New heights for content management
With IBM’s Content Manager, enterprises are afforded a single vehicle for storage, management and distribution of all types of digital content—including text, images, audio and video—by combining the strengths of the company’s EDMSuite, ImagePlus VisualInfo and DB2. IBM reports Content Manager enables businesses to take full advantage of multimedia content in e-business environments and across traditional client application while proving scaleable capture and indexing of document with optimized storage management.
Content Manager is used in a client/server environment and requires the hardware to operate the servers and client workstations. supported server environments include AIX, Windows NT and Windows 2000; client environments include Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, with an AIX tool kit for client development. A tool kit is also available upon request for Macintosh client development. Content Manager V.1 servers also support the ImagePlus VisualInfo OS2 V2.4 and V2.3 clients.
IBM states Content Manager allows increased productivity and potential revenue sources through cost-effective electronic delivery and content reuse while allowing preservation of intellectual property in various formats through the digitized content. Added benefits would include enhanced customer care by allowing call center representative to quickly view a client’s complete folder of information, i.e. correspondence received, internally generated memos and forms processed. Further, IBM claims Content Manager will reduce operational costs through elimination of storage space, manual document delivery processes and microfilm operations.
The company goes on to say the open-nature of its new product permits content-independent storage and distribution of digital assets, as well as a client/server design that allows for the intermixing of different platforms the same solution. Additionally, a wide range of heterogeneous clients can be intermixed in a solution as needed, and interfaces are included for many popular authoring tools and data distribution methods already used by many organizations. And, support for multiple distributed object servers allows placing them and their data in the proximity of the users, which is especially important for delivery of large multimedia objects, such as audio and video.
Content Manager pricing is as follows: workstation server: $15,000; $2,000 per concurrent user.