New Interwoven Apps Target Portal, Workflow Deployments

Interwoven

The company is billing the two content applications, along with a third for managing code that will be available in the third quarter, as the first set of applications to be built on top of what it is now calling the Interwoven 5 Platform.

"This is a platform, which means we won't be building all the applications," said Kevin Cochrane, vice president of product management at Interwoven. "We have introduced the first set of applications."

The platform includes Interwoven's TeamSite content management software, along with its MetaTagger application for automatically tagging files and creating content topologies, and its OpenDeploy content distribution software.

Cochrane said the applications will make it quicker and easier for integrators to extend the use of Interwoven's content management software in the enterprise and less costly to expand its capabilities to contributors to business users.

The first application, TeamPortal, uses Web services to tie TeamSite content servers to portals to enable users to browse, edit, manage and search content. "We're not a portal company," Cochrane said. "We're not trying to be your enterprise portal. We actually aid and abet your IBM, BEA or other enterprise portals."

While the growing portal market is clearly important for content management software vendors such as Interwoven, the second application, TeamDoc, targets another potential growth area -- namely, workgroup collaboration and document management software.

The application, priced at $50,000 for the first 25 users, is designed as an out-of-the-box solution that gives business users the ability to browse, tag and route documents through a collaborative workflow process. "It's a low-cost system for implementing lower-cost document management than you have today," he said.

While Cochrane insisted that the application was targeted at a new set of requirements in the enterprise than more complex document management solutions from vendors such as Documentum and Stellent, which also recently released an ad hock workflow application, others were not so sure.

"It's their answer to the market. Interwoven has carved out a leading position in what we see as the enterprise content management space, but document management is a different space," said John Hitchcock, vice president of marketing and alliances for eFORCE Global, an integrator and Interwoven partner in Hayward, Calif. "The doc-to-Web offering is going to give them a broader footprint in terms of an integrated product offering."

Mike Maziarka, a Cap Venture analyst, agreed, saying that development of the TeamDoc application is a recognition that content is more than just Web content. "And really what TeamDoc does is position [Interwoven better against Documentum and Stellent," he said.