Texcel's Information Manager exposed

January 20, 1998

The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems
Vol. 27, No. 9

George Alexander
January, 1998

Texcel's focus was on the forthcoming release 2.0 of its Information Manager (IM). Whereas the initial release was accessed almost exclusively via menus within the ArborText editor, the 2.0 release provides the user with other ways to access the IM, making the product less "hidden" and more independent of the editing environment. There are also a variety of new features and performance enhancements. The new release will be out in the first quarter of 1998.

Two major changes contribute to the increased accessibility of Texcel's IM. One is the integration of the package with a second editing environment, FrameMaker+SGML, and the other is the use of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to provide access from almost any Windows program.

Another new component of the IM is a viewer. Texcel's viewer (like many others in the industry) is based on Synex's Viewport. There are also new features associated with queries, including better support for finding text strings within tags and the ability to name and store queries for later use. The Visual Basic development environment provides tools for modifying menus and adding special processing to workflows.

Web interface. Meanwhile, new features are still being added to version 1.0 of the IM. The latest of these is Web support, demonstrated at the Washington show using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Support for dealing with XML documents across the Web is one of the objectives. Texcel is providing the same browsing and searching facilities via a Web browser interface as it provides via its standard client. An XML-to-HTML conversion step is provided to allow remote users to view XML documents. The conversion will be unnecessary once browsers with direct XML support become available. Users with editing permission can check out material via the browser interface, download it for local editing, and then check it back into the repository. The Web application for IM is scheduled to be ready next month.

Texcel's user base has grown to include more than 30 companies, including Daimler-Benz Aerospace, John Deere, Diebold, Ericsson Telecom, Boeing Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, Thomson, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. Navy.