InformationWeek

Lee Fife, chief technology officer of Equilinx Inc., a maritime procurement gateway in Arlington, Va., that deals in ship parts and is slated to go live next month, says even vertical marketplaces with specialized users find it time consuming to address each user's needs.

"A lot of our expense and time in getting this site launched initially was handcrafting Web-user inter-faces that integrate with the processes that take place in our exchange," Fife says. "For our first release, we had to do all that by hand. We've been forced to cut a bunch of corners and not do everything that we would like."

For the next version of Equilinx's system, Fife is looking to the Extensible Markup Language and a new software system from ActionPoint Inc., formerly Input Software Inc. Equilinx is testing the ActionPoint Interaction Management System, which the vendor unveiled last week when it changed its name.

The XML-based system lets a company present its online customers with user interfaces that update themselves with new information based on responses, then translate the purchase data via XML so it can be used in legacy systems or in standard enterprise application integration systems, according to ActionPoint.

The Interaction Management System consists of three applications: the ActionPoint Dialog Server, which distributes and manages the users' browsers; the ActionPoint Enterprise Server, which stores and routes user information and provides the links to legacy systems; and InputAccel, which captures print and fax information for translation into electronic systems.