Mzinga announced it has acquired Littleton, MA-based Prospero Technologies. Prospero has a client base in the media, entertainment, and publishing sectors, and owns online community properties Talk City and Delphi Forums. With this acquisition, Mzinga now offers a broad suite of workplace and customer community solutions. The two companies bring together a combination of business social media technology, in-depth moderation services, and domain expertise focused on improving business processes for marketing, human resources, and customer service professionals. Mzinga’s software-as-a-service technology platform provides a suite of social media applications, flexible integration options, and enterprise-grade moderation capabilities to help ensure efficient, secure control of user-generated content. The platform allows flexibility in the way social media technology is deployed. Using “widget” technology, one or more social media elements may be seamlessly embedded into a customer’s web site, while template functionality can be used to create private-label community destination sites. Customers also have the option of crafting their own look and feel, and integrating social media features via API into their web pages or other applications. This social media technology will be integrated into Mzinga’s learning platform. http://www.mzinga.com
Category: Content technology news (Page 177 of 624)
Curated information technology news for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. News items are edited to remove hype, unhelpful jargon, iffy statements, and quotes, to create a short summary — mostly limited to 200 words — of the important facts with a link back to a useful source for more information. News items are published using the date of the original source here and in our weekly email newsletter.
We focus on product news, but also include selected company news such as mergers and acquisitions and meaningful partnerships. All news items are edited by one of our analysts under the NewsShark byline. See our Editorial Policy.
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Kentico Software announced that the new version 3.1 of their Web Content Management System will support Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Kentico Software will release a new version 3.1 of their Web Content Management System Kentico CMS for ASP.NET in the middle of March 2008. The new version will work with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 that will be launched on February 27. This news comes soon after the company announced their CMS supports Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft IIS 7.0 at the beginning of February. Kentico CMS will keep the support for Windows Server 2000/2003 and SQL Server 2000/2005 as well. http://www.kentico.com
Attensity announced Attensity VoC On-Demand, a new secure software as a service (SaaS) that enables users to access the company’s “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) solution via the Web for on-demand customer feedback analysis. Enterprises can now extract and analyze data about their customers in Attensity’s user interface and through customizable analytic dashboards. Attensity’s VoC solution uses the company’s Exhaustive Extraction engine to automatically identify facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble areas from unstructured first person feedback found in surveys, service and call center notes, emails, web forums, blogs, news articles and other forms of customer contact. Attensity turns the first person feedback into “First Person Intelligence”, enabling Attensity users to proactively understand and rapidly react to customer issues and requests. They also have the ability to discover product and/or service offering opportunities as well as potential areas for improvement. Attensity VoC On-Demand also offers a quick start implementation program, which includes appropriate data preparation – dictionary, domain and categorization development – to prepare data sets for extraction and output views and dashboards. Users can develop predefined analysis views, known as query templates, and dashboards tailored to the user organization’s requirements. http://www.attensity.com
FatWire Software announced that it has acquired Future Tense Solutions, its Australian-based reseller. Prior to the close of the acquisition, Future Tense had exclusive rights to sell and distribute FatWire products throughout Australia and New Zealand. With this acquisition, FatWire gains a presence and direct access to customers in the region. Nigel Trinca, managing director of Future Tense, assumes the role of vice president of FatWire Australia and Future Tense co-founder, Bill Prescott, also joins the company. Future Tense Solutions was founded by a team of former Open Market colleagues who worked with FatWire’s product, Content Server. http://fatwire.com
JustSystems, Inc. announced the availability of the “DITA Maturity Model,” which was co-authored with IBM and defines a graduated, step-by-step methodology for implementing Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). One of DITA’s features is its support for incremental adoption. Users can start with DITA using a subset of its capabilities, and then add investment over time as their content strategy evolves and expands to cover more requirements and content areas. However, this continuum of adoption has also resulted in confusion, as communities at different stages of adoption claim radically different numbers for cost of migration and return on investment.
The DITA Maturity Model addresses this confusion by dividing DITA adoption into six levels, each with its own required investment and associated return on investment. Users can assess their own capabilities and goals relative to the model and choose the initial adoption level appropriate for their needs and schedule. The six levels of DITA adoption include:
Level 1: Topics – The most minimum DITA adoption requires the migration of the current XML content sources;
Level 2: Scalable Reuse – The major activity at this level is to break down the content in topics that are stored as individual files and use DITA maps to collect and organize the content into reusable units for assembly into specific deliverables;
Level 3: Specialization and Customization – Now, users expand the information architecture to be a full content model, which explicitly defines the different types of content required to meet different author and audience needs and specify how to meet these needs using structured, typed content;
Level 4: Automation and Integration – Once content is specialized, users can leverage their investments in semantics with automation of key processes and begin tying content together even across different specializations or authoring disciplines;
Level 5: Semantic Bandwidth – As DITA diversifies to occupy more roles within an organization, a cross-application, cross-silo solution that shares DITA as a common semantic currency lets groups use the toolset most appropriate for their content authoring and management needs;
Level 6: Universal Semantic Ecosystem – As DITA provides for scalable semantic bandwidth across content silos and applications, a new kind of semantic ecosystem emerges: Semantics that can move with content across old boundaries, wrap unstructured content, and provide validated integration with semi-structured content and managed data sources. http://www.ibm.com, http://na.justsystems.com
Swedish software developer Polopoly releases the latest version of its Content Management system. Continuing the effort to launch more ready-to-use functionality, Polopoly version 9.9 marks an important milestone. By introducing a standardized way to build web sites and specifically how to break down pages into standardized and reusable elements, version 9.9 introduces out-of-the-box layout management functionality. Live layout editing is now as easy as dragging and dropping content and application components onto a page – allowing for full user customization on the fly. The Polopoly platform is built entirely in Java and has open and documented APIs. Like previous versions of the Polopoly system, version 9.9 provides enterprise level performance through Polopoly’s architecture and multi-level caching technology. The new release includes the addition of a new fragment cache, which automatically caches reusable page fragments.The new developer framework introduced in version 9.9 prescribes best practices for how to build web sites and web pages with Polopoly. Keeping this “developer contract” gives the editors benefits in the form of preview and editorial control over page layout. An editor may for instance rearrange the components within a page visually, using the modular interface with drag-and-drop capabilities. Page templating can still be used to control corporate graphical guidelines and accessibility demands, for example, while at the same time allowing for just the right level of editorial flexibility and creativity to ensure maximum use of content assets. For developers, the new Velocity integration will allow for dynamic update of website presentation logic, enabling hot deployment of new site functionality. The Polopoly Content Management system provides for multi-channel distribution of large amounts of content at high speed. The modular software includes tools for managing and editing multimedia, including user generated content, within one single system. Polopoly Content Manager Version 9.9 will be available from February 1, 2008. http://www.polopoly.com
ADAM Software announced full breadth XPS-functionality. XPS stands for XML Paper Specification. ADAM’s provider model allows third party developers to co-engineer on emerging opportunities. As for XPS, ADAM software joined forces with the Belgian company NiXPS to build an XPS-engine for ADAM. The ‘NiXPS Library v2.0’ widens the scope in which ADAM can handle data. Thumbnails of XPS files are shown in ADAM, the previewing of XPS files starts here. Metadata can be read by ADAM when importing. ADAM handles a conversion of XPS files to Adobe PDF. http://www.adam.be, http://www.nixps.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of “Canonical XML 1.1.” The specification establishes a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Canonical XML 1.1 is a revision to “Canonical XML 1.0” designed to address issues related to inheritance of attributes in the XML namespace when canonicalizing document subsets, including the requirement not to inherit xml:id, and to treat xml:base URI path processing properly. Comments are welcome through 07 March. Learn more about W3C’s XML Activity. http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-xml-c14n11-20080129/
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