"Flexibility" is the word Mark Gillett uses to describe the Gauss VIP
Platform, an integrated content management environment.
Gillett, president of eHealthEngines
(www.ehealthengines.com),
Cambridge, MA, says VIP offered his company the flexibility to run on
any platform and to leverage the same technology for multiple customers.
This is important to him, because eHealthEngines' OpenMed Portal links
physicians, hospitals, laboratories and imaging centers to provide rapid
access to confidential medical information. In addition to granting
secure viewing rights, VIP allows OpenMed users to upload new
content.
The VIP Platform, from Gauss Interprise, of Hamburg, Germany, and Irvine, CA, is a cross-platform asset management suite that runs natively in several environments, including Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Windows NT/2000, Linux, AS400 and HP9000.
"The platform enables us to provide our customers with a way to embed content into our portal framework," says Gillett. "We have the flexibility to give our customers the ability to customize part of our site."
Gauss gained much of its flexibility through the April 2000 merger of Gauss Interprise and Magellan Software, which offered a cross-platform document management system. The merger integrated the companies' product lines - Magellan's SpyVision document management suite and Gauss' content and portal management software.
The products and service portfolios of each company were complementary, says Gauss chairman Heino Buchner. "Gauss can meet customer needs in a scope and manner that our competition cannot address," Buchner says. Specifically, he contends that unifying document and Web content management in one solution can reduce the cost and complexity of extending business operations to intranets, extranets and the Internet.
The VIP Platform consists of four main components: VIP PortalManager, VIP ContentManager, VIP StaffView and VIP SpyVision. Each component is accessed through a single, Web-based interface that leverages a Java client.
Based on Java and Java Bean technologies, VIP PortalManager provides personalization and application integration capabilities, allowing users to create unified, secure access to Web-based content. Using information captured within a user profile, personalized views of a Web site are served based on roles, groups or individual user names that can be created in the administration environment.
Using PortalManager's personalization functionality, eHealthEngine allows customers to customize their portal by changing the look and feel of the site. "We give our customers a lot of control over their own space," says Gillett.
Extending PortalManager is ContentMiner, a search engine that provides semantic searching of content throughout a Web site and within the VIP ContentManager and DocumentManager. Semantic searches are more powerful than conventional full-text searches in that queries on individual terms will also return synonyms. For search words that have multiple meanings, ContentMiner requests more context before performing the search. Content is automatically categorized once a user creates or uploads it into VIP.
The VIP ContentManager component is a traditional content management application that separates content from layout. ContentManager is based on a four-tier architecture - edit, QA (quality assurance), production and administration. In most circumstances, users create content within the edit environment using templates and forms. This allows authors to contribute content using nonproprietary desktop applications such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Word. The templates are created using HTML, Java server pages or XML.
Once content is created, it is stored on a file server within flat files rather than taking a more robust database approach. This is a potential limitation depending on the size of an organization and the need to scale the Web site. Content stored within an external database (not managed by ContentManager) can at least be referenced and served on VIP Web pages. VIP also stores metadata within either text files or a relational database.
External or legacy applications can be integrated through the VIP XML Gateway interface or directly through PortalManager's application programming interfaces. VIP supports a wide range of application servers, including BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere and ATG Dynamo.
ContentManager works in conjunction with the VIP StaffView, a rules-based graphical workflow system that allows users to automate the content publishing process. For example, once an editor is within the edit environment, content must first be checked in - this locks out write access to other users. Next, the editor can use any familiar authoring tool to edit the content. Once necessary changes are made, the content is checked back into the edit environment, which also offers versioning/archiving and automatic link generation.
Within the QA environment, appropriate personnel can either publish the content to the site or reject it for additional editing. Once the content is approved, it is moved automatically into the production environment, where it is formatted based on an appropriate style. From there the content is dynamically generated and served to the browser.
The latter two components, VIP StaffView and VIP SpyVision, are holdovers from Magellan's product line. VIP SpyVision is a multiplatform document management suite incorporating document capture, scanning, indexing, and optical and intelligent character recognition capabilities, as well as report indexing, archiving, bundling and distribution capabilities.
The entire VIP Platform supports Unicode characters, enabling users
to manage content in foreign languages such as Japanese, Kanji, Chinese
and Arabic. Future enhancements of VIP will feature English rules-based
business intelligence and personalization. For example, if a Web site
visitor is interested in sporting activities, a sporting events calendar
or other personalized content could be automatically displayed. Gauss is
also developing a deeper application programming interface set to
support original equipment manufacturer integration.
The VIP Platform is a strong, all-around content management system
that smartly leverages Java technology. Managing legacy information
alongside Web content is a strength. To compete with bigger players in
the market, such as Documentum, the platform should address managing
content within a database repository as well as on a file server.
