InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
December 8, 1997
Folio Adds To SiteDirector
Upgrade customizes search results
The latest release adds features previously available only in LAN-based versions of Folio's software, such as tight controls for customizing the display of search results. Several companies that use Folio's products internally are adding siteDirector to sell access to their private repositories on the Web.
"Newspapers are realizing there's revenue in them there archives," says Glenn Cruickshank, director of Tribune Solutions, a unit of Salt Lake City newspaper publisher Kearns-Tribune. Two of the company's newspapers use siteDirector to sell access to their archives, which are stored in Folio's infobase file format.
Infobase files store text, word processor documents, and multimedia data in a highly
compressed format that includes a full index of the file's contents. The siteDirector server instantly converts infobase files to HTML format when a browser requests a Web page. SiteDirector's search engine lets users search all the text in a multi-gigabyte infobase file in less than a second. SiteDirector 4.1 adds natural language searching, relevancy ranking, and fast searches of phrases or words in close proximity.
The upgrade also lets users customize how search results are displayed. For instance, doctors can set the system to sort results by medical journal and author. Users can also command the product to retrieve content by paragraph, document, book, or whatever they prefer. The upgrade also converts tables in native documents such as spreadsheets to HTML tables.
Publisher InfoMaster Inc. in Boulder, Colo., uses siteDirector to sell Web-based access to reference books used in banks. The company has grown from selling one CD-ROM product three years ago to offering a half-million-page online
library today.
"To be able to convert our infobases to HTML instantly is incredible," says Timothy Schiewe, president of InfoMaster. "We're nothing more than a big bookstore."
SiteDirector 4.1 for Windows NT 4.0 ships at the end of this month. Pricing starts at $4,995.
pen Market Inc.'s Folio division this week will unveil an upgrade to its siteDirector software for publishing document repositories on the Web.
