Stories about: Epicentric

Nothing makes a job tougher than having to scrounge for the right information. Glenn Kelman, vice president of marketing and product development at Plumtree Software, likes to cite Mazda Motor as an example of how employee-facing enterprise portals provide a convenient toolbox for people who would otherwise waste time gathering scattered resources.

As two key specifications approach final status, portal vendors are stitching in standards-compliant APIs for delivering content and applications into the portal framework.

It was September 2001, and Jeff Immelt had just become General Electric's new chairman. His predecessor, Jack Welch, had come up through the engineering ranks, but Immelt was a marketing guy, and one of his first actions was to survey the company's sales force. He was dismayed to find that members of the sales team were spending far more time on deskbound administrative chores than in face-to-face meetings with customers and prospects.

Content management wares took center stage at the AIIM 2003 Conference in New York , as vendors unveiled offerings designed to pull together content, portal, and process management capabilities.

IBM Corp. is turning up the heat on its CM (content management) strategy, preparing a scaled-down version of its Content Manager product aimed at midsize companies.

As corporate portal technology continues its battle to become an enterprise mainstay, vendors are moving to deepen business process capabilities in core portal frameworks.

Web services standardization is advancing on several fronts, including choreography and intellectual property concerns, a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) official said in an interview this week.

SOAP 1.2, the proposed revision of the Simple Object Access Protocol Web services specification, may be finalized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) within two to three months, a W3C representative said on Friday. But intellectual property rights could hinder the process.

Content management specialist Vignette Corp., which last week unveiled its strategy to deliver Web applications that extend beyond simple content management into search, collaboration and portals, plans to acquire portal software maker Epicentric Inc.

Business users looking for a more integrated way to use search, collaboration, content management and other features within their corporate portals might want to take a look at new products from Plumtree Software.

Attempting to drill beneath pre-packaged application concepts from vendors and beyond the oft-cited benefits of integration, panelists here at InfoWorld's Next-Gen Web Services II: The Applications conference explored real-world deployments of user-centric Web services applications to leverage existing investments and create new business models and application opportunities.