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Galaxy of software: Galacticomm's web site provides software updates for its Worldgroup product. Interactive captions: Moving the cursor over a picture on the Newscom web site reveals a caption in the upper window. Using Web to find out more about suppliers' productsSome folks carp that the World-Wide Web is the biggest brochure rack in the history of marketing. For you who pick publishing systems, be grateful. Thanks to the Web, you can sit in one place while you hop from booth to booth in the great cyber NEXPO. No more excuses for ignorance about the latest product developments (except for those suppliers who let their sites go stale). When shopping there's nothing like testing the look and feel of a product to help you decide. That's where the Web is a great boon for suppliers as well. At a handful of URLs, you can try out a working version of selected programs. This saves a great deal of expense in culling the buyers from the tire-kickers. Systems makers say they can spend (they never say "waste") between $600 and $1500 per person traveling to a lukewarm site. An on-line sample also saves both customers and sales departments "qualifying" time. "We've had a lot of hits on our (EyeQ Publisher) database from people who think it's one thing and realize, 'That's not what I thought it was,'" said Mike Harris, manager of publisher services at DataTimes Inc. of Oklahoma City. Follow-up calls get right to the substantive issues, Harris said, because customers are "familiar with what people can do with the system without us having to go out and walk them through it. You get below the surface right away if you put it up in an on-line presentation format." A handful of factors influence a demo's success: The speed of the web connection, the expertise of the prospective buyer and the complexity of the program. Contact with technical managers and sales people is still necessary to get the chief points across -- at least for now. "Technology is making demos easier," said Kirk Norlin, marketing manager at System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento. "Take a look at Microsoft's NetMeeting (http://www.microsoft.com/netmeeting/). We've used the 'shared application' feature as described on their web page." With NetMeeting, conference participants see the group leader's actions over a 'Net connection, and can even take turns working with a program, without having it loaded on their Windows-based computers. One thing the 'Net can't duplicate is that delicate human touch needed to close a deal. But as soon as you look like a serious buyer, you'll get all personal attention you want. The product displays you'll find on web sites fall into three broad categories:
Of course, the most satisfying are the first and second, because you can tap and tickle the features free from an anxious salesperson's prodding. The screen shot models will put you to sleep as screen after screen paints, unless you're blessed with a T1 line. A few adventurous suppliers are using the Web to test ideas as well as sell real products. These "proof of product" or concept acceptance demos are your chance to influence development before the maker gets too invested in R&D work. Here's a sampling of demo sites posted by suppliers to the newspaper industry.
Tryouts
http://w3.cascadenet.com/i-station/ Cascade boosts that the competitive edge of its archiving product, MediaSphere, is its seamless web integration, and here's the place to try it. Cascade, of Andover, Mass., is pulling newswires into a database for you to sort as you would your own in-house or web-accessible archive. One customer, the Las Vegas Sun, doesn't have its internal archive up yet, so it is using a basic /W3 implementation as its web site sifter, at http://www.lvsun.com.
http://www.l5r.com/QuestSamples/hpub/autoquerynf.HTML Harris deserves credit for teaming up with Level 5 Research (they're neighbors in Melbourne, Fla.) on this Quest classified "tickler" prototype. It shows how artificial intelligence can change frustration into service for sortable ads. Looking for a minivan, even though the word doesn't appear in today's auto listings? Quest's "fuzzy logic" will find family-sized cars and vans, ranked by price and year, whichever you say is more important. No more "search words not found!"
http://www.gcomm.com/ Over the protests of Galacticomm engineers, the Web won, and now this company is ready to prove that its on-line servers will 'Net with the best (see story Page 10). Sign up instantly "via Active HTML" for an account on its just-live Worldgroup 3.0 demo system. Another page lets you hop to public web, FTP and telnet Galacticomm systems.
http://206.155.225.44/eyeqdemo/ Once DataTimes employed Netscape Navigator for its EyeQ Publisher archiving system, a web presence was an easy leap. This demo gives access to two databases and standard EyeQ Publisher search tools. You'll need Navigator 3.0 or the latest Microsoft Explorer to satisfy the Java gods, plus a fairly large computer screen (otherwise a huge logo pushes the selector buttons out of range). You will need to request a user name and password in advance, which requires either completing an on-line form or contacting DataTimes' Mike Harris. The Windows NT server isn't completely bug-free, Harris advised, and is sometimes slowed by other FTP activity. DataTimes' content remarketing side offers a two-day free trial when you sign up at http://www.datatimes.com/freetrial.HTML. EyeQ will be web-accessible in mid-January, so check out the features that will be folded in with a new sibling service by its parent company, Bell & Howell's UMI division of Ann Arbor, Mich. If you're curious about the future pairing, step over to a "guided tour" of ProQuest Direct, at http://www.umi.com/ad/tour/tour-01.htm. The tour comprises snapshots of what a log-on account looks like, and you can "Test your Browser" for images, tables, frames, PDF viewer, cookies and security. Keep an eye out for a free trial, coming in January.
http://www.mpiinc.com/about/about.HTML Here's a chance to see how the end-user sees GuideLines, MPI's innovative listings management program, through links to several customers who are live. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company offers you the opportunity to place a romance ad, pick out or pitch a car or find a great Thai restaurant in Phoenix.
http://www.newscom.com/ You'll need a log-on to tap all the features of this news story and photo delivery service, and it happens that some content providers will pick up the charges so you can do just that. Start with the PR Newswire link for a peek at the photo thumbnails and captions. You also can sign up for low- or no-cost access to other "commercial" photos on the site. New service descriptions were being posted as we went to press.
http://www.sii.com/AdTaker/index.HTML The gem on SII's site is the on-line AdTaker "proof of concept" tucked into the section devoted to the Professional Services Division. You can critique the product while it's still moldable. AdTaker will allow anyone with an Internet browser to submit and cost classified ads, and will be part of SII's Classified Gateway line. A late-model Navigator or Explorer browser is a must to run the Java applets.
Downloadable software
http://www.astrobyte.com/BeyondPress/BeyondPressEval.HTML For Quark XPress and HTML fans, Astrobyte's BeyondPress converter is available for a 30-day evaluation. The $595 package arrives in 1 megabyte, which gives basic operations plus lots of "demo" words obstructing text. (It should be noted that The Cole Papers is converted from XPress to HTML every month using this Denver-based company's XTension.) This will be a nice side-by-side comparison for those of you who wonder whether a web site needs Quark Immedia (see below).
http://www.mindspring.com/~jjcs/Rules.HTML Besides large packages for Atex and SII integration with Macs, Jjcs of Decatur, Ga., writes Quark XTensions. Give a test drive to a "read only" version of Expressway Rules, which allows you to draw rules embedded in text, as most front-ends do. While XPress has rules above and below paragraphs, they're a bear to adapt when you need free-floating rules, both horizontal and vertical, that stay with a spot of text as you add and delete copy.
http://www.quark.com/qim001.htm Download the Immedia Viewer and you'll be able to give sample projects a test drive. Well, that's true for everyone except America Online and CompuServe users. You can't use Immedia Viewer if you have accessed a web site via AOL or CompuServe because these services rely on a single Internet Protocol (IP) address that is shared by their users. To use Immedia Viewer, you need a unique IP address. Let's see, how many potential customers does that exclude? If you are blessed with a unique IP address, you can see firsthand how the proprietary client works on Immedia sample projects, some created by customers. By the way, don't think "newspaper," think "competition," since Denver's Quark is targeting multimedia marketing and merchandising, not publishing, in its latest development partnership with Oracle.
http://nscs.fast.net/newlay.HTML Nazareth, Pa.-based SCS will introduce Internet/intranet features in its mid-1997 version of Layout 8000, said Kurt Jackson, director of operations and development. To gather reaction, SCS offers a one-screen peek and a downloadable demo.
http://www.sii.com/ In SII's Overview of Products, there's a downloadable FaxAction demo. Once it's on your machine, you may contact Jon Henry, customer marketing representative, for a password. The demo is "a scaled-down version of the (FaxAction) client with it own little database built in," he said. "You can call up simulated faxes, edit the text, re-parse the OCR, insert markup, and do account searches." All this is packed into 2.5 megabytes.
http://www.sysdeco.com/mimer.HTML The site run by Oslo, Norway-based Sysdeco claims, "The Mimer/SQL database engine is a fast, robust, low price database handler providing high performance targeted in client/server environments performing for mission critical products or services. NT operators may try it free. Download Mimer/SQL trial for Windows NT!" Hmmm. Let us know how it stands up and what all that means.
Overviews and samples
http://www.advpubtech.com/demos.HTML APT links you to three customers who are using Internet capability of ACT Classified Advertising to publish classified ads. The Burbank, Calif., company said the system "will automatically generate your classified pages for publication on the World Wide Web, with customized graphics and layout." You also can download movie demos, for Windows 3.1 or 95, for ACT Editorial (865 kilobytes), ACT Classified (1068 kilobytes) or ACT Pagination (722 kilobytes). If you'd like a one-stop manufacturer's brochure rack, stop by this site. (If you are on a 14.4-kps modem, you can get a cup of coffee while it builds.)
http://www.digital-ink.co.uk/ United Kingdom-based Digital Ink (Solutions) has created a web site for printers and pre-press companies wishing to find suppliers and industry-specific information on the Internet. The site covers such areas as scanners, trade shows and print colleges. Links at the site jump not to a manufacturer's home page but to pages dealing with the requested product, saving time searching through large sites for desired pages. There are more than 600 links to industry related sites in the United States, Europe, Australia and the Far East. Digital Ink (Solutions) Ltd., a technical and creative consultancy, was formed in August by Andy Houldsworth, formerly sales director of Monotype Systems Ltd.
http://www.tmstv.com/krt/96/main.htm This is the latest repackaging of the Chicago-based news giant's multimedia wares, this time for populating on-line services. This site is a newsletter of KRT's activities, with budgets and samples of stories, photos, animations and graphics. They'll be retrievable from PressLink Online (http://www.presslink.com/).
http://www.lmtribune.com/TS/nep3.htm Billed as "NewsView Solutions Online Demo for NewsView Connections," this page (published by Tribune Solutions, the Salt Lake City partner of Dayton, Ohio's Lexis-Nexis) features a screen-by-screen look at the Connections web-forwarding program. While there's no action, the pictures hint at the on-line formats, range of functions and reports you could expect.
http://www.pantheoninc.com/ This Seattle maker of web conversion and management tools offers a snapshot view of the complexities of its shovelware product, Builder 2.0, plus links to customer sites built with the product.
Advanced Publishing Technologies, -- Marion J. Love From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved. |
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