CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 November 2004

Product News

New Astoria Version 4.3 Offers Enhanced Structured Document Management For Distributed Workgroups

Astoria Software a provider of software for structured document management, announced Astoria Version 4.3, a major upgrade which greatly enhances XML authoring for distributed workgroups. With Astoria Version 4.3, complex XML documents can now be securely authored by access through the Internet. Additionally, Astoria Version 4.3 delivers advanced features that make it easier for distributed workgroups to manage, review, assemble and publish complex documents.

Astoria Version 4.3 is Astoria's second major software release in 30 days. Last month, the company announced Astoria for Aerospace, the world's first off-the-shelf structured document management system capable of handling the rigors of aerospace document publishing.

"Today, companies and document teams are more distributed than ever," said Tom Steding, CEO of Astoria Software. "Astoria Version 4.3 gives document management teams the freedom to author from anywhere, the control to resolve document conflicts, and the publishing flexibility to produce even the world's most complex documents."

Jeppesen, the world's leading aviation information supplier, turned to Astoria Software after two years of trying to develop their own internal solution for structured document management. Jeppesen, which standardized the world's first flight maps in the 1930s, now uses Astoria to manage the aeronautical flight information it provides to airlines -- such as maps, trip planning, weather services, etc -- that it delivers in both print and electronic formats.

"Aviation data changes all the time," said Jeff Buhl, technical lead for document management services at Jeppesen. "Jeppesen needed a system that was as flexible with changes in content as it was with changes in output formats. Astoria is the best system we found, and has capabilities that have gone far beyond what we ever hoped to accomplish."

Author From Anywhere

Astoria Version 4.3 frees authors to work from any location accessible by the internet. Authors using Arbortext Enterprise Publishing Software version 5.1 now get secure, remote access to the Astoria Structured Document Management Server via a new, robust Bridge developed by Astoria Software. This new Bridge provides full access to all of Astoria application capabilities including flexible re-use of text and graphics, precise component versioning, access controls, component editing, annotations, version notes, and integration to Astoria Review for automated workflow processes such as content approval routing.

Automating "Stare and Compare"

Expanded with Astoria Version 4.3 is support for advanced differencing to automate content updates from third party sources. Documentation managers that must integrate updates can now automate the "stare and compare" process to identify content, structure and attribute changes. Astoria Conflict Resolution automates the acceptance of these changes versus a manual, time-intensive process. New updates can be automatically accepted and merged within a document in Astoria. Incoming updates that conflict with existing content are routed via email to authors for easy point and click resolution. Content shared with other documents is automatically updated with new content as well.

New with Astoria Version 4.3 is the ability to branch a document to create two release variants and then merge them back together for a future version.

Filtered Publishing For Custom Output

Astoria Filtered Publishing provides the ability to embed product configurations (effectivity) within documents then filter based on configuration-specific information or ranges when creating an Astoria Edition. Astoria Filtered Publishing combines single source content and product configurations to produce customized technical manuals which contain only the information relevant to each product configuration.

Enhanced Search

Astoria Version 4.3 incorporates enhanced searching with greatly improved searching of international Unicode symbols and characters as well as support of additional languages. The release incorporates Verity K2 technology to manage all full text search capabilities and includes improvements in incremental search consistency and performance.

All Astoria server applications are now certified for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 expanding scalability and security.

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