Vignette Corporation introduced its new V/5 eBusiness Platform, the largest product release in the company’s history and the cornerstone of Vignette’s new V/Series architecture and strategy. The Vignette V/5 eBusiness Platform provides an enterprise-ready architecture that helps eBusinesses build and adapt their applications quickly to meet changing market demands. It provides a scalable, reliable, and high-performance foundation for delivering content and managing interactions across multiple communication channels such as the Web, pagers, mobile phones, and e-mail. The V/5 eBusiness Platform ships with the Vignette Application Foundation (VAF). The VAF extends Vignette’s applications with an application architecture and framework for building componentized, re-useable, application modules. The V/5 eBusiness Platform offers an open application environment. The V/5 eBusiness Platform operates natively in both a COM/ASP environment and an EJB/JSP environment. ASP support will be available in the first release of V/5 while JSP support is planned in a follow-up Q4 release. VAF is now available and is included in the price of the V/5 eBusiness Platform, which will begin shipping at the end of Q2 2000. www.vignette.com

Eprise Corporation and Teijin Systems Technology Ltd. (TST) announced commercial availability of Eprise Participant Server for the Japanese marketplace. The Japanese version of the Eprise dynamic content management platform is the result of a joint-development partnership with TST, which will sell and service Participant Server throughout Japan. Participant Server is a platform that enables business professionals to create, update, and target Web-based communications via the Internet, intranets, or extranets. The Asia/Pacific region, including Japan, presents a significant market opportunity for advanced content management solutions as Internet usage increases. According to TST, Participant Server’s open architecture and features, such as the ability to control content access, editing, and submission based on an organization’s own management structure, as well as language management for international sites, position Participant Server strongly for Japan and Asia/Pacific’s e-business opportunities. Like the company’s main product, Eprise Participant Server, the Japanese version operates as a Web server plug in providing event driven services for controlling content contribution, management, and distribution. No specialized server scripting language is required, as all functions are accessible via easy-to-use Web browser forms. Eprise Participant Server is available through TST in Japan this month. Participant Server supports Windows NT 4.0, Internet Information Server, and SQL Server 6.5 or 7. www.tjnsys.co.jp, www.eprise.com

Jacada Ltd. and PassCall Advanced Technologies Ltd. announced a strategic alliance to market and deliver solutions that will provide immediate and complete connectivity to any Internet and mainframe application from any wireless device. Under the agreement, PassCall and Jacada will work together to deliver WAP-based solutions to AS/400 and mainframe customers worldwide. PassCall has developed a new technology that provides users of mobile phones and other wireless devices with Internet access utilizing existing Internet web sites. PassCall’s GateWave technology enables access to any Internet site, in any language, via any cellular device. Jacada Wireless is a suite of solutions enabling wireless devices to quickly and easily integrate with existing legacy applications. Jacada Wireless supports any WAP enabled device such as mobile phones, as well as PDAs such as the Palm VII. Jacada’s offerings also include Jacada for Java, Jacada for HTML and Jacada Connects. www.jacada.com, www.passcall.com

TREEV, Inc. announced a new agreement with Sequoia Software Corporation. TREEV will integrate Sequoia’s XML Portal Server (XPS) as a core component of its strategic e-business solutions. Using the new integrated solution, customers will increase their ability to access and leverage information stored within TREEV products, legacy information spanning multiple platforms and dynamic Internet-based services and repositories. This partnership will combine TREEV’s broad range of content and process management solutions with Sequoia’s interactive e-business platform to provide customers with a faster, more effective way of interacting with stored information. With this solution, businesses will be able to provide their employees, customers and partners with personalized Web pages to access and act on information aggregated from within an organization’s valuable corporate resources, external Web content and supply chain partners. This technology addresses the process automation and content management challenge with a solution that organizes existing corporate content concurrently with Web content. This combined solution will meet a growing need for software products that can sift through the increasing volumes of corporate and Internet-based information to identify, facilitate and automate e-business opportunities. By using XML, the combined technologies of TREEV and Sequoia XPS will be capable of integrating, extracting and aggregating user-defined data and content from any variety of disparate information sources, enabling access and interaction with the most relevant information available and personalizing it according to individual user or supply chain partner needs. www.sequoiasoftware.com, www.treev.com

EDGAR Online, Inc. announced it is working with over 30 other companies and organizations on the XBRL Project Committee to develop and launch XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). XBRL, formerly code named XFRML, is a free, new XML-based specification that uses accepted financial reporting standards and practices to exchange financial reports across all software and technologies, including the Internet. Members of the XBRL Project Committee represent the financial, accounting, software and governmental communities from around the world. XBRL for financial statements, developed by the Committee as the first product in a future family of XBRL-based products, is currently under review for comments by the accounting profession and is anticipated to reach the market in July 2000. XBRL streamlines the financial information supply chain that includes public and private companies, the accounting profession, data aggregators, the investment community and all other users of financial statements. XBRL offers several key benefits: technology independence, full interoperability, efficient preparation of financial statements and reliable extraction of financial information. Information is entered only once, allowing that same information to be rendered in any form, such as a printed financial statement, an HTML document for the company’s Web site, an EDGAR filing document with the SEC, a raw XML file or other specialized reporting formats such as credit reports or loan documents. www.XBRL.org

Tumbleweed Communications Corp. announced Tumbleweed Integrated Messaging Exchange 4.0. IME 4.0 includes significant improvements for both senders and recipients of secure communication. For example, IME 4.0 includes Tumbleweed Secure Inbox, a feature that enables e-businesses to create a protected repository for each customer to whom they send documents. A user with a Secure Inbox has a safe place to receive, store and manage confidential data, the means to securely reply to or forward documents they receive, and the ability to create and send their own secure documents via IME. Users can access their private Secure Inboxes via their existing e-mail clients or web browsers. Tumbleweed IME 4.0 also includes new features for senders of secure messages. With auto-enrollment, advanced policy controls and deeper message tracking capabilities, IME 4.0 provides the infrastructure to support the preparation and delivery of any type of business document online. IME 4.0 leverages a company’s existing infrastructure and is easily integrated with back-end systems. It features a range of security options, including digital certificate integration, encryption, SSL and web-based implementation of S/MIME, which shipped as part of IME 3.0. www.tumbleweed.com

The news industry’s technical standards body has approved two major working papers for its latest XML initiative, NewsML, and authorized retention of a consultant to produce a working draft by this summer. At its spring meeting in Nice, the International Press Telecommunications Council also ratified improvements to the News Industry Text Format, the XML-based text markup standard, and expansions to its subject code list to provide for better coverage of the Summer Olympic Games. The two NewsML papers are part of the IPTC 2000 initiative launched last fall to develop an XML-based framework for structuring and managing news objects in a multimedia environment. They are: Requirements Specification (www.iptc.org/xn-2.htm.), and Encoding Decisions, a guideline on how XML is to be used to construct NewsML (www.iptc.org/xn-8.htm). The goal is to have a draft ready for review for the IPTC Annual General Meeting in early July in Geneva. …. Two NewsML working parties have scheduled meetings in London next month to continue their work. The News Structure and Management group will meet May 15-17, followed by the News Text group May 17-19. In other action at the spring meeting the NITF Maintenance Working Party won approval to streamline the text standard in two ways: (1) structural changes, to refine the organization of NITF documents, and improve definitions of container elements so their use is consistent; and (2) tag clarification, to eliminate redundant and unnecessary tags. The NITF Maintenance group was formed in January to manage changes to the standard and prepared these proposals at a meeting in February. Additional changes are pending and another meeting is expected before the July AGM. (The updated DTD is available at www.iptc.org or www.nitf.org). The IPTC also agreed to pursue contacts with groups developing other media standards as it develops NewsML and maintains the NITF. These include MPEG-7, a metadata standard for audio and video objects; PRISM, an XML initiative for magazine publishing; and SMPTE/EBU, an advanced authoring format for the broadcasting industry. www.nitf.org