XyEnterprise announced that its XML Professional Publisher (XPP) publishing software now integrates with Design Science’s MathFlow Editor. XPP is an XML-based publishing system used to produce scientific, technical and medical journals, as well as many other types of print and electronic publications. Combined with MathFlow’s graphical interface, which supports the creation of complex mathematical expressions, publishers of complex mathematical information now have a user-friendly publishing tool that supports the MathML standard. http://www.dessci.com,
Category: Content creation and design (Page 58 of 60)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?
I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.
Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.
Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.
This is becoming a hot topic. Perhaps there should not even be a “?” in the title, but it is still very early in the market and adoption stages. In our newest report Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? Lauren Wood investigates (and finds some happier outcomes than the one mentioned by Leonor!). We’ll also be covering it at our April conference in San Francisco. From our intro to Lauren’s article:
“… Most of the discussion about blogs is centered around their affect on mainstream journalism, their power as a new communication channel and voice of the people, and how this will impact society. All this is interesting, but what does it have to do with implementing content or knowledge management, or enterprise collaboration applications? IT, business managers, and even analysts can be forgiven for thinking “not much”. In fact, we have been skeptical ourselves.
But, being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments. For this issue, Contributor Lauren Wood provides a straightforward explanation of what they are, describes how they compare with content management systems, and reports on some telling examples of how blogs and wikis are currently being successfully used in enterprises.”
Via Mary McRae at OASIS and Don Day, Chair of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee:
The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC has recently approved DITA 1.0 as a Committee Draft and approved it for public review. The public review starts today, 15 February 2005 and ends 15 March 2005.
Public review from potential users, developers and stakeholders is an important part of the OASIS process to assure interoperability and quality. Comments are solicited from all interested parties. Please feel free to forward this message to other appropriate lists and/or post this information on your organization’s web site. Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person via a web form found on the TC’s web page. Click the button for “Send A Comment” at the top of the page.
We have a white paper on DITA in general and its potential role in globalization. I am also exploring DITA on behalf of a client, so will stay abreast of this.
Blast Radius and Corel announced that they have signed an agreement whereby Blast Radius will acquire all assets of Corel’s XMetaL division. The deal is expected to close within the next several days. The XMetaL XML authoring product complements Blast Radius’ existing content collaboration product offerings, also based on XML. www.blastradius.com, www.corel.com
iManage, Inc. announced fully integrated support for Adobe Acrobat within the iManage WorkSite suite. The new functionality allows users to open and save PDF documents directly to an iManage WorkSite repository from inside the Adobe PDF authoring tool. While iManage has always supported Adobe Acrobat files, iManage WorkSite now offers seamless integration, similar to its support of Microsoft Office applications, in the full Adobe Acrobat product. Users are now able to access “Open from iManage” and “Save to iManage” options within Acrobat, simplifying the process of authoring, managing and creating workflows around PDF documents within the context of related content for a given project, deal or matter. Integrated support for Acrobat is available in the latest releases of iManage MailSite and DeskSite.
Related articles:
Altova Inc. announced the availability of the new Altova 2004 XML development tools product line, designed to meet the needs of building advanced XML and Web services applications. The new Altova 2004 product line consists of updates to existing products, XMLSPY 2004, AUTHENTIC 2004, and STYLEVISION 2004, and introduces a new product, MAPFORCE 2004. MAPFORCE 2004 is a visual data integration tool, which auto-generates custom data mapping code in multiple output languages such as XSLT and Java, to enable programmatic XML-to-XML or database-to-XML data transformations. Altova’s new MAPFORCE 2004 provides a 2-step XML-based approach to enterprise data integration. Using MAPFORCE 2004, data architects can programmatically convert data into XML from any database by drawing visual mappings from relational databases to any data model expressed in XML schema. MAPFORCE 2004 will then auto-generate the software program code required to programmatically marshal data from the source database to the target XML schema. Next, data can be transformed from one XML format to another, by visually drawing mappings between different XML schema data models. MAPFORCE 2004 is available for a free 30-day trial download or purchase for $499 for a single user license. www.altova.com
Altova Inc. announced an agreement with Borland Software Corporation, to include a special edition of Altova XMLSPY 5 within future editions of Borland Delphi Studio, Borland C++ Builder, and Borland C#Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework integrated development environments (IDEs). www.altova.com
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