eXcelon Corporation introduced two new products that lower the barrier to participate in B2B eCommerce and create information-rich B2B portals. eXcelon’s B2B Portal Server is a new platform that automatically collects and publishes business content from anywhere in a partner network to a central, interactive eBusiness site. Xpress, part of the eXcelon B2B Integration Server product family, is new B2B technology that quickly connects an organization to thousands of partners to create cross-organization business processes that increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and allow end-to-end visibility and control of business operations. To provide a central location for products, services and information stored in a partner network, organizations can deploy eXcelon’s new B2B Portal Server. The Portal Server aggregates, manages and publishes content from the partner network to create highly interactive, personalized eBusiness sites that connect partners to live business information. Highly customizable, the Portal Server enables organizations to create a central, customizable location for viewing anything from product catalogs to more industry-specific content such as insurance policies and financial records. Based on XML technology, the Portal Server quickly integrates with a B2B network, providing a central viewing point for critical business data. With its data aggregation, search and personalization capabilities, users across the entire partner network gain increased efficiency, the means to make better business decisions and the ability to collaborate with partners all over the world. By providing partners with multiple levels of integration with the hub organization, eXcelon Xpress enables partners of all sizes and technical ability to integrate with a partner network with little or no investment in additional technology. When installed at the hub organization, as part of eXcelon’s B2B Integration Server, Xpress enables partners to log into the partner network with only a browser or handheld device. With the browser, partners can submit sales forecasts, initiate purchase orders and participate in any cross-business processes defined by the partner network. This option requires no technology investment from partners. For partners that would like to increase their level of integration and automation with the hub organization, Xpress can be installed on the partner side. eXcelon Xpress and the B2B Portal Server are available now for Windows NT and Solaris. The B2BPS is expected to be available for AIX and HP-UX in Q2 2000. www.exceloncorp.com
Category: Content technology news (Page 503 of 627)
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IONA Technologies announced that the W3C has acknowledged its submission of the latest version of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) specification. IONA was joined by Ariba, Commerce One, Compaq, DevelopMentor, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lotus Development Corp, Microsoft, SAP and UserLand Software (most of whom had their own similarly worded press release) in submitting the specification and proposing the formation of a working group in the area of XML-based protocols. SOAP is an XML-based interoperability protocol that links applications and services together via the Internet, regardless of operating system, object model or programming language. IONA’s iPortal Suite is a platform for integrating software applications and transforming them into B2B enterprise portals, which are unified points of access connecting an organization’s corporate business to the web. The iPortal Suite’s support for SOAP facilitates direct B2B interaction by enabling organizations to connect their enterprise portals to the e-business systems of their customers, suppliers and partners. IONA will continue to collaborate with the other submitters on the development and enhancement of SOAP to help it become the industry-standard mechanism that enables organizations to define enterprise portal services and transparently connect them with other enterprise portals. IONA is also developing SOAP mappings for CORBA. www.iona.com
Basis Technology announced the release of its Chinese Morphological Analyzer (CMA), an accurate segmentation engine for search and retrieval of Chinese text. Chinese Morphological Analyzer combines dictionary-retrieval technology with syntactic analysis to yield accurate text segmentation results for both the simplified and traditional written forms of the language. CMA boasts a comprehensive online Chinese dictionary of nearly 1,000,000 headwords, incorporating phonological, lexical and grammatical attributes. This information is used by CMA algorithms to segment and accurately disambiguate Chinese text using contextual clues combined with syntactic analysis. Morphological analysis of the Chinese language is an inherently complex problem. Chinese is written without explicit word boundaries, and it lacks the script transition cues of Japanese and Korean scripts. Furthermore, each character can potentially function as an isolated word (free morpheme) or part of a compound word (bound morpheme) or phrase. For these reasons, maintaining online forms and databases, and facilitating effective search and retrieval, are particularly difficult in the Chinese language. Chinese Morphological Analyzer is written in portable ANSI C++ and has a pure Unicode (UCS2) internal architecture that handles every major Chinese encoding format. Chinese Morphological Analyzer is licensed as a royalty-free software development kit (SDK) or as a source code distribution on all major platforms, including Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital UNIX and Linux. www.basistech.com
S.W.I.F.T. and FIX Protocol Limited (FPL) today announced that they are working with eight leading European Exchanges to define standards to harmonize access to the Pan European virtual blue chip market, planned to go live in November 2000. The European Exchanges who are involved include Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Madrid, Paris and Zurich. While the recent mergers between some of these exchanges may reduce the numbers of parties involved, their CEO’s are committed to supporting this initiative and explicitly endorse the FIX-S.W.I.F.T. collaboration. The initial output will be a Common Interface Specification for trade orders and notice of executions based on current FIX 4.2 Protocol specification. FPL is providing the technical expertise surrounding the business flows, whilst S.W.I.F.T. is providing their standard expertise and methodologies to facilitate and expedite the development process. All the business elements will be added to the ISO 15022 Data Field Dictionary, for which S.W.I.F.T. is the Registration Authority. Functionally equivalent S.W.I.F.T. messages will also be provided within the Common Interface Specification. Direct collaboration between S.W.I.F.T. and FPL will give rise to convergence and interoperability of message standards. The initiative will also result in the common deployment of the ISO 15022 Data Filed Dictionary, which will pave the way towards straight through processing as both protocols adopt XML. F.I.X., the Financial Information eXchange, is a messaging protocol, which is the de facto standard for pre trade and trade messaging in the global equity markets. FIX is administered by FIX Protocol Limited, whose members are exclusively drawn from the Investment Management and Broker Dealer communities globally. FPL is committed to promulgating standards in order to achieve the industry’s goal of Straight through processing. As part of this aim FPL has developed an XML grammar for FIX. www.swift.com
Lutris Technologies Inc. announced the immediate availability of Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0. Priced at $99, it is a supported and certified version of the Open Source Java/XML application server. The combination of Open Source software and commercial support and services provides the control and flexibility of an Open Source solution, plus the security of commercial support, training, and documentation. Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 provides an affordable option to corporate departments, small companies, consultants, and system integrators who have been priced out of the application server market and who have been unable to build high-end, data driven Internet applications that require the support of an application server. Several enhancements and improvements have been implemented in Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0, including full support for building wireless applications for delivery on cell phones and PDAs. A new feature, Enhydra Director, which distributes user loads across multiple servers, significantly increases the product’s scalability. Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 is covered by the same Open Source licensing terms as the downloadable version, available at www.enhydra.org. Customers will continue to have complete access to source code, as well as the ability to deploy Enhydra applications with no licensing or royalty fees. Priced at $99, Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0 is available immediately for purchase from Lutris. Lutris’ customer support options are available to customers who purchase and register Lutris Enhydra Standard 3.0. Registration entitles users to 15 days of free online installation support and access to the Lutris Knowledgebase. Customers may purchase incident-based support packages directly from Lutris online. Single-incident support is priced at $250 per-incident. Six- and 12-incident packages are also available for purchase, priced at $1,250 and $2,250, respectively. Customized support packages are also available. www.lutris.com
XMLSolutions Corporation announced the immediate availability of Vocabulary Builder for E- Business. Vocabulary Builder is a program designed to bridge a company’s existing business vocabulary to today’s e-commerce language while maintaining contextual definitions on both ends. XMLSolutions’ Vocabulary Builder allows companies to conduct business using the same syntax it has always used by XML-izing existing business vocabulary, semantics unchanged, so that the company can communicate electronically. Vocabulary Builder extends business operations across the Internet without revolutionizing core business processes. XMLSolutions utilizes Schema Central and their META-X Methodology to identify corporate metadata crucial to the successful implementation of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and e-business initiatives. The Vocabulary Builder program pinpoints strategic business information and executes a crucial step in developing e-commerce solutions. Creating DTDs that represent key business information is a primary function of Vocabulary Builder. www.xmls.com
Canto announced Cumulus 5 – Enterprise Edition, designed to manage and archive all types of digital assets used in production, publishing, communication, and other workflows. The release of the Enterprise Edition completes the Cumulus product line, which also includes a Single User Edition and a Workgroup Edition. Varying Options exist for the different Editions. The Enterprise Edition embraces and extends the success of the Workgroup Edition. It offers the most complete set of functionality and benefits. Cumulus 5 – Enterprise Edition will be available this month to a number of pre-selected customer sites. Broad availability through System Integrators and Solution Partners will follow in Q3/00. The “starter kit” of the Enterprise Edition is priced at US$33,000 and includes the server application and 20 concurrent client licenses. It also includes the Cumulus Internet Client, the Browser, the Vault and URL AssetStore Options, and five days of technical service. Additional client licenses are available for US$400 per client. Additional service days are available at US$1,500. The Oracle Connect Module will be announced separately. Maintenance contracts and the Cumulus SDK will be offered separately. The Cumulus 5 – Enterprise Edition is a fully cross-platform solution. The server software will be available for Solaris, Linux, Windows 2000 and MacOS X. The client software is available for MacOS and Windows. It also includes Internet access through standard Web Browsers. www.canto.com
Ironside Technologies Inc. announced that they have reached agreement-in-principle with Commerce One, Inc. for the purpose of real-time seller/buyer connectivity. Commerce One and Ironside expect to finalize terms and execute definitive agreements by summer 2000. Ironside intends to integrate its Ironworks sell-side product suite and Ironside Network service offering into Commerce One MarketSite and Global Trading Web solutions. Ironside expects to support Commerce One’s xCBL transactions within the Ironworks product suite and the Ironside Network service. XCBL is expected to provide Ironside Powered suppliers access to an extensive worldwide business-buyer community. The Ironworks 4.0 product suite will provide integration capability to the Commerce One MarketSite Global Trading Portal, as well as individual trading exchanges running on the MarketSite Portal Solution. Additionally, the Ironside Network “real-time exchange to the exchanges” is expected to provide suppliers on-demand real-time integration into the entire MarketSite community of exchanges. In addition, Ironside and Commerce One expect to collaborate to streamline and simplify content management functions, working together to homogenize supplier catalog information and automate content management functions. www.ironside.com, www.commerceone.com
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