A Web site for pros
A new company, formed as a joint venture between a London law firm and a huge professional services company, will use the Internet to deliver professional services over the Internet.
The new site, BeProfessional.com, will offer interactive services, tailored to individual needs, to small and medium-sized businesses. Among its offerings will be online solutions to legal, tax, accounting and other business-critical matters. The law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner and the professional services company Deloitte & Touche together have invested more than $7 million on the Web site.
To implement the online venture, the two organizations sought content help from KnowHow Systems, developer of a suite of Internet content management products called KcentriX. The products will help the business community obtain professional solutions online, access commonly used business documents and automatically generate personalized documents from stored content.
Because content is stored in multiple formats such as RTF, HTML and PDF, BeProfessional.com needed a common language format. Explains Tony Foy, managing director at KnowHow Systems, “All of our software is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is why BeProfessional.com asked us to participate in the project. Customers can use the tools we provide to manage the content in a familiar word processing environment. We then convert the content into XML and store it in our repository.”
However, because BeProfessional.com wanted to maintain the security and integrity of documents, conversion to the non-revisable PDF format was required. That’s where CDC Solutions and its publishing solution Xtensia enter the picture. Its software aggregates and delivers corporate content according to industry standard formats including XML, HTML, TIFF, GIF, JPG and PDF.
Peter Reynolds, U.K. sales account manager for CDC Solutions, says, “Xtensia takes the content, fuses together the XML boilerplates and the style sheets and dynamically publishes it to PDF, which is then archived and available for future search or reuse. The user simply fills in the tax form or legal document and then prints it, with no knowledge of the underlying complexity that makes the forms available.”
When the system goes live, BeProfessional.com users will be able to access and fill in documents online.
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