IBM announced version 8 of its Content Manager software Monday at the IBM Software Symposium in Vienna, Austria, promising support for virtually all content types, as well as open standards and performance improvements.
This new version of Content Manager will be able to integrate and manage content from multiple data sources–including scanned images, audio and video–as well as to provide access to information from other applications and databases. IBM calls this multiple data-source access, “federated data management.”
Version 8 also adds support for the MPEG-4 standard for streaming media and enhances support for XML through new query capability based on the XPath Query Language.
Content Manager takes advantage of the Self Managing and Resource Tuning (SMART) feature in IBMs DB2 database to improve search performance, and it adds more centralized management capabilities through LDAP integration and new Java-based administrative tools. IBM officials claim search performance will be improved by 25 percent and application development speedy by 30 percent in version 8. Search will also be more detailed in this release, officials said.
This version also adds single sign-on capability, requiring only one sign-on for access to the various sources of information that Content Manager can access.
Content Manager 8 is in beta now and will be generally available by September. Pricing is $24,000 per processor and $2,000 per concurrent user.