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The folks at Percussion believe the mid-market is unique in its content management needs and that simply downsizing enterprise offerings doesn't cut it. With the release of its Rhythmyx 5.5 product last month, Woburn, Mass.-based Percussion is trying to offer a content management product that strikes a balance between out-of-the-box functionality and customization.

Today's market for content management consists of the large stack vendors like Microsoft and IBM, which target the high-end customers. Low-end applications for simple Web content management (WCM) tasks and intranets abound. The mid-tier seems to consist of everyone else.

Percussion, for its part, believes the mid-market is defined by its buying habits, not the size of the organization, said Susan Challenger, Percussion's VP of marketing. The IT purchasing decisions in the mid-market is driven by its line-of-business needs.

"Mid-market organizations have a heterogenous IT environment and it's one they really embrace," Challenger told Intranet Journal. They also value a standards-based approach because they have to integrate all of the pieces of that heterogenous environment.

Yet mid-market organizations don't expect to give up any of the functionality that large enterprises get in their IT products. "When it comes to enterprise software, mid-market organizations follow the lead of their big brothers in the global 2000," Challenger said.

Enterprise content management among the high-end vendors has been focused on consolidation and building products that encompass WCM, document management (DM), digital asset management (DAM), and collaboration applications. The low end is about point solutions that solve very specific problems. While the high-end wants to own the computing stack and deliver core functionality, mid-tier customers want a product suite.

"The mid-tier is looking for something that allows you to roll out applications out of the box," said Vern Imrich, Percussion's CTO. "There are a couple of things you have to do and do well."

For Percussion, those couple of things are WCM and DM. Rhythmyx has always been a WCM-centric application, and with 5.0 the company added document management. Many of the most significant enhancements to Rhythmyx 5.5 center around DM.

Percussion has always had a strong background in XML, but in 5.5 the document management capabilities reach back to users' desktops, where most of the day-to-day content resides, and works with file formats. Rhythmyx 5.5 includes a Text Extraction capability that can take text and meta data from more than 200 file types and allow it to be re-used in documents published via HTML, XML, PDF, or just about any other format.

Out of the box, Rhythmyx 5.5 does not target strategic document production for documents like FDA records or complicated tech manuals. Nor does its main focus lie with document imaging. Instead, Imrich said Percussion is targeting so-called "tactical documents" like HR and marketing materials.

For these documents, Percussion believes the process is much more collaborative. These document also directly support business processes. Rhythmyx 5.5 focuses on these collaborative desktop documents, like meeting minutes and run-of-the-mill Office documents, because companies need to control the sharing and lifecycle of these documents now more than ever.

Document publishing features in Rhythmyx 5.5 help users pull content from where it was generated to new places on the Web, a portal, or wherever it's needed. Users can create customizable "executive dashboards" that show documents relevant to their work.

Also new in Rhythmyx 5.5 is the search functionality. Percussion now incorporates Convera's powerful RetrievalWare search product, which allows for concept searching, not just keywords, and can search across multiple repositories.

WebDAV support lets users contribute content from the desktop authoring tools they've always used, such as Word, Excel, PhotoShop, and Dreamweaver.

The document management module in Percussion's Rhythmyx 5.5 provides collaborative sharing for documents and digital assets through portal environments.