Support for HotSauce MCF (Meta Content Format), PICS, online discussions
and Apple Network Servers.
AppleExpo, London, November 6th 1996 - Groupsoft Ltd. today demonstrated
Groupsoft Publisher 1.1, the most cost-effective editorial system for
managing an online publication.
The release of Groupsoft Publisher 1.1 brings support for automatically
generating HotSauce MCF (Meta Content Format) files used by Apple's
proposed industry standard structured information navigation tools, and
the ability to choose a PICS rating for individual pages. A separate
"discussion" module allows readers to participate in online discussions
attached to sections of the publication.
Groupsoft Publisher allows a small editorial team to manage a large and
dynamic Web publication. By separating production into three distinct
roles - site structure management, page appearance, and content - the
online publication can be managed without specialised resources becoming
a bottleneck.
Those people preparing pages - creating and editing articles, or
repurposing material imported in real-time from production systems, and
placing them on the site - do not need any knowledge of HTML. Submitted
pages may have embargo and expiry dates, and approval groups assigned
automatically.
After the editing and approval process, pages in the Web site are
automatically: - marked up from a library of HTML templates, - linked
together into Tables-of-Contents, - added to the HotSauce map for the
site, - added to an interactive Java site map, - fulltext indexed, - and
published onto the web.
Pages in sections of the site can automatically be restricted for
subscribers with username and password access control. Links between
pages are checked and alerted to the Webmaster automatically. The draft
and published articles are always visible to the entire production team,
in the site database.
Assigning individual roles to people involved in production -
journalists, editors, approvers, graphic designers - and using the
powerful workflow capabilities of Lotus Notes, makes Groupsoft Publisher
the first industrial-strength collaborative publishing system for the Web.
"We wanted to change the company from being a smallscale magazine
publisher - albeit dominating its sector - to become an information
company with global reach and multimedia output. Show me a more cost
effective way of achieving this than adopting Groupsoft Publisher and I
will be amazed!" said Malcolm Matson, Chairman of Trinity Square
Publishers, whose titles will shortly be online at <http://www.3in1.com/>
Groupsoft Publisher runs on Apple's Network Servers, as well as Windows
NT, OS/2, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris. Supported clients are Apple Macintosh
(PowerPC and 68K), Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and Unix.
Sites managed with Groupsoft Publisher can be read by all web browsers,
although the Apple HotSauce plug-in is needed to read the MCF site map.
--"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." - Marshall McLuhan 1969
<> tbyars@earthlink.net <>