Content management platform adds apps

By Jennifer Mears
Network World Fusion, 04/24/02

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Responding to customer demands for better collaboration capabilities and faster deployment, Interwoven this week released a trio of applications designed to sit on top of its standard content management platform and provide businesses with enhanced features out of the box.

The new applications focus on document collaboration, application code management and integration of content management within portals. They work with Interwoven 5, the company's content management platform that is made up of its TeamSite content management software, MetaTagger content classification software and OpenDeploy content distribution software.

In addition, Interwoven announced updates to Interwoven 5, which include better scalability, support for .Net and Java, automatic content tagging and a drag-and-drop feature for moving content such as Web sites into the Interwoven content management system.

"It's all about faster ROI [return on investment] and lower cost of ownership," says Clinton Stark, director of product marketing. "We're giving businesses a way to leverage our value across the enterprise."

The TeamPortal software enables businesses to more easily integrate content management into their portals, providing content creators with collaboration and publishing tools to keep portal content fresh without burdening the IT department, Stark says.

TeamDoc takes aim at the growing number of digital documents within businesses by helping companies put a document management system in place. TeamDoc includes features such as the Document Dashboard, which provides a single view of all the documents within a department or business and tracks the location, changes and approval status of those documents.

Finally, TeamCode offers a collaborative environment for creating Web applications. Application developers, graphic designers and Web designers can all work together in creating an application for a portal, for example.

"If you didn't have our collaborative technology that enables them to all work together, they'd all be working individually in their own applications," Stark says. "You would have no way of bringing it all together to test the gadget to see if works. With TeamCode and TeamSite they all collaborate on the same platform and they can still use their own tool of choice -- but it's all enabled through the Interwoven 5 technology."

Stark says businesses can expect to see more applications designed to take advantage of Interwoven's basic content management capabilities. Partners and customers are already creating applications for e-learning, customer relationship management and vertical industries, he says.

TeamPortal is available now for IBM and BEA portals, with support for Plumtree, Oracle and SAP coming in the third quarter. Pricing starts at $150,000. TeamDoc is also available now and starts at $49,000. TeamCode will be available in the third quarter of this year. Pricing for that has not yet been determined.