IBM has taken the wraps off the first beta version of Content
Manager Version 8, which the company says will offer improved ways
of collecting, integrating and managing a range of text and rich
media content from across an enterprise.
Version 8, scheduled for release in September, is capable of
accessing and retrieving information in various forms, including
scanned images as well as audio and video files. This capability
should ultimately make corporate accounts respond faster and more
efficiently to the needs of their users and business partners, IBM
officials believe.
IBM has for several years focused on content management (CM) as
part of its overall data management strategy.
"Companies are beginning to think about assets like scanned images
and other multimedia data as just that - information assets that
they need to leverage," said Janet Perna, vice-president and
general manager of IBM's data management business. "But to do that
they need a place from which this content can be repurposed," she
said.
A recent report released by analyst organisation Meta Group
predictred that 95% of all Global 2000 firms will have a CM
infrastructure in place by 2004.
IBM officials said they have improved the performance of their
product's search capabilities by 35%. In addition, Version 8
includes improved programming capabilities that enable developers
to build applications some 30% faster than Version 7, according to
Brett MacIntyre, vice-president of content management at IBM.
"There is more and more application development going on around IBM
Content Manager," he said.
The improvements should cut down on the cost and resources used to
integrate CM-related data into both new and existing third-party
applications, company officials claimed.
The product's added performance in accessing rich media files, in
part, comes from better leveraging the existing capabilities of
IBM's DB2. Using what IBM officials call "federated data
management," the product can now access data in Lotus Notes and
products made by Oracle, Documentum, FileNet, Sybase and
Microsoft's SQL Server.
A federated approach - compared to a more centralised approach used
by some IBM competitors - allows users to build more efficiently on
their existing infrastructure, resulting in increased scalability
and reliability while lowering the product's total cost of
ownership, IBM officials claimed.
According to Rob Perry, senior analyst at the Yankee Group, CM
through a federated management layer makes sense as a way to manage
data strewn across multiple repositories.
"The federated approach is a good approach because it assumes not
all content is right for a single repository, or that content may
exist in many different repositories. It recognises that companies
are very diverse, particularly large companies," Perry said.
Content Manager Version 8 features a new "unified programming
interface" that officials contend eliminates the need for
developers to write multiple programs for specific text search
requests and to more easily integrate Content Manager with new
applications.
"We are really unifying our API set to get to much simpler APIs,"
MacIntyre said. "We are also building widgets and common building
blocks within the browser client and within the Windows client for
rapid application development."
Other improvements include the integration of Content Manager with
LDAP and new Java-based tools that allow for central administration
from any location. This should cut down the time associated with
carrying out system administration.
"What we have done [with Content Manager Version 8] is to provide a
data store with a Java-based open API so independent software
vendors, systems integrators and corporate clients can build
applications and be able to store and retrieve their content
including unstructured data," Perna said.
IBM has also added support for the MPEG-4 standard for steaming
media as well as enhanced support for XML through a new query
features based around the XPath Query Language. It has also added a
single sign-on capability.