Panagon primed for XML
Panagon primed for XML
FileNET's new vision is to help businesses publish "e-content" to internal and external Web sites using revamped document management software (see news section), and its new Web Publisher software is one of the first applications in its Panagon family to walk the company's talk.
With version 4.0, new XML language and incremental publishing capabilities have been added to the software that is designed to automate the conversion of native application-authored documents into Web content.
Panagon Web Publisher (PWP) is driven by templates that are user-specified and now able to be fully linked XML and/or HTML Web sites. The translation to XML or HTML is automatic with version 4.0, eliminating much of the tedious labour of publishing to a portal.
FileNET's "digital dashboard" is one example of the company's Web publishing capabilities.
"PWP 4.0 adds compelling new functionality to FileNET's e-content management solution," said Robyn Bradbury, managing director of FileNET Australia and New Zealand.
"It allows users to select and order a group of documents as a publication and to develop relationships among those documents. It provides navigation from within and among documents with automatically generated hyperlinks, next page and previous page buttons, indexes, tables of contents, lists of figures, table lists, reference documents and presentation graphics which gives the publication an real Web appeal."
The ability to create a Web site with a consistent look and feel with Panagon Web Publisher 4.0, even though source documents are formatted in an ad hoc manner, is provided by the software's "abstraction" capabilities.
"There are two ways to map content from a source document into XML or HTML - either by forcing authors to use strict paragraph styles in all documents and then mapping those to XML or HTML style elements, or by using abstractions to automatically map to those style elements," said Ms Bradbury.
"The abstraction feature analyses the content of each document and uses PWP rules to identify titles, headings [and] footnotes using the same visual clues that a person would use in looking at a printed page."
Documents can be published on demand or according to a predetermined schedule and Panagon Web Publisher supports custom frame sets and pass-through support for XML and Adobe PDF files.