Microsoft Corp. laid out the next phase in its strategy for online services, offering a road map for new offerings that synthesize client, server and services software. Microsoft plans to deliver a variety of solutions during the coming months under two families of service offerings– “Live” and “Online.” “Live” services from Microsoft are designed primarily for individuals, business end-users and virtual work groups. These services emphasize ease of use, simplicity of access and flexibility, and are suited for situations where people either don’t have access to professional technical expertise or don’t require high levels of system management. “Online” services are for organizations with more advanced IT needs where power and flexibility are critical. Online services from Microsoft give businesses the ability to control access to data, manage users, apply business and compliance policy, and meet availability standards. Microsoft is providing business customers with the flexibility to choose between traditional on-premise implementations, services hosted by Microsoft partners and now Online services that reside in Microsoft’s datacenters. Microsoft also unveiled– Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a new Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that lets people access their documents online and share their work with others; Microsoft Exchange Labs, a new research and development program for testing new messaging and unified communications capabilities in high-scale environments; Continued customer and partner support for Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM; The renaming of the Microsoft Office Live hosted small-business service, a service dedicated to addressing small-business pain points, including core IT services and sales and marketing services, to Microsoft Office Live Small Business; and Microsoft BizTalk Services, a building block service that enables developers to build composite applications. Anyone can pre-register for the English language beta of Office Live Workspace at http://www.officelive.com
Category: Content technology news (Page 182 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.
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Xyleme Inc. announced the immediate availability of Xyleme LCMS 3.1. This is Xyleme’s newest version of its single-source solution for learning content reuse. Organizations use reusable learning objects from Xyleme LCMS to leverage training materials across any learning modality and to create a customized and contextual learning experience for each learner. Xyleme LCMS ease-of-use has been enhanced for its authoring component. A new configurable workspace provides multiple editor windows for simplified drag-and-drop and image and hotspot utilization, and new virtual document features such as find-and-replace and visual displays of version differences. A new tool allows organizations to automatically convert PowerPoint presentations into reusable XML learning objects. Text, bulleted lists, images, and tables are automatically transformed to individual assets that can be mixed, matched and reused across all blended learning solutions. Users have the ability within Xyleme LCMS to define the content assets to be included in any given output. Custom filtering also allows for the on-demand publishing of custom content that is based on user profiles, providing organizations the vital ability to provide a contextual learning experience. Xyleme has added mobile learning to supported outputs via the optimization of its search and navigation features. Reusable learning objects including text, images, audio and Flash can be pushed on-demand to mobile devices supporting these formats for real-time performance support. SCORM 2004 Release 3, is supported. http://www.xyleme.com
Vamosa announced Vamosa Content Migrator for IBM Lotus Quickr, a new way for organizations to fast start their Lotus Quickr implementation. Lotus Quickr is a Web 2.0 based collaborative content offering, designed to transform the way everyday business content, such as documents and rich media, is stored and shared, to enable more effective team collaboration for innovation. Vamosa Content Migrator for Lotus Quickr enables organizations to unleash the potential of their collective IQ faster by pre-loading documents and rich media into Lotus Quickr team places with automated content migration tools. Vamosa’s software enables faster implementation of Lotus Quickr’s set of collaborative content and team services including wikis and team blogs. By migrating content from file servers, intranets and legacy systems into Lotus Quickr’s scalable content repositories, Vamosa helps organizations implement Quickr faster. Vamosa Content Migrator for IBM Lotus Quickr software is expected to be available before the end of 2007. Pricing will be available later in the year. http://www.vamosa.com
BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) and Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced they have signed an agreement across four products. The companies will work together to provide customers with a design environment for rich Internet application (RIA) development. Separately, they will bring together application server technology to help enterprises develop customer engagement applications. BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder 2 software with BEA Workshop Studio, allowing developers to build cross-platform RIAs that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure for enterprise mash-ups. Further, every Workshop Studio developer will now have access to Flex technology for building RIAs. The agreement also calls for Adobe to distribute evaluation licenses of BEA’s application server, WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) software. The new Workshop Studio bundle includes Flex Builder 2, Adobe’s Eclipse-based IDE, and the Adobe Flex SDK, which is planned to be released under the open source Mozilla Public License. These RIAs can then be integrated with other BEA products, such as those from the company’s WebLogic and AquaLogic product families. Organizations also will be able to deploy these applications using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a new cross-operating system application runtime that allows developers to extend RIAs to the desktop. http://bea.com, http://www.adobe.com
Idiom Technologies, Inc. announced that it has named hiSoft, one of China’s largest IT outsourcing services providers and a long-time member of the Idiom LSP Advantage Program, an “Authorized Solutions Provider.” Idiom also named hiSoft to the Platinum tier of its LSP Partner Program, recognizing hiSoft’s deep Idiom WorldServer expertise and its continued commitment to increase the use of modern GMS solutions and globalization best practices within its client base. The two companies will engage in joint marketing, business development, and technology development activities on an on-going basis. As an Idiom Technologies Authorized Solutions Provider, hiSoft will leverage its IT services expertise to create and offer hosted WorldServer GMS services. For each customer, hiSoft will bundle its managed services around a WorldServer license. http://www.idiominc.com
Movable Type announced the release of Movable Type 4.0. “This is the biggest release of MT ever, a complete redesign of both the front end information architecture and the back end scaling infrastructure.” Movable Type 4 has a broad set of new capabilities, including: a redesigned user interface, more and better plugins, built in support for OpenID, community features, ability to aggregate content from multiple blogs, new support for standalone pages in addition to blog entries, “content management” features, smarter archiving (e.g., by author), more robust templates, and more. They also announced an upcoming open source version. http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2007/08/presenting-movable-type-40.html, http://www.movabletype.com/
Adobe announced the availability of the shipping version of ColdFusion 8. Designed for developers building dynamic Web sites and Internet applications, ColdFusion 8 targets day-to-day development challenges to increase developer productivity and integrate with complex enterprise environments. ColdFusion 8 uses Adobe Flex and Ajax-based components, and includes advanced Eclipse-based wizards and debugging to help developers build applications and identify and fix problems, while a new Server Monitor quickly identifies bottlenecks and tunes the server for better performance. It integrates with .NET assemblies, support for Windows Vista and new J2EE servers, for enhanced flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and interacts with Adobe PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to capture information. ColdFusion 8 is available in two versions: ColdFusion 8 Standard and ColdFusion 8 Enterprise Edition. Each license is valid for 2CPUs. Adobe is also offering discounted upgrade pricing for customers who own ColdFusion MX 6.X or ColdFusion MX 7. www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe Captivate 3 software, an eLearning authoring tool for the delivery of computer-based simulations, scenario-based training, and interactive quizzes. Adobe Captivate 3 offers enhanced features including multi-mode recording, rerecording, new Microsoft Powerpoint import capabilities and support for rich media formats, such as Adobe Flash Player compatible .SWF, MP3, and AVI files. Adobe Captivate 3 allows learning professionals to create software training in a simple screen capture session. The screen capture generates multiple learner modes, including demonstrations with mouse movements and automated text descriptions of each recorded task, practice simulations with instructional automated or customized feedback, and assessments with scored user interactions. The enhanced Microsoft PowerPoint import functionality supports the conversion of slide animations into Flash Player compatible SWF format and allows authors to create interactive presentations incorporating audio and video. Adobe Captivate 3 software automatically generates Adobe Flash Player-compatible content, allowing files to be e-mailed, posted to Web sites, intranet sites, and online help systems. The new XML export and import feature simplifies the localization process of projects by exporting captions to the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF). Adobe Captivate 3 will be available for Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista and is expected to ship in August 2007 or later this summer at an estimated price of US$699. Localized versions in French, German, Japanese, Italian and Spanish are expected to be available in September 2007. Users of Macromedia Captivate 1 and Adobe Captivate 2 can upgrade to Adobe Captivate 3 for an estimated price of US$299. http://www.adobe.com/go/captivate
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