Vignette Corp. and IBM announced they will jointly market IBM’s packaged e-infrastructure solutions with Vignette Content Suite V6. The Blue Pack is immediately available, will be jointly marketed by IBM and Vignette, and comes in two prebundled packages: one for small to medium-sized Web sites and another for more advanced, robust, high-volume sites. The solution will be available on IBM eServer pSeries systems running Vignette’s Content Suite V6 software. The Blue Pack also includes IBM middleware, including WebSphere Application server Advanced Edition and high-performance DB2 Universal Data Base Enterprise Edition. www.ibm.com, www.vignette.com

Percussion Software announced the immediate availability of the Rhythmyx Personalization Accelerator for BEA’s WebLogic Personalization Server. This Accelerator is the first of the new Rhythmyx Accelerators that enable enterprise organizations to speed deployment between Rhythmyx Content Manager and other technologies. The Rhythmyx Personalization Accelerator combines the functionality available in the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server with the content production capabilities of Rhythmyx Content Manager, including content entry, dynamic workflow, Active Assembly and publishing. The Rhythmyx Personalization Accelerator includes a set of standard components required for the integration and a sample demo application to show how these components are used from end to end. www.percussion.com

Stellent Inc. announced a strategic alliance with gedas Mexico, a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group and one of the largest systems integrators in Mexico. Under the agreement, gedas will integrate the Stellent Content Management system with e-business solutions for customers in Mexico. gedas specializes in business IT solutions based on global systems integration, consulting, outsourcing and a wide portfolio of e-business offerings that focus on diverse market segments such as government, automotive, products and services, health care and financial services. The integrator plans to implement the Stellent Content Management system as part of several customer projects that are currently underway. www.stellent.com, www.gedas.com.mx

Artesia Technologies announced a software extension to support the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) initiative as part of the company’s support for this emerging standard. Developed under the supervision of the Department of Defense-sponsored Advanced Distributed Learning initiative (ADL), SCORM is designed to serve as a common, XML-based standard for the use and distribution of e-learning content across all federal agencies. Teams provides organizations with a solution for creating, identifying and managing the various metatag fields used to define content attributes within the SCORM initiative. The ADL Initiative is a collaborative effort between government, industry and academia, to establish a common framework that permits the interoperability of learning tools and content on a global scale. The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Labor, and the National Guard have established the ADL Co-Lab as a forum for cooperative research, development and assessment of new learning technology prototypes, guidelines and specifications. To learn more about, or to download, SCORM Version 1.2, visit www.adlnet.org, www.artesia.com

Group EM3 Inc. (EM3) and XCache Technologies announced a technology partnership that includes integration of the XCache dynamic content caching and delivery solution within EM3’s fully dynamic Web content management system, iOn (information object network). iOn’s out-of-box functionality is designed for non-technical business communicators. Coupled with XCache, iOn’s page delivery speed has increased by “an average of 800 percent.” Because CPU load is also significantly reduced, many more pages can be served with the same or fewer hardware resources, which means lower ongoing maintenance costs. Non-technical content providers still specify dynamic publishing rules and lifecycle dates within iOn, and the caching occurs automatically. www.xcache.com, www.em3.com

Applied Semantics, Inc. announced it has added direct support for the International Press Telecommunications Council’s (IPTC) subject codes to its Auto-Categorizer enterprise software product. This enhancement enables electronic publishers to automate the process of tagging news articles with topic labels for easy routing, archiving, syndication, and retrieval.
Augmenting Applied Semantics’ Auto-Categorizer with IPTC’s subject codes, a
three-level hierarchical taxonomy comprising over 900 categories, also
enables electronic publishers to integrate news content easily with other
document collections for presentation in intranet portals. Applied Semantics’ Auto-Categorizer tool accepts XML input and responds with XML output, providing compatibility with any XML format, but particularly with NewsML and the News Industry Text Format (NITF) – two additional standards established by the 50-plus member IPTC organization. The IPTC developed the subject codes in support of these two standard XML schemas, both of which provide for use of topic tags. www.appliedsemantics.com

ALPNET, Inc. announced the launching of its FastTrackXML, an extensible solution that offers corporations a quick and easy way to implement an XML-based authoring and single-source publishing system. Working with the client, Alpnet consultants and engineers implement, over a period of four to six weeks, a system that enables the client to author information modules, assemble them into publications and publish the result to paper, Web or on-line help. The FastTrackXML solution from Alpnet makes use of off-the-shelf packages and combines them with Alpnet design, development and customization services and powerful Alpnet -developed components. It is made up of an authoring environment and a publishing environment, developed and customized for one publication type, a service manual for instance. FastTrackXML from Alpnet lets users customize the content of the manualand output it to print, Web or on-line help format. Target users of FastTrackXML from Alpnet are publication departments, engineering teams that develop product information and marketing teams that need to publish the same information to multiple channels. www.alpnet.com

Jcorporate Ltd. unveiled its Expresso 4.0 application development framework, a major release which includes integration with the Apache Jakarta Struts Framework. Expresso is an OSS Java application development framework, a foundation set of reusable, Java software components. By leveraging Java, JSP, Servlet, XML, J2EE, Javamail, Cactus, Log4J, JUnit, Xerces, Xalan, and Struts, Jcorporate empowers businesses to design and implement unique, adaptable, and unrestricted solutions that are independent of platform and application server.
Struts is a MVC light weight framework emphasizing presentation and application configuration, and bringing a powerful tag library to Expresso. Expresso 4.0 is an application development framework with components for developing database-driven web applications. Struts concentrates on specific areas of the application development process, whereas Expresso adds capabilities for database-stored security, object-relational mapping, background job handling and scheduling, self-tests, log4j logging integration, automated table manipulation, database connection pooling, email connectivity, event notification, caching, internationalization, XML automation, testing, registration objects, configuration management, automatic database maintenance, etc. Expresso is available for download at www.jcorporate.com/product/expresso.html