Xml News & Articles

The cat’s outta the bag—we’ve got a birthday in the house!

Yesterday JustSystems (news, site), provider of XML and information management technologies, announced that their flagship product has been around for ten whole years.

XMetal is a powerful solution for structured content authoring and collaboration. It can be used as a stand-alone solution or as an integrated application with various content management and publishing systems including EMC's Documentum, IBM's FileNet and Microsoft's SharePoint. Using industry standards including Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), XMetaL enables content creators to create, collaborate, and reuse information that can be repurposed into the languages and formats customers need.

With a little bit going on for everyone, XMetaL boasts user-friendliness and ease of use for the technically challenged as well as powerful features for tech fanboys and fangirls.

"XMetaL has been one of the industry's top choices for the last ten years because customers can easily achieve a measurable return on investment as a result of their XMetaL implementation," said Aaron Deitcher, vice president of North America and EMEA for JustSystems.

Cut yourself a slice of cake, break out the bubbly, and learn more about XMetal here. 

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under -- you guessed it -- undisclosed terms.

Just because DITA authoring tools are coming onto the market at the speed of a runaway train, does not necessarily mean that A) companies understand what it is they are actually using, or B) they do not want to understand it.

And it is this segment of the market that the latest publication from Toronto-based content management consultancy the Rockley Group (TRG) is targeting with DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers.

While the authors (Anne Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper) never claim that the 148-page overview of DITA will make an expert out of you, they do say that it will help answer the $40 million question: Is DITA for you or your company?

Just to put it in perspective: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard that breaks content into small bundles of information that can be used and re-used at will through company- or group- specific information.

An XML-based architecture, it was introduced in 2001. In 2005, it was ratified as an OASIS (news, site) standard and is becoming increasingly popular in the creation of all kinds of documents.

Initial reviews of the book appear to be good, but then they would because they appear on the publisher’s website.

But then that shouldn’t put potential readers off. A quick search across the Web shows just how confusing the subject can be, and anything that can untangle the mess of ‘explanations’ out there should be worth a look.

Download or buy it from publisher on Lulu.com, or flip through a free chapter online before you actually buy.

For MadCap (news, site), it looks like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) initiative is still a go. The company, a software provider with a serious thing for integrated applications of the content management variety, first announced its support of DITA late last year.

This week, MadCap unveiled proof of that support in the form of updated versions of two of their offerings: MadCap Flare 5.0 and MadCap Blaze 2.0. According to the company, the newest versions of Flare and Blaze are” the first authoring software products to support transformation and publishing from the DITA standard—without requiring Java development or third-party toolkits…”

Let’s take a look, shall we?

With the planned Fall 2009 release of a feature-rich up-grade to its Text Mining Engine (TME), Nstein Technologies (news, site) is taking semantic metadata firmly into the world of Web 3.0.

For anyone that is not aware already, Nstein is a global specialist provider of solutions in the online media and web publishing world. TME 5.0, the company says, will include enhancements to linguistic abilities, Web 3.0 compliance and a number of new tools that will give users greater control over semantic metadata.

Code and Visual hits all the right keywords with its new web content management solution. Rainbow Live offers the ability to manage XML content for Flash-based websites. It's a simple Web CMS, supported by their Rainbow XML editor, for those who don't want to be weighed down by hefty back-end systems.

Content solutions provider, Mark Logic (news, site) has secured US$ 12.5 million in further venture capital funding to help expand sales and development of its XML server and other products.

Continuing to move and shake the world of XBRL are our friends at JustSystems (news, site), who after announcing their new XBRL Report a couple weeks ago are back again with a partnership to leverage data aggregation, content creation and publishing of financial reports using the business reporting language.

The new partnership with XML server provider Mark Logic (news, site) was announced at the Mark Logic User Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.

The W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has released the latest version of the Candidate Recommendation CSS Specification -- CSS 2.1. The newest version corrects some errors in the previous version and adds some features that have been highly requested.

Japan’s JustSystems (news, site) has announced the launch of its beta program for xfy eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Claiming it’s the first of it’s kind, the XML solutions providers designed the program specifically for people who’ve spent nights dreaming of the day they’d be able review and analyze the typically unreadable XBRL data.

Isn’t that considerate?

The latest version of SDL Trisoft – Trisoft 3.7 - has just been released, and if the UK-based vendor of this Component Content Management (CCM) system has got it right, then this solution will dramatically increase the speed and quality of targeted technical writing.

Responding to the need of companies to provide customized content to users in their own language and over the web, Trisoft 3.7 has a number of new feature.

With out-of-the-box DITA functionality, this solution gives companies the ability to handle thousands of variations in technical content that can be integrated dynamically and according to customer needs.

It has often been said that necessity is the mother of invention. In current times, with recession depriving many businesses of the barest survival necessity – cash - invention is key to getting through the next 12 months.

In this respect then, the recent announcement from XML and Information Management software vendor JustSystems (news, site) that Keyence Corp, a developer of sensors for factory automation, is to take a 44% stake -- worth US$ 44.7m -- in the Japanese vendor is logical.

The logic in this case being take the money where you can find it.

 With money too tight to mention these days, it is hardly surprising that with the many new versions of the various content management systems coming out, storage and reuse of assets is a priority feature.

So it is with the latest version of Vasont Systems (news, site) enterprise content management system that enables users to store multilingual content once for reuse and delivery to multiple channels. Specifically geared for the publishing industry, the Vasont CMS enables organizations to manage and store multilingual content, both structured and unstructured, in a single database.

A new version of an XML and DITA authoring tool that can be used with SharePoint (news, site) has been unveiled by JustSystems (news, site), the Japan-based vendor of enterprise software for information management.

Extending the SharePoint platform, XMetaL Author Enterprise provides an easy-to-use content creation solution that utilizes XML and DITA to manage content more efficiently with an interface that even novices can use.

Component Content Management (CCM), the technology that allows enterprises to manage content as componentized chunks of information rather than docs or webpages, has just expanded. Generally being a domain of small, niche software vendors, CCM is now welcoming ECM vendors and large digital publishing companies with open arms. The expansion not only brings companies of various sizes together, it also potentially brings XML to the masses.

"Component content management has traditionally been the purview of the technical industry, but increasingly organizations are adopting DITA and CCM to create sales and marketing, policies and procedures, and regulatory material," notes Ann Rockley, lead analyst for The XML & Component Content Management Report 2009.

Some key points found in the report:

• IBM is building a strategic presence witnessed by its recent integration of DITA with IBM FileNet Content Manager in partnership with Quark XML Author
• Microsoft has signaled an interest in the space with the promotion of Intelligent Content Framework
• Open Source options are now available through Alfresco via DocZone and Componize
• Adobe and Quark have moved publishing from technical XSL-FO (XML formatting language) to high end digital media delivery
• EMC and Mark Logic have taken content retrieval to new levels with intelligent XQuery and dynamic delivery

As Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe puts it, “The involvement of enterprise focused vendors is bringing about a profound change, and buyers of XML/CCM technology will need to review their own strategies accordingly.”