Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 74 of 77)

Progress Software announced Progress Apptivity Version 3.1, its Java application server and integrated development environment. The new version’s support for XML facilitates the deployment of broadly available business-to-business and e-commerce applications. In addition, enhanced SQL functionality strengthens e-commerce applications by allowing custom, vendor-specific queries on enterprise databases. Progress Apptivity Version 3.1 greatly increases the ability for enterprises to exchange information via support for documents formatted with the XML data interchange language. Progress Apptivity Version 3.1’s integrated XML support enables more rapid deployment of business-to-business transactions such as procurement and cataloging without the need for external XML servers. Via enhanced Progress Apptivity SmartAdapter technology, inbound XML data are integrated into local applications as relational data, reducing the need for manual conversion. Additional enhancements include: Improved SQL Functionality, Conditional HTML, Java 2 Support, and a Refined Look and Feel. Progress Apptivity server prices start at $10,000 USD. Availability is immediately. www.apptivity.com

Differential and UWI.Com, announced a strategic relationship. The combined technology provides a safer than paper solution for enterprises and financial institutions to securely send and receive legally binding transactions and other contractual agreements for conducting business-to-business e-commerce. Differential’s Digital Receipt Infrastructure compliments InternetForms by providing a complete non-repudiation solution for e-commerce and legacy systems. Non-repudiation is the use of strong electronic evidence to prove to an independent third party that a document or transaction was sent and received at a specific time by a specific person or company. Non-repudiation requires an irrefutable trail of digital evidence, as well as protocols and procedures for transaction verification, dispute resolution, auditing and reconciliation. A Digital Receipt is an XML document, which captures the digital signatures of the sender and the receiver, a verifiable time stamp and standardized transaction details. Digital Receipts may contain information about related receipts permitting complicated transactions to be re-assembled and reconciled. Digital Receipts also support real-time assurance such as online notaries, insurers and auditors. An InternetForm is an XML document that preserves in a single, digitally signed form all of the elements of a transaction required to produce a binding record. InternetForms capture the questions a form posits, and the answers a person provides, as well as any internal form logic and attached related documents, to provide non-repudiation and preserve the signer’s intent. www.uwi.com, www.differential.com

Interwoven announced its strategic partnership with IBM. As a member of IBM’s Solution Developer Program, Interwoven will work closely with IBM to provide industry-leading solutions for e-business. The first collaborative effort will be integrating IBM Net.Commerce with Interwoven TeamSite to provide a complete Web content management solution for catalog-based e-commerce Web sites. TeamSite enables concurrent development by hundreds or thousands of contributors working with tens of thousands of Web files requiring rapid development and publishing. www.interwoven.com

Softshare announced ecSuite, a suite of e-commerce products that provides range of solutions addressing the needs of organizations from the small, home-based business to the large enterprise. Softshare’s ecSuite provides a total Internet e-commerce environment and, when combined with the Softshare Network, a traditional EDI solution. The entry-level product for the small business is Softshare Vista 2.0 Standard Edition. Softshare Vista is a 32-bit Windows-based desktop EDI application that enables trading partners to electronically create and exchange business documents such as purchase orders, invoices and advance-ship notices. Standards supported include traditional EDI such as ANSI X12, UN/EDIFACT, as well as XML and XSL. Communications are SMTP and POP3 based. Softshare Vista 2.0 Standard Edition is priced at $295 for the single user. Softshare Vista 2.0 Professional Edition adds S/MIME security, advanced document tracking, event-driven document management, trading partner management, multiple mailbox support and direct integration with Softshare’s universal data translator, Softshare Delta. The Professional Edition is priced at $995 and includes a five-user license. Softshare Delta is a data translator capable of mapping both to and from EDI, flat file (from both fixed-width and delimited), XML and OLE DB data sources. Delta also supports mapping to free-form text documents, such as HTML, to aid in Web and Internet integration. www.softshare.com.

Bluestone Software, Inc., announced the giveaway of 3,000 copies of Bluestone Visual-XML, a toolkit for building XML applications. Available today, Bluestone Visual-XML is a pure Java development tool that makes use of a straightforward graphical user interface, drag-and-drop capabilities, and Mentor, Bluestone’s advanced interactive navigation and help facility to simplify development of dynamic XML applications. Bluestone Visual-XML’s Database Publishing Wizard helps users generate XML documents from data stored in a database, without any coding. The Process Wizard allows for the input of XML documents into a dynamic XML server. An example application is included with Visual-XML, showing the use of several Open Application Group (OAG) Document Type Definition’s (DTDs) for processing purchase orders against a database, including logging of transactions. This sample application can be a useful template for creating applications with any of the emerging industry DTD’s and DTD repositories, such as OBI, cXML, RosettaNet, OASIS, and BizTalk. Pricing for Bluestone Visual-XML is $99 and may be purchased and downloaded online at the Intraware intraware.shop Website ( www.intraware.com/shop) and at the Bluestone Website. www.bluestone.com

Akamai Technologies announced the commercial availability of its first offering, FreeFlow. FreeFlow has been in commercial use since the beginning of April and to date has delivered more than 10 billion hits for some of the biggest sites on the Web. The service dramatically improves Web site performance and reliability, and is backed by Akamai’s Proof of Performance guarantee. In a separate announcement today, the company named Yahoo! as one of its charter FreeFlow customers. FreeFlow was designed around the needs of high-volume Web sites in eCommerce, new media, and Global 2,000 businesses. To help the customer assess FreeFlow’s performance during the evaluation period, Akamai contracts with Keynote Systems, a third-party measurement service. Based on the testing done by this independent authority, the customer is able to evaluate the speed and reliability improvements of FreeFlow. The results show exactly how FreeFlow performed using live traffic, and are compared with the customer’s existing processes. FreeFlow customers pay only for the network resources they use — no capital investment is required. Usage charges are priced according to megabits per second of content served. Customers commit to a minimum usage level and may “burst” above this commitment. Monthly pricing begins at $2,000 per megabit per second, with discounts for volume usage. www.akamai.com

Intershop announced its partnership in the SAP mySAP.com business-to-business e-commerce portal. Other partners in mySAP.com announced by SAP are IBM, Pandesic, and Microsoft. Hosting directories, information services and industry-specific content and services, mySAP.com is the Internet business strategy that creates collaborative markets and facilitates dynamic business relationships through industry business yellow pages, online catalogs and e-commerce for more than 10 million users and many partner organizations. Intershop software adds fully automated business-to-business procurement to mySAP.com by connecting purchase managers who use SAP software with suppliers, who offer products and services on the Internet. Sellers are not required to use SAP R/3 standard software. Intershop e-commerce applications integrate with most legacy and ERP systems such as SAP R/3, Oracle Applications, Sage KHK, Baan, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft. Intershop embraces the new XML data exchange format that is expected to replace the old EDI standard. Using XML technology, Intershop’s back-office will connect to the SAP material management application, allowing order information to pass directly from the system of the buyer to the seller. www.intershop.com

Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc., announced plans to work together to accelerate the adoption of XML-based standards for e-commerce. The companies will join together to integrate Commerce XML (cXML), an emerging standard for business-to-business e-commerce, with the Microsoft BizTalk framework to define schema for communicating operating resource transactions, such as catalogs and orders. In addition to collaborating on BizTalk and cXML, Ariba and Microsoft plan to work together to implement these e-commerce frameworks into products offered by both companies. Ariba will support the BizTalk framework in Ariba e-commerce solutions, and Microsoft will integrate support for cXML into upcoming releases of the Microsoft Commerce Server and BizTalk Server. This collaboration will enable integration between Ariba e-commerce solutions and the multitude of supplier Web sites based on the Microsoft commerce platform. The joint work will provide the opportunity for Microsoft and Ariba customers to more easily and efficiently conduct business-to-business e-commerce with business partners worldwide. As a member of the core group of organizations that will drive the development of BizTalk, Ariba plans to collaborate with Microsoft on the continued development of operating resource transaction cXML schema. Under the planned development, Ariba will use XML-Data Reduced (XDR), the preferred syntax for BizTalk, in the next version of cXML. www.microsoft.com, www.ariba.com