Open Market updates Folio
The e-commerce vendor will release new, Web-friendlier versions of the publishing software it acquired last year with Folio.
Poor sales by the Folio division have been cited as weaknesses in Open Market's latest earnings report. Last week the company laid off 65 of its 480 employees after the company reported a bigger loss and lower revenue than expected despite an earlier admission to Wall Street of an earnings disappointment.
"Our customers are trying to reach new and existing customers using their customers' medium of choice," said Mark Stamm, Open Market director for commercial publishing. "If that's from a CD-ROM, we want to provide solution for that. If they want to use an Internet site or on paper, we want to do that. Same thing for location: On the Internet, or behind a corporate firewall for the corporation internally."
The Folio products have been targeted largely at big publishers who delivered information on CD-ROMs. The new offerings, renamed as LivePublish and SecurePublish, are basically similar to publishing software Folio has been marketing for years, but make it easier to publish information on the Internet.
The products also can be linked to Open Market's flagship Transact software, making it easier for publishers to sell their content on the Internet.
Web publishing product LivePublish extends the Site Director line that Folio has marketed for 12 years. LivePublish is an enterprise-class product used to publish and securely deliver content over the Web, and is designed largely for internal use on intranets.
SecurePublish is an intranet subscription server or rights management system that works with LivePublish. It lets publishers and their corporate customers negotiate license agreements and log usage of published information in ways more flexible than standard concurrent users or site licenses.
LivePublish, now in beta, has two pricing schemes. One starts at $4,995 and rises depending on the number of concurrent users. Commercial publishers can pay $9,995 plus a percentage of revenue generated by content published with LivePublish. SecurePublish starts at $19,995. Both products are available on Windows NT.