SilkRoad Technology, Inc. announced the debut of SilkBlogs, an enterprise Weblogging solution. Built on Eprise, SilkBlogs provides a people-centric collaborative environment for sharing thoughts, ideas, information, and documents on the Web. The application allows organizations to develop and maintain enterprise-wide Weblogs to capture and disseminate within an organization tactical knowledge that is timely, searchable and accessible from anywhere. Key features of SilkBlogs include rich text editing, and a security model built to manage and permission a large directory of users to blogs and its containing information. SilkBlogs Public Preview Release will be available on February 16th, 2004. For pricing and information see www.SilkRoadtech.com

Vignette Corp. and Xpediant Solutions announced an agreement where Xpediant will OEM the Vignette Application Portal for its Xpress Intranet solution. The Xpress Intranet solution can be installed as a direct or hosted Intranet solution for small or medium-sized businesses interested in a portal for 250 users or fewer. The Xpediant Xpress Intranet solution leverages Vignette Application Portal’s personalization, scalability and globalization capabilities enabling Xpediant to deliver a customized intranet solution for low cost and quickly. Xpress Intranet is a fixed-fee, fixed-time engagement that enables a company to deploy a business portal solution tailored to fit the company’s unique needs. Xpediant’s Xpress Intranet is a combination of custom portlets, extended out-of-the-box portlets and Web applications built with Vignette Application Portal and Vignette Application Builder. www.vignette.com

IXIASOFT and Ektron, Inc. announced a strategic OEM partnership. Under the agreement, Ektron will integrate TEXTML Server into their Web content management solution, Ektron CMS300. The offering is designed for enterprises that want to enhance the manipulation, searching, and retrieval of XML content. TEXTML Server is a native XML database and search engine designed for software developers who require advanced storing, indexing, and searching capabilities for their applications. CMS300 makes it easy for non-technical content authors to create, edit, and manage HTML and XML Web content, and syndicate it to multiple locations and devices. The integration of these two technologies will provide users with a complete XML Web content management environment. www.ixiasoft.com, www.ektron.com

Inxight Software, Inc. announced SmartDiscovery 4. In addition to significant enhancements to its existing search, entity extraction, categorization and taxonomy capabilities, the new version offers a fact extraction feature that “connects the dots” between the people, places and organizations referenced in text, allowing users to quickly discover non-obvious events and relationships. Inxight SmartDiscovery provides text analysis and discovery capabilities for applications ranging from information retrieval to data mining to trend analysis. SmartDiscovery 4 provides significant entity extraction speed improvements, as well as a new relevancy ranking option that determines an entity’s importance to a document as a whole. SmartDiscovery 4’s taxonomy editor now leverages the Inxight query language, providing more flexibility. Ease-of-use enhancements include an improved interface for taxonomy development and management and new document clustering methods for taxonomy creation. SmartDiscovery 4 also includes upgrades to its system administration and enterprise integration features, providing simple set up and configuration. www.inxight.com

The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars announced a special expanded conference session on electronic forms at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management to be held at the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, March 24-26, 2004. The special session, “Electronic Forms & Content Management” will be held Thursday March 25, 3:00 5:00pm and be moderated by Bill Trippe, Senior Editor, The Gilbane Report, and author of “Microsoft, Adobe & XForms to Shake Up Electronic Forms Market” (Gilbane Report Vol. 11, No 8, October 2003). Speakers include: Chuck Myers, Technology Strategist, Adobe (NasdaqNM:ADBE); Micah Dubinko, Chief XML Architect, Cardiff Software; and Amber Kinney, Product Manager, InfoPath, Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT). The conference program is entirely focused on content management technologies, and includes 26 sessions and tutorials covering todays most critical issues for businesses planning or implementing a content management strategy. Microsoft is the Platinum sponsor of the Gilbane Content Management Conference in Los Angeles. Gold sponsors include Vignette, Context Media, and GMC Software. Other sponsors include IDC, InfoWorld, eContent Magazine, CMSWatch, Transform Magazine, XML Journal, Web Services Journal, OASIS, IDEAlliance, OSCOM, WOW, and G-SAM. For a complete list of sponsors and exhibitors see www.gilbane.com/CM_conference_sponsors_LA_04.html, www.lighthouseseminars.com

IXOS SOFTWARE AG and Open Text announced the IXOS 6 Suite, an ECM platform that will enable corporations to securely and compliantly manage, archive, and retrieve enterprise content. The IXOS 6 Suite, with its capabilities for meeting regulatory compliance, will become a key part of both companies’ ECM solution portfolios, designed to address the full spectrum of enterprise requirements, from content creation through final archival and disposition. IXOS 6 Suite delivers an integrated, modular solution set for ECM strategies based on a core repository architecture. At the core of this architecture is functionality that provides a single point of access to all structured data and unstructured data within an organization. The IXOS 6 Suite central repository system enables companies to store content, along with its metadata in one place, so enterprises can share content across applications including SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and MS Sharepoint, etc., regardless of whether the application is running on individual desktops. The IXOS 6 Suite will be generally available in May. www.ixos.com, www.opentext.com

FileNet Corporation unveiled a comprehensive ECM compliance management framework. Leveraging the FileNet P8 platform, FileNet’s Compliance Framework is intended to manage three elements of compliance. First, it helps companies put in place processes to react to changing regulations. Secondly, it provides organizations with the ability to manage content. Finally, the framework can connect with various legacy systems found throughout the enterprise. The FileNet Compliance Framework helps to provide consistency across the organization and better control in the management of records and business processes by tracking real-time information on who’s done what, where, and across which departments. This helps validate the process of how information was gathered for internal auditors and external regulators, and allows them to see how and why decisions were made. The FileNet Compliance Framework provides an event-driven architecture, which can identify and initiate responses to material events, such as a change in a financial report. FileNet’s Compliance Framework is scheduled for availability during the second quarter of 2004. www.filenet.com