Intranet Solutions Moves Into Web Content With Xpedio Server

Computergram International, Sept 20, 1999

Intranet Solutions Inc is expanding beyond its document management base into general web content publishing and management with a suite of new products and an acquisition. The Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based company has acquired privately-held InfoAccess Inc for about $14.5m in stock, based on Thursday' closing price, Intranet wants InfoAccess' HTML and XML publishing tools, which it will include in the new Xpedio content server, which the company will announce today.

Xpedio comprises a content server, content publisher and reporting tool. Dan Ryan, the company's VP marketing, claims that customers using Intradoc, the document management system the company has been selling for two years, have used it to publish general web content with that tool, and so it makes sense for Intranet to produce a packaged application itself.

Ryan says that Xpedio is a platform for building content-centric applications and it can also manage the content on web sites, which is all stored in the Intranet repository. Ryan says the repository is preferable to an ODBC database employed by web content management companies like Vignette because it makes retrieving the content much quicker and more secure, he claims. Anyhow, Vignette and Broadvision and the like are concentrating on a higher-end market than the one Intranet is going after here, he says.

Application modules will be able to plug in to the Xpedio content serve and the first two are the HTML and XML content publisher the company gets from the acquisition of InfoAccess and Xpedio ReportSite, a reporting tool the company developed itself it can handle reports from multiple sources. Ryan says other modules will likely be developed by partners in the areas of customer support, call centers, ERP, messaging management and e-commerce and the company could develop more itself as well. Work continues apace on Intradoc and a workflow engine will be added later this year, with a categorization and taxonomy engine coming next year.

Xpedio content server, which is required for any of the other modules to work, costs $125,000 for one development and production server and is available on October 15. Additional production servers start at $50,000. The content publisher module costs $50,000 and will be out December 1, while ReportSite also costs $50,000 and will be available at the same time as the content server. It all runs on Windows NT and Solaris, with IBM AIX, HP-UX and AS/400 versions in the pipeline.