We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Magnolia 2.0 final beta, the free open-source J2EE content management system based on JSR-170. The release date of the Magnolia 2.0 is November 15th, 2004. Some highlights of Magnolia Release 2 include: a new JCR repository browser and editor that lets you configure your application completely through the GUI; a customized and customizable KUPU rich text editor; an updated Java Content Repository (JCR); improved caching; a completely rewritten GUI; and modularization so it is easy to write and add modules to Magnolia 2.0 without the need to touch the code base of the core CMS. www.magnolia.info

Astoria Software announced Astoria for Aerospace, commercial off-the-shelf software that can handle the demanding documentation requirements of aerospace flight operations, maintenance and training. Astoria for Aerospace is one product in Astoria’s new family of structured document management products for aerospace that manages the entire documentation lifecycle — authoring, review, assembly and, publishing — with entry level to full XML-enabled solutions. In addition to Astoria for Aerospace, the company is offering two additional products designed to provide a range of content management solutions for a variety of needs across commercial airline operators: Astoria FastDoc is purpose-built for the airline industry, simplifying update and publishing through Adobe FrameMaker, and serves as a launching pad for XML content management; Astoria Reviser automates the review and manual editing of revised flight manuals, along with generating edit summaries of front and back matter (Table of Contents, Index, List of Effective Pages). www.astoriasoftware.com

Convera Corporation announced version 8.1 of the company’s RetrievalWare search software platform. Version 8.1 is currently available on a limited basis with general release scheduled for next year. RetrievalWare 8.1 enables users to set customized content filters and alerts for the specific information they require to do their jobs, personalize their own unique query interface, and share search results from personal queries within Public Folders. To establish highly personalized, “always-on” search queries, a user can utilize the new Content Filter feature of RetrievalWare 8.1. For both commercial and government environments where vast amounts of information enter databases each day, a user can set very specific queries to automatically identify certain documents as soon as they enter the database. Key words selected by the user within the query immediately tag exact details within a document, isolate the document, and then route it to the users Personal Folder. Other new features include Alerting and Personalized Folder Sharing. Future RetrievalWare 8.1 capabilities planned include: Web Services APIs for .NET application development, JSR168 WebLogic Portlet; New industrial and manufacturing taxonomies and the Convera Workbench 3.0; New language detection, encoding detection and conversion, and Unicode compatibility. www.convera.com

Vivisimo announced Vivisimo Velocity, rapid-deployment, customizable enterprise software that combines dynamic clustering, search and meta-search into one solution. Velocity is a comprehensive search solution that lets enterprise customers customize their crawling instead of “re-customizing” their content to fit the arbitrary requirements of other search solutions. Velocity eliminates the need to re-format content or pre-define taxonomies, and is designed for applications that need to crawl up to one million documents and meta-search an arbitrary number of other search engines or documents. Velocity crawls textual information in databases, emails and files, meta searching external sources of information, and then integrating all of the results in easy-to-navigate clusters of information. As a result, knowledge workers can pull from multiple sources of disparate information–both corporate-owned and Web-based–and see it presented by theme. Vivisimo Velocity pricing starts at $10,000 per year and scales with the number of documents to be crawled or meta-searched. Velocity will ship within 30 days. www.Vivisimo.com

Entopia, Inc. announced the launch of K-Bus 3, the latest release of its software infrastructure for information discovery. Entopia K-Bus 3 is a comprehensive infrastructure that captures the essence of enterprise content from both structured and unstructured information sources as well as all employee interaction around the content such as reading, writing, discussing, emailing, printing as well as security and access controls. By converting all of this valuable information into a single, unified language, Entopia can deliver personalized results that were previously unattainable through its discovery services Enterprise Search, Social Networks Mapping, Expertise Location and Content Visualization. Entopia K-Bus 3 is available immediately. www.entopia.com

Ephox Corp., the provider of EditLive! content authoring technologies, announced product and integration support for the Vignette family of software and solutions, including content management, portal, document and records management, collaboration, and integration capabilities. Ephox and Vignette will continue to enhance the integration of Ephox’s EditLive! for Java and EditLive! for XML with Vignette V7 to provide customers with comprehensive, cross-platform authoring technologies. www.ephox.com, www.vignette.com

Copernic Technologies Inc. announced the creation of a new separate company, Coveo Solutions Inc. The company will focus exclusively on providing enterprise search software to businesses, organizations and government entities. The creation of Coveo is in response to market demand for Coveo Enterprise Search (CES), formerly known as Copernic Enterprise Search. Laurent Simoneau, formerly COO at Copernic Technologies, Inc. has been appointed President and CEO of the newly formed company. David Burns will continue to lead Copernic Technologies as CEO. www.coveo.com

Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. (TCS) announced an extended global partnership with Vignette. TCS will continue to focus on working with Vignette customers, providing complete IT services including integration, migration and development of Vignette-powered solutions. Vignette solutions include content management, portal, collaboration, integration and document and records management capabilities that drive greater business efficiency for enterprise organizations. www.vignette.com, www.tcs.com