Astoria

Today comes news that SDL is acquiring Idiom, Inc. for US$21.7 million. Idiom was one of the first global information management systems (GIMS) to jump on the DITA bandwagon and they did it in a big way, forging partnerships with CCMS vendors Astoria Software and XyEnterprise CCMS, and authoring tools JustSystems XMetaL and PTC Arbortext Editor. While SDL's GIMS and Idiom often went head-to-head as competitors vying for content management integration, when it came to XML-based content component management, Idiom frequently won because of it's strong XML and DITA support. So in light of SDL's recent moves, SDL now supports a variety of different tools in this space: Acquisition of Tridion (web content component management system) Minority share investment in Trisoft (multichannel content component system) Acquisition of Idiom (strong support of XML-based global information management)

By Rich Huff, Pat Turocy and Kelley West In the Web world, "stickiness" is an intangible quality that keeps customers on a Web site. When competitors are only one click away, a sticky Web site is an invaluable asset to an e-business or e-commerce initiative. But how does an organization add that quality to its Web site? Dynamic and personalized content is one way to ensure that consumers stay on your Web site and remain loyal to your organization. With its recent release of Eclipse 1.0, Chrystal Software delivers a content management solution designed to provide rich user experience on Web sites. Chrystal's vision is to enable the addition of real-time interactive content without disrupting the environment. The company is no stranger to content management. Its flagship product, Astoria, is an authoring support system designed to provide a collaborative authoring environment with access control, versioning, reuse and distribution in multiple formats.

After pulling the plug on its CMS step-company, Astoria, Xerox has put renewed energy into its DM capabilities, which now rival those of Stellent (the former Web DM upstart), at least in breadth. The latest version of DocuShare (v3.0) is completely Web-based, for users and administrators. It's not a long jump from here to more unstructured content management. And a very low price point is going to put a lot of pressure on competitors, especially Microsoft's SharePoint server. BTW, in case you haven't noticed, WebDAV support has quietly become nearly ubiquitous...Read up on DocuShare

Today we announced an alliance with The Rockley Group to publish a report evaluating "Content Component Management" tools and practices. From today's release: Significant vendors in the Content Component Management space include: Astoria, AuthorIT, DocZone, PTC, SiberLogic, Trisoft, Vasont, XHive, XyEnterprise, Percussion, Tridion, Documentum, and Interwoven. The report will also evaluate major structured authoring tools, including JustSystems XMetaL, PTC Arbortext Editor, Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, and In.Vision Xpress Author. I'm very excited because our customers frequently ask us about this space, and it seems to remain under-covered in the media/analyst community.

ArsDigita, the open-source CMS and community-collaboration services company founded by Web-database guru Phil Greenspun, has called it quits. As with other similar cases (Astoria, eBT), the professional services team will continue on under a different company (in this case, RedHat). And no doubt the folks at MIT will keep the somewhat blander, Tcl-and-Postgres ACS Community System going. But still goes to show you that even open-source CMS projects are not immune from turbulence in the industry...Read about ArsDigita closing

ABBYY: Recognition Server™     ABBYY, a leader in document recognition, data capture and linguistics technologies, licenses its technologies to many leading capture and ECM vendors, providing the foundation for many of today's content management and capture solutions. ABBYY Recognition Server is a robust, server-based solution for automating document recognition and PDF conversion in enterprise environments. Its scalability, open API, XML ticket support and "hot folders" allow integrators and corporate IT staff to quickly integrate OCR functionality into existing knowledge or content management systems across an enterprise. With ABBYY Recognition Server, IT managers can easily set up document processing service to convert scanned images into searchable PDFs for full-text indexing and archiving.ABBYY USA Software House47221 Fremont Blvd. Fremont, CA 94538

CMS Watch readers know that we often look favorably on old-line DM vendors, who tend to understand complex content structures and sometimes offer strong XML support. But it is a wide chasm for them to cross to compete with newer Web CM products, and some of the smaller ones aren't making it. Buzz out of last week's XML2001 Conference was that Chrystal Software, developer of Astoria, is winding down...No news yet on the Chrystal website

The content management universe today is a "3-V" world of velocity, volume, and variability. These drivers have significant bottom-line impact for product manufacturers that create, manage and publish product information used across the organization from product engineering, to marketing, sales and customer service & support. Let's explore these content drivers in more detail:Velocity…The rate of information change requiring content owners to publish new or updated content and deliver it accurately, on-demand to customers is increasing.Volume…The amount of content created and published is increasing exponentially as a perpetual stream of new products and product derivatives are manufactured and sold.