via the SiteUpdate to upgrade to Bitrix Site Manager 5.1. You can test-drive Bitrix Site Manager by downloading and installing the fully functional trial version at http://www.bitrixsoft.com/download/
Index Data has released Zebra 2.0, a major upgrade of its Open Source database server and indexing engine. This upgrade makes index profiling much easier, supports increased tuning of search results, incorporates XML technology into core functionality, and increases performance speed. Some of the highlights of the improvements of Zebra 2.0 over the 1.3 version are: a 64-bit based index structure, elimination of the 2GB limit on register file size, new on-disk format providing increased stability and faster indexing and retrieval, new record filter using XSLT transformations to drive both indexing and retrieval, improved logging and analysis of external traffic, and revised and expanded documentation. Zebra 2.0 replaces the previous versions’ tight coupling to the Z39.50 BIB-1 attribute set with a new XML friendliness, making Zebra easy to use for such XML-based formats as Dublin Core, MODS, METS, MARCXML, OAI-PMH, RSS, etc. The software’s new plug-in architecture allows the skilled user to write his or her own record indexing and retrieval filters as loadable modules. The performance enhancements incorporated into version 2.0 mean that Zebra can now index and search even faster than version 1.3. In a test of Zebra 2.0, the software was able to build a 31 GB database of very large records in four elapsed hours on a 1800 GHz Dual AMD box. It processed an average of 2.2 MB of data per second. Zebra 2.0 offers more precise logging of external traffic, access and indexing, and log messages are now printed in a style similar to Apache server logs. http://www.indexdata.com/zebra
JBoss, Inc. announced JBoss Portal 2.4, which adds support for the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification, a standard for enterprise portals and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Supporting both the Java portlet API (JSR-168) and now WSRP, JBoss Portal is an extensible portal framework that integrates dynamic Web pages, applications and content within reusable portlets. Instead of bundling portlets and the portal into a single application, users can deploy portlets remotely and let the portal consume portlets as needed via WSRP. WSRP support in JBoss Portal 2.4 extends to both the producer, i.e., portlet containers, and the consumer, which is the system communicating with presentation-oriented Web services on behalf of users. Version 2.4 supports service description and markup interfaces and implicit cloning for both producers and consumers. In addition, version 2.4 extends support on the consumer side to standard window states and mode and the registration interface. The company also announced that it has joined OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability). The JBoss community is also enhancing the JEMS platform with related technologies such as portlets and content management systems that enable enterprises to pick and choose the extensions that make the most sense for their portal applications. A library of portlets, themes and layouts contributed by the community is available. Licensed under the open source GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), JBoss Portal is free to download and use for both development and production deployments. http://www.jboss.com, http://www.portletswap.com
The OpenDocument OASIS Standard (also known as ODF – OpenDocument Format), a format which enables users of varying office suites to freely exchange documents, has been approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard. OpenDocument was balloted through the Joint Technical Committee on Information Technology (JTC1) of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The OASIS OpenDocument submission has been given the designation, ISO/IEC 26300. OpenDocument defines an XML file format for office applications. Suitable for text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases, the standard frees documents from their applications-of-origin, enabling them to be exchanged, retrieved, and edited with any OpenDocument-compliant software or tool. In May 2005, OpenDocument was ratified as an OASIS Standard and subsequently submitted by OASIS to the ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, subcommittee SC 34, Document description and processing languages. As ISO/IEC 26300, the standard will continue to be maintained and advanced by the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee and the recently formed OASIS ODF Adoption Committee, both of which remain open to participation from users, suppliers, government agencies, and individuals. Current members of OASIS committees focusing on OpenDocument include representatives of Adobe, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, as well as government agencies and other organizations, such as the Chanfeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance in China, National Informatics Center of the Government of India, Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration, Royal National Institute for the Blind, and Duke University. http://www.oasis-open.org, http://www.iso.org
Stibo Catalog announced the next generation of STEP. With STEP 4.8 Stibo Catalog will release a new merchandising planning module to help catalogers drive sales. STEP Merchandiser gives product managers on-demand visibility and lets them analyze product performance of products and pages. The tool lets merchandisers pre-plan pages, as well as initiate product, image and copy writing workflows. Designed to tear down the walls between product managers and creatives, STEP Merchandiser will help reduce review cycles and increase the speed to market of new promotions and multiple versions. STEP Document Author is a new optional module designed to create documents such as data sheets and provide detailed information about a product that will often include tables, diagrams and long descriptive text and editorial text. Data sheets are updated regularly and reused throughout the life of a product. These characteristics lead to publishing workflows that can be very different to those used when producing catalogs and other direct marketing publications. The new tool will include an authoring interface within STEP PIM that provides both creation and reuse of data within a document format STEP’n’design will provide a print publishing tool for documents enabling a multi-page document to be paginated fully formatted with a single drag & drop. STEP 4.8 will support print publishing with QuarkXPress v7 and Adobe InDesign CS2 as well as Quark DDS and Adobe InDesign Server. Other enhancements will include Proof views in STEP PIM, Image Workflows, user password authentication using LDAP and support of external digital asset management systems via Asset Push. Stibo Catalog will be working with selected customers on testing STEP 4.8 and expects to commercially release the solution in Q4, 2006.
CambridgeDocs announced xDoc Server Version 2.02, and with it the ability to publish Microsoft Word .DOC files to PDF in a cross-platform environment. The Java-based xDoc Server can be called from any J2EE application server, including the popular platforms IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Apache Tomcat. Organizations can now process and publish high volumes of Microsoft Word content on Windows, Linux and Solaris serves – free of the licensing and performance issues related to installing Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat or Distiller on a server. This links business users’ preferences for Microsoft Word into IT departments who are consolidating servers and implementing applications ranging from contract generation to custom publishing. Previous generations of PDF publishing have relied on direct “print-stream” approaches, which rely on the original desktop applications “print to” a PDF format. By using Java and XML, the multi-threaded xDoc Server can also merge individual Word files, add data from databases into document “templates”, and publish as XML, HTML, or Microsoft RTF. A benefit of using XML as the file format transformation medium for xDoc Server is it helps companies in maintain corporate branding for document “templates” for policies, applications or contracts that are created in Microsoft Word, and that then require database information to be merged into these “templates” as part of a multi-threaded J2EE application. In these scenarios, the documents can be concatenated or merged together as necessary before being published to PDF and thereby retain their corporate “look and feel”.
Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) (NASDAQ:TSX:) (NASDAQ:OTC) announced that it has extended its global agreement with HP to provide customers with solutions that improve the way documents, emails and other information are managed though complex business processes. The solutions from Open Text and HP will help better manage information throughout its lifecycle in ways that meet both compliance rules and efficiency demands. The solutions will use Open Text’s Livelink ECM software and compliance solutions with HP Integrity servers and the HP StorageWorks File System Extender offering. In addition to Europe, the companies will focus on opportunities in North America to work with systems integrators and consultants on compliance solutions. Open Text and HP’s combined offerings help customers manage the massive volumes of documents and other content generated by ERP systems that run critical business functions, such as finance and human resources. Open Text is a member of the HP StorageWorks Information Lifecycle Management Partner Program. http://www.opentext.com
