ATG Refurbishes Content Manager, Workflow

Art Technology Group's newly unveiled ATG Publishing 6.1 incorporates stronger publishing and content management features than previous versions and tighter ties with the company's commerce and portal offerings.

While ATG is not pushing Publishing 6.1 as a full-featured stand-alone content manager, the offering will be "all the content management" many customers need, said John Dragoon, senior vice president of marketing at ATG, Cambridge, Mass. "Many people don't need the complexity of Interwoven or Documentum."

When ATG launched the first version of Publishing late last year, the strategy was one of co-existence with existing content management offerings. "The lack of integration with those offerings was our opportunity," Dragoon said.

Publishing 6.1 has a new application workflow engine--part of ATG's Relationship Management product--that promises to help automate repetitive processes with very granular control. The system, for example, can be set up to provide proactive self-service. "It can anticipate a service request and address it in realtime," Dragoon said. "If you buy something and the warranty is to expire in three months, you get a proactive request notifying you in advance of the expiration, and asking you if you want to extend it."

"True [enterprise content management] customers who need meta-tagging and rich media management, content aggregation or syndication will still need Interwoven or Documentum," said Tom McFadyen, president of McFadyen Consulting, a solution provider based in Vienna, Va. "But if you want traditional Web content management--which 75 percent of the people do--ATG Publishing is a good fit, and you can support one platform going forward instead of two."

On the flip side, ATG Publishing can do some things that enterprise content managers cannot, McFadyen said. "[Enterprise content managers] don't handle a commerce site with a catalog with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, but ATG's Publishing allows you to manage that, have version control and manage catalog content. It's also integrated with the portal," he said.

In addition, the software now promises tighter integration with IBM's WebSphere 5.0 application server and with BEA Systems' WebLogic 8.1 and WebLogic 7.0 on Linux.

The alliance with IBM for WebSphere is just the latest sign of changes at ATG, which built its name years ago on providing its own highly functional and proprietary application servers. ATG has since climbed up the software stack to applications, pledging to support all the popular app servers with its portal, publishing and other offerings. IBM WebSphere is now "first among equals" of the app servers supported, Dragoon said.

One solution provider, who requested anonymity, said he understood the need for the alliance but conceded that some might view it as "getting in bed with the enemy."

ATG Publishing starts at $95,000 per server for 10 seats. ATG Portal is $40,000 per CPU. ATG Commerce is $55,000 per CPU, and ATG Relationship Management Platform--including workflow--is $40,000 per CPU.

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