Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Netscape PublishingXpert

 

PublishingXpert White Paper

 

 

 

 

 

Netscape PublishingXpert™

A COMPREHENSIVE ONLINE PUBLISHING SYSTEM

A complete solution for developing, maintaining, and growing online content with unprecedented flexibility and control. Netscape PublishingXpert makes it easy for publishers to author, revise, stage, deliver, and manage their own online services. 

Fully integrated, modular components for membership registration services, access controls, payment services, and document management help content providers customize their online services to match their business requirements.

Entertainment, financial, research, publishing, and service organizations recognizing the commercial value of their "knowledge capital" are rapidly moving to the Internet to deliver online services. Who can get them there faster?

Netscape PublishingXpert accelerates the time it takes to bring new online services to market. Once those services are established, Netscape PublishingXpert provides a high degree of control and flexibility, allowing content providers to expand product offerings and strengthen their relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Finally, Netscape PublishingXpert's comprehensive online publishing solution makes it easy for publishers to author, revise, stage, deliver, and manage their own online services.

FEATURES OVERVIEW 
  • Allows for easy customization of user registration, access, profiling, billing, and search services
  • Audits transactions and collects usage statistics
  • Supports flexible billing models
  • Provides comprehensive document management to load, index, search, and stage documents
  • Offers bulletin board services for subscribing to, reading, and posting to news and discussion groups
  • Integrates with industry-leading advertising-management solutions


FLEXIBLE REGISTRATION SERVICES 
Flexible user registration services allow publishers to tailor log-in templates to collect additional information about a customer. This lets you learn more about your customer base so that you can, in turn, expand product offerings or create new promotions. User registration information is stored in an underlying RDBMS that can later be used for access control, promotions, and advertising.  Features include:

  • Support user, corporate, or family accounts.
  • Provide log-in and registration templates that collect customer name, address, password, and credit card number. Templates may be customized to collect additional information such as hobbies and occupation.
  • Allow secure, online credit card authorization during sign-up or when user modifies payment information.
  • Include preset membership reports that can be customized via SQL.

    • GRANULAR ACCESS CONTROLS  
    Multiple levels of access offer publishers the flexibility to control access to a document, article, issue, or the entire publication. This enables you to maintain both billable products and free view areas for visitors to sample in the same site.  Features include:
  • Control access to users and documents. Document access can be controlled to a document, article, issue, or an entire publication.
  • Support thousands of simultaneous users.
  • Provide detailed usage analysis reports.

    • RANGE OF PAYMENT OPTIONS 
    Group various resources (such as documents, newsgroups, and publications) into billable products to realize maximum return on your knowledge capital. Choose statements for account status, charges by product or charges by user - Netscape PublishingXpert puts you in control.   Features include:
    • Lets publishers group various resources (documents, newsgroups, and publications) into billable products
    • Assigns a charge model to products, which allows publishers to create payment parameters


    CREDIT CARD PROCESSING 
    A Credit Card Processor provides a secure and reliable platform for credit card processing over the Internet. The processor's innovative design allows publishers to process their electronic subscriptions and purchases with little or no additional investment. Features include:

    • Authorizes, captures, and validates credit card transactions
    • Automates credit card batch and reconciliation processing
    • Utilizes a leased line or Internet connection for transmission of transactions
    • Provides secure transactions for credit card processing via SSL encryption


    BILLING STATEMENTS  

    • Set up statement automatically when a new user opens an account and provides valid payment method.
    • Create statements that include charges for user subscriptions and products in real time. For corporate or family accounts, the system automatically generates consolidated statements.
    • Review all billing charges and incurred fees charged to subscribers' credit cards at the end of a billing period defined by the publisher (daily, weekly, monthly).
    • Allow users to check their account status online.
    • Support provisions for a nonbillable area with free access to certain documents or sections, as well as a members-only billable area.
    • Provide statistics for transaction audit and collection.

    PROFILER PERSONALIZES DELIVERY 
    A unique profiler engine allows publishers to proactively deliver personalized content to service subscribers.

    Capturing personal interests in a user profile, the system matches these interests with new content as it's loaded. Users can be automatically notified of matches in real-time or delayed mode.
    • A run-time license for the profiler is included with PublishingXpert
    • Captures user personal interests in user profile
    • Matches user interests with new content loaded into the system and stores matches in a central database
    • Notifies users of matches in real-time or delayed, by automated email, pager, fax, or personal home page
    BULLETIN BOARD SERVICES 
    • Bundled with PublishingXpert
    • Let users subscribe to, read, and post to public or private discussion groups
    • Allow organizations to seamlessly integrate the BBS with the rest of their Web site via a customizable user interface
    • Support distribution of public and private bulletin boards
    • Transport bulletin board articles securely via NNTP or NNTPS with Netscape News Server
    • Integrate with the Information Retrieval Module to support free-text search and field search (e.g., title, author, subject) of articles
    • Support grouping of similar newsgroups
    • Provide user-defined Quick List of favorite newsgroups


    COMPLETE DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT 
    A complete set of document management capabilities helps publishers handle the large pools of existing information they want to bring online. Once online, these capabilities also help manage and organize the site. This includes:

    • A document handler that tags, converts, and loads text, graphics, audio, or video into the system
    • A content administrator that manages the document index and customer profiles
    • A content stager that automates distribution of large volumes of documents for publication
    • Choice of  two robust commercial search engines which locate information with full-text and attribute searches


    DOCUMENT HANDLING  

  • Imports content from other systems, news and satellite feeds supporting major text, graphics, audio, and video formats.
  • Tags, converts, and loads documents into the system. Define publications by specifying documents' destination and attributes (such as title, author, subject), load documents manually or automatically by specifying the update frequency from an electronic feed.
  • Natively indexes Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files.
  • Separates incoming documents into pure text (and tags) and arranges text into one or more hierarchical collections or browsing trees based on attributes.
    • DOCUMENT CONVERSION 
  • Document filters convert to HTML from PDF, SGML, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, RTF, AmiPro, FrameMaker, and Interleaf Publisher.
  • Graphic filters convert to JPEG from PCS, TIFF, BMP, PICT, CGM, WPG, and WMF files.
  • News filter framework for converting  to HTML from ANPA-based newsfeeds (e.g., Reuters, Dow Jones, AP).

    • AUTHORING FRAMEWORK
  • Supports one-button publishing from industry-leading authoring tools.
  • Ability to publish many to one; supports multiple content providers/authors with single staging environment.
  • Provides a complete framework to support multiple authoring tools or environments.

    • CONTENT STAGING 

    Allows writers to submit new documents to a staging server (inside the firewall) and publishers to process and move documents to multiple production systems (outside the firewall) for user access.
    • Utilizes "rdist"/Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), open security technology to securely transport content from staging system to production system
    • Performs automatic synchronization of content between staging and production systems
    • Performs automatic archival, indexing, and backup of all new content on production systems


    INFORMATION RETRIEVAL 

    Includes a choice of two robust commercial search engines for full content and attribute searching:

    • Includes natural language, full Boolean relationships (AND, OR, and NOT) text searches.
    • Provides relevance ranking of results.
    • Returns consolidated results list from multidatabase searches.
    • Search Plug-in API allows integration of additional third-party search engines.


    OPEN, EXTENSIBLE SOLUTION 

    • Three tier client server architecture for maximum scalability
    • Scales to support a large number of users with multiple front-end publishing servers.
    • Allows maintenance of billing access controls and membership management services in a central database even when multiple publishing servers are employed to streamline consolidation and reporting.
    • Includes membership, access control, billing and information retrieval SDK for complete control in customization.
    • A full set of C++ APIs enables integration with legacy systems.
    • Integrates with Netscape Navigator for installation, configuration, and management. Makes the system the easiest to use in its class.
    • Uses a modular system design to allow modules to run on multiple systems, such as a cluster configuration to support high availability, scalability, and security.


    ADVERTISING 

    • Integration with leading third-party advertising solutions enables ads to be targeted based on demographic information contained in the registration database.


    SUPPORTED PLATFORMS AND SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS, PUBLISHING SYSTEM V1.6

    Digital 

    Alpha 

    Digital Unix 4.0 

    Sun 

    SPARC 

    Sun Solaris 2.4, 2.5 

    Silicon Graphics 

    MIPS 

    IRIX 5.3, 6.2 

    IBM 

    RS/6000 

    AIX 4.1, 4.2 

    Hewlett-Packard 

    PA 

    HP-UX 10.20 

    Memory 

    64MB minimum, 
    128MB recommended 

    Disk Space 

    1.2GB minimum, 
    3GB available disk space 

     

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