The updated enterprise personalization software offers an enhanced user interface and long document management capabilities.After an almost 18-month development cycle, Exstream Software Inc. has released a new version of its enterprise personalization software, Dialogue 5.0, with a revamped design interface, new long document management features and expanded PDF options.
Chris Watts, Dialogue product manager at Lexington, Ky.-based, Exstream, said the primary focus in the lengthy development process was configurability, improving compatibility with Microsoft Windows and providing more PDF tools for users.
"The previous version was released in August 2003, and what we wanted to do is go back in and improve the user interface and boost the overall customer communications functionality with this release," Watts said.
Exstream added a Web-based design interface called Dialogue Anywhere for Marketing that enables companies to test rules-based marketing messages over the Internet for possible inclusion into documents at run time, according to the company.
Additionally, Dialogue 5.0 comes with substantive long document control features targeted for users in the insurance, medical, financial and legal arena. "This was one of the major focuses of the development work in this release. The management of long documents has always been one of our strengths, but in the past the capability to view all components of a long document en masse was not available," Watts said.
"For example, if an insurance company was sending out a financial statement to users that included a shareholders letter on top, previously users could not see the entire structure of the document in the design window," Watts said.
With the release of Dialogue 5.0 users can edit multiple sections in long documents at once and are able to view the entire document structure in the design window. Additionally, users can manage all the content as individual components with a rule- based system available for document creators.
"We enhanced the Designer feature to enable complex nesting and rule control over any objects and content in a long document, which also allows for more collaborative control and endless reuse of content," Watts said.
Dialogue 5.0 also includes an IBM Content Manager connector that Watts said was geared toward providing existing IBM Content Manager users the ability to pull content from the IBM content management system and incorporate it into the Dialogue design process.
Other key features of version 5.0 include: an upgraded design interface including the addition of role-based interfaces at the system or group level; expanded PDF security features enabling users to password encrypt PDFs; and new conversion and design tools for QuarkXPress documents.
For the next update, which will have a shorter release cycle than 5.0, Watts said his team is focused primarily on PDF support. "We see PDF as the de facto standard for the industry and that's where our focus will be with the future release."
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