Divine Inc. and Interwoven Inc. are adding more capabilities for document management to their respective content management software suites.
Divine Content Server 5.0, which Divine unveiled last week, features DocLink, a Windows Explorer-like interface for saving and retrieving documents. DocLink also supports metadata insertion, revision tracking and workflow initiation directly within Windows Explorer, said officials at Chicago-based Divine.
Such ease-of-use improvements appeal to Omnexus America Inc., which publishes a content, commerce and community site for the plastics industry.
"The architecture lets our user community post information to the site," said Thorne King, chief technology officer of Omnexus, in Atlanta. "Divine software is uniquely positioned to use in a distributed way."
Content Server 5.0 also includes Asset Filters, which transform content from document types such as Microsoft Corp.s Word or Excel into HTML or XML when the document is saved to the system. This extensible framework serves as an integration point for other Divine and third-party applications and content sources, officials said.
This version also contains a set of predefined Web services that can be used by any Web application to access and present content within that application. It allows developers to create new Web services to expose any custom business logic within Content Server, Divine officials said.
William LeVine, vice president of development at Omnexus, said Content Server is moving toward being able to manage content in non-Divine applications across the enterprise.
"Ultimately, wed like to be able to manage content across the board [from Content Server]," LeVine said. "With an open architecture and maturing products, I think we can get there. Slowly, but surely, there are more and more common denominators between applications."
Separately last week, Interwoven, of Sunnyvale, Calif., rolled out its Collaborative Document Management Solution Powered by iManage Worksite MP product. The product adds the collaborative document management and portal capabilities of iManage Inc.s Worksite MP software to its own content management offerings.
The combined offering, due by the end of the quarter, supports shared project folders, calendars, e-mail discussion threads, task lists and outstanding-issues tracking. It also supports ad hoc and highly regimented document management according to established security protocols. Users can get reports on projects, documents and workflow status with out-of-the-box report views, Interwoven officials said.
