Category: Content management & strategy (Page 308 of 481)

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the immediate availability of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 software. Acrobat 7.0 provides users the ability to assemble documents from multiple sources, create intelligent forms, and collaborate on projects inside and outside the firewall. The Acrobat 7.0 family offers different functionality to address specific customer workflows. Acrobat 7.0 Professional provides more advanced control over engineering and design documents for technical and creative workgroups that rely on specialized software, including computer-aided design applications and publishing solutions such as Adobe Creative Suite. Acrobat 7.0 Standard is for business professionals in organizations of all sizes. Acrobat Elements is a license-only product that allows enterprises to put Adobe PDF creation capability on every desktop for more secure document distribution. Adobe also announced the immediate availability of Adobe Reader 7.0, including a public beta version for the Linux operating system. Adobe Reader 7.0 now offers the ability for users to participate in document reviews, have Yahoo! Search capabilities at their fingertips and interact with 3D objects placed in PDF. Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Acrobat 7.0 Standard for Microsoft Windows 2000 (with service pack 2), Windows XP Professional, Home and Tablet PC Editions, and Mac OS X v10.2.8 and v10.3, are immediately available in English. French, German and Japanese language versions are expected to be available in early 2005. www.adobe.com

Mediasurface announced that it had entered into a partnership agreement with Cervalis, a managed service and hosting specialist. The new service allows companies to deploy the Mediasurface solution in a fully hosted environment, taking advantage of Cervalis’ enterprise class security and scalability with an extremely low set up and maintenance cost. www.cervalis.com, www.mediasurface.com

Just before the Christmas holiday, AIIM announced some interesting research about how users view the connection between ECM and Business Process Management. Gaining access to the full-report requires (free) registration as an AIIM Associate Member, though AIIM has been highlighting a few items in the press:

• Users see limited connections between ECM and BPM technologies. Sixty-four percent of the respondents viewed ECM and BPM as two separate initiatives that intersect from time to time. They are seen as complementary and overlapping, but distinct.
• Users have varied implementation experiences with ECM and BPM technologies. End user respondents reported that more than 50 percent have undertaken BPM solutions to address departmental projects. By comparison,42 percent have undertaken departmental projects using an ECM solution. Interestingly, the survey found that only 11 percent of end users have deployed and implemented an enterprise-scale initiative using BPM technologies, while 17 percent have used ECM solutions.
• Users rate productivity and costs savings as extremely important business process drivers. End users cited increased productivity, reduced costs, and increased customer satisfaction as extremely important potential benefits of ECM and BPM technology solutions.
• Users view ECM and BPM implementation challenges comparable to other major software implementation challenges. More than 50 percent of end users surveyed state that the implementations of ECM and BPM technology solutions present exactly the same challenges or similar challenges to other major software implementation challenges.
• Users cite finance and internal/administrative business processes as important reasons for BPM implementation. BPM technologies could be used to address business processes across a variety of functional areas within enterprises, with finance, internal/administrative processes, and human resources as top beneficiaries.

This research spells out some of the market confusion I have been sensing over the last year or so. I think some vendors see BPM as the bigger market opportunity, and this seems to support that. It perhaps explains why Oracle’s content management announcement last month seemed to be part of a larger message about BPM.

While the AIIM users see “limited connections between ECM and BPM technologies,” I see a much stronger connection, but, as I have admitted in the pages of The Gilbane Report and elsewhere, I don’t think I have successfully explained that connection yet.

Don’t forget the deadline for submissions for the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies in San Francisco April 11-13 is this Friday. Submit a speaking proposal.

Mobius Management Systems, Inc. announced native support in DocumentDirect for the Internet for RedHat Enterprise Linux ES. DocumentDirect for the Internet, a component of the ViewDirect TCM suite, uses high-performance search and indexing to access content in any format. Automatic content presentment (ACP) transforms documents into Web-ready formats while retaining all formatting of the original. Flexible content presentment (FCP) repurposes content by extracting selected items from documents for display on a formatted Web page. www.mobius.com

Vasont Systems introduced a new integration between the Vasont Content Management System and Microsoft Word. Vasont is a single-source content management system that enables organizations to store their multilingual content once for multi-channel delivery. Using the Vasont Universal Integrator (VUI) extension, this integration enables users to: access Vasont directly from the Microsoft Word interface, so that they can take advantage of Vasont’s versioning, advanced search, and workflow capabilities to streamline the editorial process; mix-and-match Microsoft Word content with XML content already stored in Vasont to create new documents; and convert Microsoft Word-authored documents to XML for use across an entire enterprise, while still maintaining a link to the source document. www.vasont.com

The Apache Lenya development community announced the 1.2.1 release of Apache Lenya. Apache Lenya is an Open-Source Content Management System written in Java
and based on XML and XSLT. Lenya is built on top of Apache Cocoon and other components from the Apache Software Stack. Its XML-centric architecture allows for content delivery targeted to the capabilities of various devices, and avoids data lock-in. Apache Lenya is built around Off the Shelf components from the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Lenya comes with the features you can expect of a modern Content Management System, such as Revision Control, Scheduling, a built-in Search Engine, separate Staging Areas, and Workflow. Apache Lenya 1.2.1 is based on Cocoon 2.1.5.1, but Lenya 1.2.1 is also known to work with Cocoon 2.1.6. You can use Cocoon features such as Caching, multi-channel output, it’s many connectivity options to quickly build customized solutions to meet your specific needs that are not already covered by Apache Lenya. http://lenya.apache.org

Idetix Software Systems’ Revize Version 4.3 Web Content Management Software is now available. Changing or adding web page content is easier with Revize v4.3. Simply go to the page on your website and start editing. Adding content to a website with Revize v4.3 Contextual Edit Forms is also easier to do. No special tools or training is required. Every task is done through the browser by simply clicking and typing, using a Microsoft Word-like rich text editor, within the exact context of the webpage and seeing the results as you go. The Revize v4.3 template builder is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) visual editing tool incorporated as a Macromedia Dreamweaver extension. Revize v4.3 offers the ability to publish both static HTML pages and dynamic pages and publishes dynamic pages to any corresponding web server that would include the following types of dynamic pages: .jsp, .cfm, .php, .asp, .aspx, etc. www.idetix.com