InformationWeek

Office Application Adds Internet Links

By Karen M. Carrillo

ord-processing applications have a new competitor in town. Trellix Corp. last week introduced Trellix 1.0, an office application that lets users create presentations and detailed information by adding Internet links and graphics within their documents.

"Guided tours" let readers navigate specific pages and links in a document. "People are inundated with things to read," says Dan Bricklin, founder and chief technology officer of Trellix, in Waltham, Mass. "Trellix lets you provide summaries to make documents easier to read."

Using the Contents Map, a visual map of the document, users can "visually organize" their ideas, Bricklin says. Other features include drag-and-drop interaction with other office applications, and ActiveX and OLE automation support.

Testers see many potential uses for Trellix. "We build very complicated Web sites and were looking for a product on an ease-of-use level with Microsoft Word," says Bill Freeland, director of the integrated media lab at R.R. Donnelley Financial, a division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. in Hudson, Mass. "This makes for faster content on the Web." The company used Trellix to create human resources documents for its intranet.

"This is a very significant development. It creates a whole new category of electronic document authoring," says Josh Bernoff, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

JJ Jones, a technical writer at the Learning Technology Group, a division of Simon & Shuster in Cambridge, Mass., likes Trellix's ease of use and navigational features. "The map keeps track of what you're doing and where it is," she says. "It's easy to revise, connect, and disconnect documents."

Trellix 1.0 is scheduled to ship in the fall and will be priced between $99 and $149.

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