IBM announced the acquisition of Datacap Inc., a privately-held company based in Tarrytown, NY. Datacap is a provider of software that enables organizations to transform the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition strengthens IBM’s ability to help organizations digitize, manage and automate their information assets, particularly in paper-intensive industries such as healthcare, insurance, government and finance. Additionally, regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley have demanded new standards and now legislation is encouraging the adoption of new records management solutions, including scanning and capture to increase accuracy, lower costs and speed business processes to meet these regulations. http://ibm.com http://www.datacap.com/
Category: Enterprise software & integration (Page 21 of 30)
Acquia has launched Drupal Gardens into private beta today, e-mailing out invites to the intial batch of people who signed up to be beta testers. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal which is remotely installed, hosted and upgraded. It is designed to have an interface similar to sites such as WordPress.com or Ning. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens aims to be a tool for organizations that want to build social sites. While currently on a private beta you can sign up to request an invite, and Acquia expects to transition to a public beta by spring 2010. Drupal Gardens will be available for free to the public throughout all of 2010. www.drupalgardens.com/
EntropySoft announced the commercial release of an Open Text Vignette Content Management connector. Features for the read/write connector include preparing Vignette content for search, e-discovery, Records Management or for daily document transfers. This connector aims to facilitate web publishing of content coming from different sources and speed up the update of sites. The connector should also be able to integrate vertical applications working with Vignette content. The EntropySoft Vignette Content Management connector works with the Vignette Management Console API. The connector is a single java library, a .jar file. The EntropySoft Vignette connector allows the creation and modification of Vignette objects such as sites, channels, projects and documents. The Vignette connector will be CMIS-compliant when the specification is available. The Vignette connector can also be integrated in third-party applications or used in conjunction with EntropySoft’s content hub or Content ETL. http://www.entropysoft.net
Alfresco Software announced that it has included the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 in Alfresco Community 3.2 to enable developers and organizations to participate in the public review process. The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) has recently approved CMIS Version 1.0 as a Committee Draft and announced the start of a two month public review period. The objective of the CMIS specification is to deliver a common REST or Web Services API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications. The CMIS specification is backed by vendors including Alfresco, Adobe Systems, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. As an OASIS TC member, Alfresco is able to offer an implementation of CMIS for developers who wish to participate in the public review process. The public review ends December 22, 2009. The OASIS TC has issued an open invitation to comment and strongly encourage feedback from potential users and developers. CMIS 1.0 Public Review can be downloaded with Alfresco Community 3.2 at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition.
As I pointed out in my first post (SharePoint: Without the Headaches – A Discussion of What is Available in the Cloud,) you don’t necessarily need to host SharePoint in your own organization. Although I believe that most businesses should focus on leveraging the front end of SharePoint to its full extent, it is important for non-technical users to have an understanding of what it takes to host SharePoint and why one might want to do so. Therefore, this post provides a discussion of what it takes to host SharePoint and the driving factors for hosting SharePoint.
Microsoft’s original intent was to build a tool that was easy to leverage by non-technical users. Microsoft thought of this as the natural extension of Office to the web[1]. That being said, the complexities got away from Microsoft, and in order to leverage a number of features one needs access to the back end.
Before delving into the SharePoint back end, let me point out that many businesses hire SharePoint development staff, both permanent and on a consulting basis. I think that developing custom SharePoint code should be done only after thoroughly justifying the expense. It is often a mistake. Instead, organizations should clearly define their requirements and then leverage a high quality third party add-on. I will mention some of these at the end of the post.
SharePoint is a fragile product and therefore custom code for SharePoint is very expensive to develop, test, and deploy. Furthermore, custom code often needs to be rewritten when migrating to the next release of SharePoint. Finally, SharePoint is a rapidly growing product, and chances are good that custom code may soon become obsolete by new features in the next generation.
In my first post, I pointed out that inexpensive SharePoint hosting options are available in the cloud. These options tend to be limited. For example, the inexpensive rentals do not provide much security, only provide WSS (not MOSS), and do not allow one to add third party add-ins. It is possible to lease custom environments that don’t surrender to any of these limitations, but they come at a cost. (Typically starting at $500 per month[2].) I believe that robust MOSS offerings with third party add-ons will be available at competitive prices within two years.
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[1] SharePoint is developed by the Office division.
[2] For example, FPWeb offers a SharePoint hosted environment with the CorasWorks Workplace Suite included starting at $495 per month.
If you’re like me and have been thinking about CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), but need some use cases to help you conceptualize it better, Laurence Hart has put together a very useful presentation. He welcomes comments.
As usual, Robin Cover has a great list of resources here.
DataDirect Technologies, an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ- PRGS), announced the latest release of the DataDirect Data Integration Suite featuring new versions of its XML-based component technologies for data integration in traditional and service-oriented environments. Designed to meet the data transformation and aggregation needs of developers, the DataDirect Data Integration Suite contains the latest product releases of DataDirect XQuery, DataDirect XML Converters (Java and .NET) and Stylus Studio in one installation. DataDirect XQuery is an XQuery processor that enables developers to access and query XML, relational data, Web services, EDI, legacy, or a combination of data sources. New to version 4.0 is full support for the XQuery Update Facility (XUF), an extension of the XQuery language that allows making changes to data manipulated inside the XQuery. Now developers can more easily update individual XML documents, XML streams, and file collections from within their XQuery applications. The product also includes the ability to update and create Zip files, therefore supporting the OpenOffice XML format. The latest release of the DataDirect XML Converters are compatible with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and are integrated in the Microsoft BizTalk development environment. For healthcare organizations needing to comply with the X12 electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and the latest Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 5010 transaction definitions, the DataDirect XML Converters now include support for the HIPAA EDI dialects including 004010A1, 005010 and 005010A1 messages. Stylus Studio 2009 has a new EDI to XML module that works with DataDirect XML Converters in an interactive way. Users can now load EDI documents to view contents, test conversions, create customizations and preview XML. http://www.datadirect.com
eZ Systems announced the release of eZ Components version 2008.2. This is the seventh major version of eZ Components, which is a general-purpose PHP library of over 40 components used independently or together for PHP application development. The latest versions of eZ Publish are also based on eZ Components. With eZ Components, developers can concentrate on solving customer-specific needs. The eZ Components tool set provides key application functionality, such as caching, authentication, database interaction, templates, graphs, and much more. Main improvements in this release include more features for the Document and Webdav components. The Document component, which enables you to convert documents between different formats, was already able to convert ReST to XTHML and DocBook. In this release, more formats are implemented, such as three different wiki formats (Confluence, Creole and DokuWiki), the eZ Publish XML formats, as well as reading XHTML and writing ReST. The wiki parser can easily be extended for other wiki formats. The Webdav component now supports authentication and authorization, as well as support for integrating authentication mechanisms into existing systems. In addition, it supports shared and exclusive write locks, even with custom storage back-ends. The main new development of the eZ Components 2008.2 release is the MvcTools component. The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework. Instead of dedicating the structure of the application, it provides a dispatcher, two request parsers (one for HTTP and one for email messages through the existing Mail component), two routing methods, two view handlers (one through plain PHP scripts and one through the Template component), and a response writer for HTTP. http://ezcomponents.org
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