Hummingbird Ltd. and Certus Software, Inc. announced a technology partnership to offer organizations a comprehensive solution to implement and certify internal controls to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404 financial business processes. Hummingbird Enterprise DM creates an organized, secure environment that manages the lifecycle of financial documents from creation to destruction. Companies can capture and organize policies and procedures in secure and manageable repositories allowing users to search and access documents across the enterprise. Hummingbird will integrate Certus’ Governance Suite, into Hummingbird Enterprise to provide internal controls and assurance software based on a compliance platform for SOX Sections 103, 302, 404, 409, and 906. Certus’ software helps corporations document, implement and sustain internal and disclosure controls required by law. Certus’ suite enables documented activities to be instituted, executed, monitored, tested and demonstrated. www.certus.com, www.hummingbird.com

Open Text Corporation has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Vista Plus suite of products and related assets from Quest Software Inc. Vista Plus captures and stores business-critical information from packaged applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and mySAP as well as custom and mainframe legacy environments. The acquisition expands Open Text’s integration and report management capabilities as part of its ECM suite. Vista provides a platform from which to address report content found in ERP applications, and business intelligence (BI) software from Cognos, Business Objects, Crystal Reports and others. The Vista Plus Suite consists of three components, an output manager, electronic forms server and a scalable central repository. Together they control and deliver all business output to any user via multiple delivery channels. The transaction is expected to close in September 2004. The product acquisition is structured as a cash asset purchase and the purchase price is approximately $24 million. As part of the transaction, Quest employees will become a part of Open Text. www.opentext.com, www.quest.com

Vasont Systems announced that Innodata Isogen, Inc. joined its Vasont Important Partner (VIP) Program. The strategic alliance between Vasont and Innodata Isogen will include joint projects, marketing and sales efforts. Additionally, Innodata Isogen and Vasont are working together with customers to implement environments where external authoring and publishing tools are integrated with the Vasont Content Management System to support automated localization and single-source publishing of multilingual content. www.vasont.com,
www.innodata-isogen.com

Vignette Corp. announced enhancements to its integrated content management and portal solutions including capabilities for expanded presentation management, real-time delivery of information from its native sources via real-time page generation and assembly, and advanced caching. Vignette content management now provides modular dynamic content delivery to Vignette portals and other Web sites, with a page region caching mechanism for dynamic sites. New presentation management capabilities span Vignette’s content management and portal applications to allow IT departments to create templates that can be customized for any number of unique sites. Vignette solutions separate control of layout, content and presentation so that static content, dynamic information, content selection rules and active applications are all assembled at request time to satisfy the Web user’s requirements. The latest versions of Vignette Content Management, Vignette Application Portal and the integration modules are available and shipping to customers today. www.vignette.com

IBM announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Venetica. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth-quarter. Financial details were not disclosed. Venetica’s operations will be integrated into the Information Integration group within IBM’s Information Management software business and Venetica products will be available from IBM and its Business Partners. Venetica is a provider of enterprise content integration software that enables organizations to access unstructured information such as business documents, still images, digital media and Web pages, and integrate it into existing business processes. With Venetica technology integrated into IBM’s DB2 Information Integrator software, IBM will ba able to deliver comprehensive information integration infrastructure. Additionally, in support of IBM’s infrastructure strategy, Venetica software can also work with both IBM and non-IBM data sources, including EMC/Documentum, FileNet, Hummingbird, Interwoven, Open Text and Stellent, enabling organizations to leverage their existing content assets. Once the acquisition is completed, IBM plans to Integrate Venetica’s software assets and personnel into the Information Integration group within IBM’s Information Management Software group and market and sell Venetica technology worldwide through IBM direct sales and its business partners. Venetica technology will be integrated into IBM’s DB2 Information Integrator family of products and complement other IBM middleware offerings, including DB2 Content Manager, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Business Integration and IBM’s Workplace initiatives. www.ibm.com/software/data

Inmagic, Inc. announced the release of Inmagic Presto! – a Web-based content catalog for accessing, sharing and re-purposing information assets. Built on the Inmagic Content Server using the Microsoft SQL Server backend, Presto!
leverages the Microsoft .NET technologies to provide unified access to search, identify and retrieve content no matter where it resides. Inmagic Presto! is designed to help information-intensive organizations maximize value from their information assets and interoperate within the overall IT infrastructure. Presto! can serve as a repository for housing content from legacy systems as well as maintain metadata about an organization’s content whether it resides in the Presto! database or elsewhere. In addition, Presto! automates the capture, aggregation and categorization of the content to provide integrated search in order to facilitate information discovery. Combining local control of content with enterprise-wide access, Presto! requires that content managers need only manage the lifecycle of the original content. www.inmagic.com

TripleHop Technologies announced it made MatchPoint available directly from the search menus of Microsoft Office with its MatchPoint 3.2 Office Edition. MatchPoint Office enables end users within the enterprise to perform searches through their desktop information, in addition to other disparate sources previously searchable through MatchPoint 3.2 Enterprise Edition. With MatchPoint Office, end users can now query any internal or external information source directly from within Windows. MatchPoint 3.2 Office Edition is available directly through TripleHop Technologies www.triplehop.com

Refresh Software Corp. announced the release of SiteRefresh 5, with a J2EE Core developed in Java offering JSR-170 (level 2) features for inclusion in Service-Oriented Architectures. SiteRefresh’s Open Publishing System provides interfaces, complete with source code, for Web publishing and delivery systems developed in ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, CFM, PHP, TCL, and Perl. Enhancements to SiteRefresh 5 include a 3-tier architecture, enhanced Digital Asset Management capabilities, support for both an image and file repository as well as content asset specific files and images, enhanced AssetType datafield validation, support for user-defined triggers performed on workflow transitions, originator notification and periodic review workflow settings, and, edition content can now be defined by either current or published versions. SiteRefresh Open Publishing System (OPS) is a method for the secure and controlled retrieval of assets stored in the SiteRefresh Content Repository. OPS includes a series of source code Content Retrieval Objects which engage SiteRefresh’s Content Repository’s open/published RDBMS schema for non-proprietary API access. Customer’s chosen publishing process continue to operate without reengineering and can be used to generate content in Web, WAP, RSS, and XML. www.refreshsoftware.com