Phil Green
I stopped by the Inmagic booth to chat with CTO Phil Green, who was fairly bubbling about the latest product developments. Earlier that day, he had presented a case study with one of their customers, the Human Resources Professionals Association – From OPAC to SOPAC (Part II): Taking the Social Library from Theory to Successful Reality. Unfortunately I didn’t get to hear it, but Green did show me around the HRPA site, which is using the new “app,” AssociatioNet, a Presto application designed specifically for the association industry.
AssociatioNet creates virtual environments that bring together content, people, and tools for information access and discovery. The new Resource Centre interface allows members to search HRPA resources, as well as tap into outside search engines, through one easy-to-navigate portal. It offers access to content collections, such as articles, white papers, policies, forms, as well as news updates and links to relevant external content. The AssociatioNet app also includes forums, blogs, content tagging and rating, integration with CMS, and end-user authentication.
Green says the company is moving to an applications focus. (It has already offered an open API with Presto.) Also brand new is another application called IdeaNet, which provides an innovative community for posting and voting on ideas. Expect to see more app announcements from them.
In addition, the company will be shipping the next version of Presto sometime in April, version 3.7. It will add “network crawling” capability (such as indexing a collection of PDFs on a company network). Also new in this version will be metadata extraction and different processing pipelines for different kinds of content. “We’re making it very extensible,” says Green. Finally, Inmagic has added EBSCOhost as one of Presto’s federated search results—furthering the integration of internal and external content. These new developments should be welcome news for Presto’s growing customer base and potential new clients among knowledge-driven organizations.
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