The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing articles from October 1998

The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing archives from October 1998

Adobe Brings Styles to Web Graphics with ImageStyler.(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... As the Web continues to mature as a publishing medium, the need for robust, desktop authoring tools becomes increasingly apparent. Two years ago, vendors zeroed in on page makeup; this year, attention has shifted to graphics, with Adobe and...

Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000: Stiff New Competitor in the Office Market.(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Later this month, Microsoft will muscle its way into the market for entry-level graphics software when it releases PhotoDraw 2000. The software, which includes both photo-editing and drawing tools, is designed to make it easy for business users...

All Sound and Fury? A Retrospective on Quark's Failed Bid to Buy Adobe. (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... Rarely has a news story aroused the interest and concern of the industry to the extent of the proposal by Quark to acquire Adobe Systems. For two weeks in late August and early September, it held people's attention, sparking rampant speculation...

Commentary. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... K2 revealed. The demo was teasingly brief, yet because of its timing, it became one of the notable events of the year. For months, well-placed customers and industry insiders had been briefed on the product under strict nondisclosure. Word had...

Seybold Announces First Vision Award Winners. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... At Seybold San Francisco, Seybold Publications awarded its inaugural Vision Awards, which recognize products or people who have helped to move the publishing industry forward in the areas of print, Internet and media-independent publishing....

As we went to press . . . (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... HM to test Copyright Direct for books. The College Division of Houghton Mifflin will soon begin testing Yankee Book Peddler's copyright-management service, Copyright Direct. The test is the first time that YBP's service, developed for digital...

Branding with Digital Media Requires a New Marketing Approach.(Web-based commerce requires significant investment, experts say) (Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
October 1, 1998... With few exceptions, all of the major brands that have succeeded in gaining a loyal following have been created using print and broadcast media. Until recently, the Web did not play a significant part in the plans of marketers seeking to create...

Managing Content and Assets: Updates on Systems in Five Market Segments.(preview of Seybold San Francisco 1998 report) (Industry Trend or Event)
October 1, 1998... Software for managing digital assets-whether they be Web content, conventional documents, images or multimedia objects-remains a hotbed of activity, with new vendors still coming onto the scene and existing vendors, especially in the Web space,...

Web Content Managers. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... THOUGH MANY of the largest Web sites now have some sort of database in place for keeping track of their content, the majority of Web publishers-even those with database-driven content-still rely on the file system as their storage system and...

FutureTense streamlines IPS.(NewsDesk, Content Server streamline Internet Publishing System 1.5)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... FutureTense is making a name for itself in the newspaper market with its Internet Publishing System (IPS), which is now used to produce the Web sites of Community Newspapers in Massachusetts and has been purchased by the Washingtonpost.Newsweek...

GoLive enters the system market.(GoLive Systems GoLive CyberServer)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... The developer of CyberStudio, a popular Web authoring tool for the Macintosh, GoLive has decided to follow the path of NetObjects and FutureTense: build a server-based product for collaborative Web authoring and site management, and use the...

Inso rolls out DynaBase 3.(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... The big news at Inso was its acquisition of Bitstream's MediaBank, giving the company a solid system for managing a variety of assets, especially images, that DynaBase lacks (see story in the Latest Word). But Inso's own development team has...

Interwoven adds a template engine.(Interwoven TeamSite 2.0)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... At the opposite end of the spectrum from GoLive, but in the same ballpark as Inso, Interwoven demonstrated its newly released PageWarehouse, a system for creating and managing template-driven Web sites that complements Interwoven's TeamSite 2.0...

NetObjects upgrades, renames Team Fusion to reflect new open stance.(NetObjects Team Fusion 3.0)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... A year ago, NetObjects ushered in the mass-market collaborative Web-authoring system with the introduction of Team Fusion (Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 20), a server-based collaboration system that complemented the Fusion design tool. The company...

RTIS delivers Microsoft-based system for magazines.(Reed Technology and Information Systems EPS publishing industry software) (Product Information)
October 1, 1998... During the past five years, Reed Technology Information Systems (RTIS) has steadily migrated its business from one of pure database composition (both print and CD-ROM) to a mix of software development, integration and services. Although it...

Systems for Managing Structured Documents. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... Chrystal and Hynet introduced editorial systems for FrameMaker, and Xyvision announced plans to connect to Open Text Livelink, as these niche vendors look to broaden their customer base. ONE SEGMENT of the content-management market that has...

Chrystal embraces FrameMaker with Canterbury.(also introduces Lingua for Astoria)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... One of a handful of vendors that manage SGML and XML documents, Chrystal has had the most success in technical engineering and documentation departments, whereas FrameMaker is often used to produce printed manuals. To capitalize on its...

Hynet "relaunches" Directive.(HyNet Directive 2.0)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Last fall, Hynet entered the long-document-management market with its Digital Library System. This year, with new funding and a new name, it "relaunched" the product as Directive 2.0. Directive is a tool for managing long documents at the...

Xyvision to link to Open Text workflow.(OpenText LiveLink integration with XyVision Parlance Document Manager) (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... Xyvision announced plans to integrate its Parlance Document Manager with Open Text's Livelink system. The integration recognizes that Xyvision corporate customers-typically a documentation department-may want to take advantage of a company-wide...

Enterprise-Level Media Asset Managers.(Thomson Consulting, WebWare, Quark planning) (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... Two companies at Seybold San Francisco demonstrated industrial-strength media-management systems that are clearly designed with integration in mind. And at the enterprise level-meaning across multiple departments of one or more firms-the...

Quark: Noise about Adobe, but quiet on the DMS product front.(Quark Digital Media System)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... There was not a lot of product news from Quark, but the company's name was on everyone's lips for another reason: its proposed acquisition of Adobe (see Commentary beginning on p. 32). Now that the Adobe merger has been dropped, attention...

Thomson formally rolls out TEAMS.(Thomson Consulting Thomson Editorial Asset Management System)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... The IT consulting services arm of Thomson Corporation, now called ThomsonConsulting, showcased its Thomson Editorial Asset Management System, or TEAMS. Although TEAMS has been shown before, this is the first time that it was shown with its new,...

More features, more customers for WebWare MAMBO.(WebWare Media Asset Management By Object)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... WebWare has been busy adding features to its asset-management package, Media Asset Management By Object (MAMBO), which it positions as a tool for managing brand-related assets. That category includes such things as corporate marketing...

Hot Action Among the Midrange Image-Management Players. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... In publishing and the graphic arts, image management has always been a concern. As a business, we make use of a high volume of art, much of which is of high quality. The material is valuable, and therefore it needs to be tracked and preserved....

Bitstream sells MediaBank to Inso, adds Verity indexing. (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... The big news at Bitstream last month was, of course, the sale of part of the company to Inso. Specifically, the MediaBank and InterSep products and the entire team-engineers and marketing-are moving from Cambridge, MA, across the river to...

Canto's foray into the "middle market".(Canto Cumulus)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Among asset-management software, Canto's Cumulus package has long been the leader in the single-user Macintosh market, with a solid base of installations among small workgroups as well. Canto claims over 80,000 users, far more than any...

Imation plans a move upmarket.(Imation MediaManager) (Product Information)
October 1, 1998... Imation wants to move its MediaManager product upstream from the production environments where it is now focused. The company divides the world into media creators (e.g., designers and ad agencies), media users (e.g., corporate marketing...

Island manufactures ImagePump.(Island Graphics ImagePump)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Island Graphics, a name that is well known in prepress imaging, has entered the image-management market with a rather expensive but impressive-looking product. Island hopes that its focus on managing lots of high-resolution images and its OEM...

Dark Horses Enter the Desktop: Image-Management Race.(Arriba, Jintek, Digital Graffiti) (Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... IF THE ODDS seem to favor Island Graphics' chances for success, they are definitely much longer for three newcomers in image management: Arriba, Digital Graffiti and Jintek. All three have desktop products that the vendors want to take to the...

Arriba sweeps up Web images.(Arriba Express, WebVac)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Is it too late to be joining the asset-management fray? Arriba Soft doesn't think so. The company didn't exhibit at the show, but we met with its executives in San Francisco and got an idea of what the company's Arriba Express package can do....

Digital Graffiti's Mabango starts shipping.(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... We first saw Digital Graffiti and its new asset manager, Mabango, last spring. (Then, the package was called "Cura," a name which had to be dropped because of a conflicting use.) As we noted then, this package stands out because of its...

Jintek Treasure series links XPress with an image database.(Treasure, Treasure XT, Treasure Pro XT)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Jintek, founded in 1996 (as Street Logic), makes Quark XPress Xtensions, plug-ins and utilities. It has offices in San Diego, CA (primarily marketing) and in Thailand (primarily software development). This fall it is rolling out three new...

Chromeffects: Desktop of the future or the end of Web standards?(from Microsoft)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Integrating Windows 98 and multimedia hardware improves multimedia interfaces Microsoft's forthcoming multimedia technology, called Chrom- effects, may become the core technology for next-generation desktops. Microsoft used Seybold San...

Macromedia generates personalized Web graphics.(Macromedia Generator)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... On-demand graphics via templates and a Flash repository Macromedia has introduced Generator, a system for producing and delivering personalized and automated Web graphics that raises the personalization bar a bit higher. Based on the Flash...

Punch Networks' WebGroups poised to ease collaboration.(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... Web-based file sharing is incremental, format independent and easy to implement Punch Networks, formerly known as Kangaroo Inc., announced its WebGroups collaboration software at Seybold San Francisco. WebGroups allows members of a workgroup...

Ultimatte unleashes new sophisticated masking.(KnockOut image processing software)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... KnockOut technology uses partial transparency Ultimatte, a firm that made its name in the movie and video special-effects business, recently introduced an innovative graphics program called KnockOut. The $400 program is well worth a look from...

Bitstream sells InterSep, MediaBank to Inso. (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... Bitstream sold its MediaBank asset-management system and InterSep product lines to Web content-management system provider Inso last month, in a deal valued at $12 million in cash. As part of the agreement, approximately 30 employees of...

Iceni develops export technology for PDF repositories.(Iceni Technology Gemini Studio, BCL Computer PDmorF)(Product Announcement)
October 1, 1998... BCL Computers previews a similar technology PDF has long struggled with its reputation as a one-way repository: Data goes in, but cannot leave gracefully. But Iceni Technology and BCL Computers are trying to change that. Each has developed a...

Publist.com: Directory of periodicals. (News Briefs)
October 1, 1998... Publishing exec creates a central resource online Publishers of periodicals now have a Web directory devoted to their genre at www.publist.com. The new site takes basic publication listings that appear in R.R. Bowker's Ulrich's International...

Sun sets GHz course.(Sun Microsystems 64-bit UltraSPARC architecture) (Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... Sun announced a four-year plan for upcoming chip architectures, leading to a 64-bit UltraSparc processor that will be capable of 1.5-GHz clock speed in 2002. Although that is a fourfold increase over current Sparc speeds, Sun said that it...

Cascade: NT services over Solaris.(Sun Microsystems Project Cascade) (Company Business and Marketing)
October 1, 1998... Sun also announced that it will seek to run Windows NT system services on top of its own Solaris operating system. Project Cascade, as it is called, will attempt to separate NT services (such as user authentication, file sharing and print...

Chip does SCSI, Fibre Channel.(LSI Logic) (Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... LSI Logic has released a chip that handles both SCSI-3 (parallel interface) and Fibre Channel (serial) protocols. It will allow disk makers to design dual-purpose controllers for only a modest premium over dedicated controllers. This...

VF-45 group touts fiber plug standard. (News Briefs)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... Several manufacturers have endorsed the VF-45 fiber connector, hoping that its adoption will speed the deployment of fiber to the desktop. The group includes optical semiconductor makers, connector companies and equipment manufacturers. The...

Branding with Digital Media Requires a New Marketing Approach
October 1, 1998... With few exceptions, all of the major brands that have succeeded in gaining a loyal following have been created using print and broadcast media. Until recently, the Web did not play a significant part in the plans of marketers seeking to create...

Managing Content and Assets: Updates on Systems in Five Market Segments
October 1, 1998... Software for managing digital assets-whether they be Web content, conventional documents, images or multimedia objects-remains a hotbed of activity, with new vendors still coming onto the scene and existing vendors, especially in the Web space,...

Web Content Managers
October 1, 1998... THOUGH MANY of the largest Web sites now have some sort of database in place for keeping track of their content, the majority of Web publishers-even those with database-driven content-still rely on the file system as their storage system and...

FutureTense streamlines IPS
October 1, 1998... FutureTense is making a name for itself in the newspaper market with its Internet Publishing System (IPS), which is now used to produce the Web sites of Community Newspapers in Massachusetts and has been purchased by the Washingtonpost.Newsweek...

GoLive enters the system market
October 1, 1998... The developer of CyberStudio, a popular Web authoring tool for the Macintosh, GoLive has decided to follow the path of NetObjects and FutureTense: build a server-based product for collaborative Web authoring and site management, and use the...

Inso rolls out DynaBase 3
October 1, 1998... The big news at Inso was its acquisition of Bitstream's MediaBank, giving the company a solid system for managing a variety of assets, especially images, that DynaBase lacks (see story in the Latest Word). But Inso's own development team has...

Interwoven adds a template engine
October 1, 1998... At the opposite end of the spectrum from GoLive, but in the same ballpark as Inso, Interwoven demonstrated its newly released PageWarehouse, a system for creating and managing template-driven Web sites that complements Interwoven's TeamSite 2.0...

NetObjects upgrades, renames Team Fusion to reflect new open stance
October 1, 1998... A year ago, NetObjects ushered in the mass-market collaborative Web-authoring system with the introduction of Team Fusion (Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 20), a server-based collaboration system that complemented the Fusion design tool. The company...

RTIS delivers Microsoft-based system for magazines
October 1, 1998... During the past five years, Reed Technology Information Systems (RTIS) has steadily migrated its business from one of pure database composition (both print and CD-ROM) to a mix of software development, integration and services. Although it...

Systems for Managing Structured Documents
October 1, 1998... Chrystal and Hynet introduced editorial systems for FrameMaker, and Xyvision announced plans to connect to Open Text Livelink, as these niche vendors look to broaden their customer base. ONE SEGMENT of the content-management market that has...

Chrystal embraces FrameMaker with Canterbury
October 1, 1998... One of a handful of vendors that manage SGML and XML documents, Chrystal has had the most success in technical engineering and documentation departments, whereas FrameMaker is often used to produce printed manuals. To capitalize on its...

Hynet "relaunches" Directive
October 1, 1998... Last fall, Hynet entered the long-document-management market with its Digital Library System. This year, with new funding and a new name, it "relaunched" the product as Directive 2.0. Directive is a tool for managing long documents at the...

Xyvision to link to Open Text workflow
October 1, 1998... Xyvision announced plans to integrate its Parlance Document Manager with Open Text's Livelink system. The integration recognizes that Xyvision corporate customers-typically a documentation department-may want to take advantage of a company-wide...

Enterprise-Level Media Asset Managers
October 1, 1998... TWO COMPANIES at Seybold San Francisco demonstrated industrial-strength media-management systems that are clearly designed with integration in mind. And at the enterprise level-meaning across multiple departments of one or more firms-the...

Quark: Noise about Adobe, but quiet on the DMS product front
October 1, 1998... There was not a lot of product news from Quark, but the company's name was on everyone's lips for another reason: its proposed acquisition of Adobe (see Commentary beginning on p. 32). Now that the Adobe merger has been dropped, attention...

Thomson formally rolls out TEAMS
October 1, 1998... The IT consulting services arm of Thomson Corporation, now called ThomsonConsulting, showcased its Thomson Editorial Asset Management System, or TEAMS. Although TEAMS has been shown before, this is the first time that it was shown with its new,...

Arriba sweeps up Web images
October 1, 1998... Is it too late to be joining the asset-management fray? Arriba Soft doesn't think so. The company didn't exhibit at the show, but we met with its executives in San Francisco and got an idea of what the company's Arriba Express package can do....

Dark Horses Enter the Desktop: Image-Management Race
October 1, 1998... IF THE ODDS seem to favor Island Graphics' chances for success, they are definitely much longer for three newcomers in image management: Arriba, Digital Graffiti and Jintek. All three have desktop products that the vendors want to take to the...

Island manufactures ImagePump
October 1, 1998... Island Graphics, a name that is well known in prepress imaging, has entered the image-management market with a rather expensive but impressive-looking product. Island hopes that its focus on managing lots of high-resolution images and its OEM...

Imation plans a move upmarket
October 1, 1998... Imation wants to move its MediaManager product upstream from the production environments where it is now focused. The company divides the world into media creators (e.g., designers and ad agencies), media users (e.g., corporate marketing...

Canto's foray into the "middle market"
October 1, 1998... Among asset-management software, Canto's Cumulus package has long been the leader in the single-user Macintosh market, with a solid base of installations among small workgroups as well. Canto claims over 80,000 users, far more than any...

Bitstream sells MediaBank to Inso, adds Verity indexing
October 1, 1998... The big news at Bitstream last month was, of course, the sale of part of the company to Inso. Specifically, the MediaBank and InterSep products and the entire team-engineers and marketing-are moving from Cambridge, MA, across the river to...

Hot Action Among the Midrange Image-Management Players
October 1, 1998... IN PUBLISHING and the graphic arts, image management has always been a concern. As a business, we make use of a high volume of art, much of which is of high quality. The material is valuable, and therefore it needs to be tracked and preserved....

More features, more customers for WebWare MAMBO
October 1, 1998... WebWare has been busy adding features to its asset-management package, Media Asset Management By Object (MAMBO), which it positions as a tool for managing brand-related assets. That category includes such things as corporate marketing...

Digital Graffiti's Mabango starts shipping
October 1, 1998... We first saw Digital Graffiti and its new asset manager, Mabango, last spring. (Then, the package was called "Cura," a name which had to be dropped because of a conflicting use.) As we noted then, this package stands out because of its...

Jintek Treasure series links XPress with an image database
October 1, 1998... Jintek, founded in 1996 (as Street Logic), makes Quark XPress Xtensions, plug-ins and utilities. It has offices in San Diego, CA (primarily marketing) and in Thailand (primarily software development). This fall it is rolling out three new...

Chromeffects: Desktop of the future or the end of Web standards?
October 1, 1998... Integrating Windows 98 and multimedia hardware improves multimedia interfaces Microsoft's forthcoming multimedia technology, called Chrom- effects, may become the core technology for next-generation desktops. Microsoft used Seybold San...

Macromedia generates personalized Web graphics
October 1, 1998... On-demand graphics via templates and a Flash repository Macromedia has introduced Generator, a system for producing and delivering personalized and automated Web graphics that raises the personalization bar a bit higher. Based on the Flash...

Punch Networks' WebGroups poised to ease collaboration
October 1, 1998... Web-based file sharing is incremental, format independent and easy to implement Punch Networks, formerly known as Kangaroo Inc., announced its WebGroups collaboration software at Seybold San Francisco. WebGroups allows members of a workgroup...

Ultimatte unleashes new sophisticated masking.
October 1, 1998... KnockOut technology uses partial transparency Ultimatte, a firm that made its name in the movie and video special-effects business, recently introduced an innovative graphics program called KnockOut. The $400 program is well worth a look from...

Bitstream sells InterSep, MediaBank to Inso
October 1, 1998... Bitstream sold its MediaBank asset-management system and InterSep product lines to Web content-management system provider Inso last month, in a deal valued at $12 million in cash. As part of the agreement, approximately 30 employees of...

Iceni develops export technology for PDF repositories
October 1, 1998... BCL Computers previews a similar technology PDF has long struggled with its reputation as a one-way repository: Data goes in, but cannot leave gracefully. But Iceni Technology and BCL Computers are trying to change that. Each has developed a...

Chip does SCSI, Fibre Channel
October 1, 1998... LSI Logic has released a chip that handles both SCSI-3 (parallel interface) and Fibre Channel (serial) protocols. It will allow disk makers to design dual-purpose controllers for only a modest premium over dedicated controllers. This...

VF-45 group touts fiber plug standard
October 1, 1998... Several manufacturers have endorsed the VF-45 fiber connector, hoping that its adoption will speed the deployment of fiber to the desktop. The group includes optical semiconductor makers, connector companies and equipment manufacturers. The...

Adobe Brings Styles to Web Graphics with ImageStyler
October 1, 1998... As the Web continues to mature as a publishing medium, the need for robust, desktop authoring tools becomes increasingly apparent. Two years ago, vendors zeroed in on page makeup; this year, attention has shifted to graphics, with Adobe and...

Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000: Stiff New Competitor in the Office Market
October 1, 1998... Later this month, Microsoft will muscle its way into the market for entry-level graphics software when it releases PhotoDraw 2000. The software, which includes both photo-editing and drawing tools, is designed to make it easy for business users...

All Sound and Fury? A Retrospective on Quark's Failed Bid to Buy Adobe
October 1, 1998... Rarely has a news story aroused the interest and concern of the industry to the extent of the proposal by Quark to acquire Adobe Systems. For two weeks in late August and early September, it held people's attention, sparking rampant speculation...

Commentary
October 1, 1998... K2 revealed. The demo was teasingly brief, yet because of its timing, it became one of the notable events of the year. For months, well-placed customers and industry insiders had been briefed on the product under strict nondisclosure. Word had...

As we went to press . . .
October 1, 1998... HM to test Copyright Direct for books. The College Division of Houghton Mifflin will soon begin testing Yankee Book Peddler's copyright-management service, Copyright Direct. The test is the first time that YBP's service, developed for digital...