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After more than a decade in the business, 1,000 customers, and 3,500 implementations, RedDot is taking its experience in Web content management and bringing it inside the office to power document management and collaboration.

While other companies in the content management space have set about adding document management, records management, collaboration, and Web content management through acquisistions (such as Vignette did last week), RedDot has focused on managing Web content with easy-to-use, Microsoft-based content management solutions. Until this week, when the company unveiled its Extended Content Management Suite (XCMS).

"We're extending beyond our core business of Web content management," Kevin Kohn, vice president of marketing for RedDot, told Intranet Journal. XCMS is focused on mid-market organizations because, Kohn said, RedDot felt most of the enterprise content management products to date have left behind smaller organizations or departments with the same content management needs as enterprises.

According to Kohn, XCMS is the end result of discussions RedDot has had with its customers about their content management needs. RedDot had been helping its customers manage an increasing amount of Web content over the years, and found customers are now overwhelmed with the shear amount of content they are managing that's not necessarily headed for a public Web site or intranet.

RedDot's Content Collaboration Server "Webtop," launched within an Outlook client, personalized for the individual user. Users have the full capabilities of the Webtop, including personal documents, work tasks, a list of business process the user is authorized to launch, and related news on topics of interest to that user or based on project teams.

The opportunity to build a product that harnessed business content existed. But it had to be an out-of-the-box, Microsoft-based solution because RedDot's existing customers didn't want to devote significant IT resources to such a project.

"What we find is customers need solutions they can get up and running without technical knowledge," Kohn said. The new suite of products is easy to manage, easy to support, and is ready to be used out of box.

RedDot's suite is browser-based, and needs no client-side software beyond a Web browser. The RedDot Content Collaboration Server (CCS), the new addition to the RedDot family that enables the document management, project collaboration, and business process workflow within XCMS, can integrate its client within Outlook's folder tree or as a Webtop workspace for individual users (see image above). CSS includes full indexing and search capabilities. Users store documents within a folder structure and can assign meta data and authorizations to each document.

Publishing documents from the CCS to the Web or an intranet is done with RedDot's Content Management Server (CMS), which has been updated to version 5.5 for the XCMS. As in past versions, CMS handles the creation, review, and management of Web content. New in version 5.5 is Microsoft Office integration, increased navigation support, expanded navigation support, and expanded digital asset management capabilities.

XCMS delivers the core functionality of the Webtop to a personalized view within a corporate intranet. Users access work tasks, see related news based on topics of interest, and data from integrated backend systems, all delivered within the branding of the corporate intranet

The RedDot Content Personalization Server (CPS) supports user-specific delivery of content and is based on Java and XML/XSL. New for the XCMS is version 2.0 of the Content Personalization Server. It includes wider support and use of Web services, a new GUI, and performance enhancements.

RedDot's Content Integration Server (CIS) is a Java-based framework for integrating back-end applications with Web sites. The CIS Application Portal integrates content management, business data and processes in one interface. It is now in version 2.0 for the XCMS. The new release includes single sing-on authetication, expanded APIs, and enhanced support for portal infrastructures.

As a modular suite, the pricing for RedDot's XCMS depends on which products you need. The Content Management Server runs $60,000, as does the Content Collaboration server for 50 concurrent CCS users. Adding on the Content Integration Server or Content Personalization Server, which carry server-based pricing, costs $40,000 for each.

Information created within RedDot's Content Collaboration Server that was then, as part of a workflow process, automatically sent to the RedDot Content Management Server for publishing to the corporate intranet.