Category: Content technology news (Page 562 of 640)

Addressing the need for e-businesses to maintain a singular, holistic view of their customers, vendors in the e-business and e-customer applications market today announced the Customer Profile EXchange (CPEX) working group. CPEX offers a vendor-neutral, open standard for facilitating the privacy-enabled interchange of customer information across disparate enterprise applications and systems. Charter working group members currently include: Andromedia/Macromedia, Calico Commerce, Cogit, Compaq, Digital Impact, DoubleClick, Engage Technologies, Fujitsu Software Corporation, Harte-Hanks, IBM, InsWeb, Intuit, Lumeria, Marketsoft, Net Perceptions, net.Genesis, Oracle, Personify, Siebel Systems, Sun/Netscape Alliance and Vignette Corporation. Additional organizations that have formally expressed interest in joining the CPEX effort include Lucent Technologies CRM Solutions, Proxicom, U.S. Interactive and others. The CPEX standard integrates online and offline customer data in an XML-based data model for use within various enterprise applications both on and off the Web. The result is a networked, customer-focused environment that allows e-businesses to leverage a unified view of their customers into more compelling e-relationships. More than simply a DTD or XML tag set, CPEX will include a data model, transport and query definitions, and a framework for enabling privacy safeguards. Few of today’s supply and demand chains share a unified image of the customer, leaving customer support, order management, lead sharing and other primary business functions working independently to grasp a customer’s identity, behavior and needs. Customer service capability is severely reduced by this lack of shared information, creating significant and redundant short and long-term IT integration costs. Businesses will be able to apply CPEX across a disparate range of back-office applications, front-office applications and Web customer automation applications. While the benefits of a singular customer view are growing increasingly apparent within an enterprise, CPEX solutions will prove vital in tomorrow’s world of connected enterprises. The CPEX working group intends to develop an open-source reference implementation and developer guidelines to speed adoption of CPEX among vendors. Open to any vendor that wishes to contribute to the standard, the CPEX working group is chaired by Siebel Systems, the Marketing Committee is co-chaired by net.Genesis and Vignette Corporation, and Andromedia/Macromedia chairs the Technical Committee. The CPEX working group is hosted by IDEAlliance.org, a neutral, non-profit organization that also hosts ICE, PRISM and several other XML working groups. www.cpex.org.

Oracle Corp. announced Oracle Integration Server, providing XML-enabled infrastructure for enterprises and e-business exchanges. In combination with Oracle’s portal strategy, Oracle Integration Server incorporates business process integration on all levels-including user interfaces, applications and back-end data-to easily transfer data internally and business-to-business. Also, the Oracle Integration Server includes message warehousing to enable analysis and optimization of business processes. As e-businesses expand electronic commerce initiatives beyond consumer storefronts to Internet exchanges, business process integration is crucial to success. When dealing with numerous partners or merging with other companies, e-businesses often find a mixture of incompatible IT infrastructures which make information exchange nearly impossible. Rather than a wholesale replacement strategy or point-to-point solutions, Oracle Integration Server provides a standards-based integration layer above these different systems, enabling information to flow easily between different applications and systems. By utilizing XML the Oracle Integration Server facilitates data exchange, reduces integration costs, and increases customer flexibility. Oracle Integration Server is expected to be the first among mainstream vendors to enable message interchange between heterogeneous messaging systems such as IBM MQSeries, TIB/Rendezvous, and Oracle Advanced Queuing. In addition, the software supports different methods of message transmission, including publish, subscribe, point-to-point, and multicast. As part of its e-business integration strategy, Oracle is working with a number of industry-leading vendors such as TSI Software, Vitria Technology, TIBCO Software, Active Software, STC, and Oberon to provide a comprehensive enterprise integration solution. The Oracle Integration Server is scheduled to be available in Q1, CY 2000. www.oracle.com

Policy Management Systems Corporation (PMSC) announced through its wholly-owned subsidiary, DORN Technology Group, Inc., that DORN’s claims management system and its universal claims data specification are programmed in XML. In this case, XML will streamline the exchange of data between all those processing, managing and analyzing claims via the Internet. As a result, DORN’s claims management system, RISKMASTER/World, can reduce significantly the cost of handling claims online. The XML version of RISKMASTER/World will facilitate online communication between claims handlers such as self-insured organizations, third party adjusters, insurance pools, and insurance companies. XML eliminates many problems associated with incompatible data formats. For example, users can more easily exchange data via e-mail, browser, file, and live feeds. This new functionality will help DORN maintain its leadership among providers of online claims management systems. Meanwhile, DORN’s universal claims data specification will help claims application developers create custom XML tags that define where specific data elements begin and end. This helps speed the process of establishing a claims data standard for the entire claims industry. www.dorn.com, www.pmsc.com

Icon Information-Systems announced the release of version 3.0 of its XML Spy product. XML Spy is a professional validating XML editor that lets you edit all XML, XSL, Schema, and DTD files and provides four integrated views on the documents: The Enhanced Grid and Database View shows the entire structure of an XML document in a hierarchical presentation that allows in-place editing of all elements. Sequences of repeating elements are automatically transformed into a spreadsheet-like display. The Text View gives you the option to view the XML document in source form with customizable syntax-coloring and allows you to directly edit the source for low-level tasks. The integrated Browser View uses Internet Explorer 5 to render an XML document inside XML Spy. This view fully supports CSS and XSL style-sheets and can be displayed in a separate window. The new Import function enables the user to generate XML documents from a wide range of flat and relational data sources: text files, Word documents, Access files, and ODBC database sources. Complete Unicode and character-set encoding support are integrated for seamless data exchange with foreign languages or writing systems. www.icon-is.com

click2send.com, Inc. launched click2send for the Enterprise, a Web-based file delivery, management and storage service to facilitate large-scale business communication via the Internet. The service combines instant global file delivery with in-network format conversion, file synchronization, Web-based storage and the ability to customize the user interface to reflect corporate branding, streamlining corporate communication and collaboration with employees, partners and customers. Using click2send for the Enterprise, users can rapidly and reliably transfer files up to 75MB in size using their Web browser and no additional software. The service notifies recipients about the availability of files for transfer through short email messages that contain URLs pointing to the sender’s secure click2send Safe Deposit Box. When recipients click on the URL, their browsers are opened and the users are taken immediately to the file location where files can be downloaded to a local hard disk. Leading business document types, including Microsoft Office, HTML or Windows Media, can be viewed directly in the click2send window without the user having to download the file first and launch it separately. Files can be viewed simultaneously by many recipients in different locations. click2send for the Enterprise is available now to any business with Internet access for a minimal monthly subscription fee. The service is suited for hard-wired connections and Netscape 4.01 or higher and Internet Explorer 4.00 or higher Web browsers. www.click2send.com

The Apache Software Foundation, in collaboration with Bowstreet, DataChannel, Exoffice, IBM, Lotus Development Corporation and Sun Microsystems, announced the formation of the xml.apache.org Project in response to the overwhelming demand for Open Source XML and XSL tools triggered by the rapid adoption of XML. xml.apache.org will advance the development and deployment of XML and XSL standards, and demonstrate the power of these technologies on both Web server- and client-side environments. In addition, xml.apache.org will provide a robust set of XML- and XSL-related libraries and applications within an industry-wide, peer-based Open Source development process. The xml.apache.org Project is being bootstrapped with technology donations from several vendors and Open Source XML developers, and will be maintained by the Project team. The donated technologies include: XML4J and XML4C Parsers from IBM, Java Project X and XHTML Parser from Sun Microsystems, LotusXSL, from Lotus Development Corporation, XPages, from DataChannel, FOP, from James Tauber, now with Bowstreet, Cocoon, from Stefano Mazzocchi and the Java-Apache community, OpenXML, from Exoffice and Assaf Arkin, and XSL:P, from Exoffice and Keith Visco. xml.apache. org will name its parser technology Xerces, which will be based on IBM’s XML4J and XML4C technologies. The next version will incorporate the best features on Sun’s parser and other contributions from the open source community. xml.apache.org

Symix Systems, Inc. announced that it has published key XML schemas to the BizTalk.org repository as a part of its digitalmidmarket.com initiative for midsize manufacturers and distributors. As a part of its eBusiness initiative, Symix is supporting the use of XML as a common data exchange framework. Symix has posted two midmarket- and industry-specific XML schemas — Bill of Materials (BOM) and Order Promise Date Request/Response — to BizTalk.org to facilitate the collaboration and information exchange between its midmarket customers and their customers and trading partners. Symix plans to post additional schemas to the BizTalk.org repository. www.symix.com

DataChannel will donate its XPages, an XML application markup language, to the Apache XML Project Open Source Library. The rapid adoption of XML has triggered an overwhelming demand for Open Source XML and XSL tools. DataChannel’s XPages is an XML application markup language for quickly building data-driven, cross-platform Web applications that integrate disparate data sources. XPages offers a dynamic application environment defined by an XML file that aggregates multiple data sources, makes that data URL addressable and defines custom methods to access that data for presentation at the desktop or other devices. The DataChannel submission to the XML.APACHE.ORG Project includes Java code for a servlet based engine. The Project code, along with developer participation guidelines, is available at http://xml.apache.org/, www.datachannel.com