Publish or be damned

Pro

1 April 2005

One of the widely mooted benefits of information technology to small business is that it equips firms with the ability to interact more quickly and efficiently with customers and suppliers. It is thought that the ever-increasing adoption of Internet technologies such as extranets and intranets will completely re-work and revolutionise industry supply chains, providing the smaller trading partner with opportunities to cut costs while playing an even more active role in them. Investment in a Web-based and dynamic content management system or CMS is seen as a very effective way for small companies with limited IT resources to publish online content — purchase orders, statements and invoices, product catalogues and prices — and allow suppliers and customers secure, password-protected access to this information from within their Web browsers.

Arconics offers a software product called PublishPort which allows non-technical business users to publish information to a company Website, intranet or extranet and structure that content in the manner in which they prefer. They can do so in a user-friendly ‘drag and drop’ environment with the help of a text editor and image uploader built-in. Based on XML and Java technologies, PublishPort produces dynamic Web pages drawn from a database and is currently being used by the Irish Examiner to allow its journalists to publish daily news stories to the Web. The CMS is also being used by the Spar supermarket group in the UK to upload product categories to its customer extranet, while at the company headquarters in Grannard, Waterford, staff at Dawn Foods post product information on to the company’s Intranet. Dennis English, chief executive of Arconics says that PublishPort can cost as little as EUR5000 if the content is only posted by one user, with a 5 user licence pack costing EUR15,000 with a Eur3000 for technical support and minor system upgrades as an additional charge.

Arconics: +353 (0)1-8093459