Most companies dealing with products will have at least one system designed to deal with product information. This will typically be part of an Enterprise Resourse Planning system where product information is needed for manufacturing planning, inventory control, distribution planning, sales order pocessing and sometimes procurement.

Unfortunately, the product information stored by these systems is generally limited to that required by the processing and information provision functions of those systems. Product based organisations need to make more general information about products available internally or externally in a structured and controlled way. The sort of information which needs to be managed includes:-

• Extended product descriptions, for use in brochures and e-commerce sites
• Product pictures and diagrams. In multiple resolutions and sizes for different purposes
• Product Data Sheets
• Dimensions and weights
• Control of Substances Harmful to Health (COSH) Sheets
• Instruction notes
• Buyers notes
• Buying contracts
• Warranty information
• Technical notes and CAD drawings
• Brochures
• Video or audio promotional or instructional material

At Edeptive we have extended the functionality of our Digital Asset Management system (DAM) to support Product Information Management (PIM). This is a set of capabilities which enable product companies to store all 'supplemantary' product information in a single system. The Edeptive DAM will then act as a repository for all product information other than the pure operational information used by the ERP systems.

Access to this product information may be controlled by defining user rights, using the powerful browsing and search capabilities user will be able easily to find and download the information they need.

The Edeptive DAM will provide up-to-date product information to e-commerce sites and feeds out to layout programs such as Quark for the generation of paper catalogues. The whol system is Web Service based, so any system would be able to 'request' information from it. So for example a system supporting a telesales operation could request a product image and base information and display this to the operator and also make available the datasheet for the product to email out to a potential customer.

Product data is increasingly shared between trading partners both directly and through product data exchange initiatives. The Edeptive DAM could provide an excellent platform for supporting these product data sharing initiatives.

We believe that this innovative approach could drastically improve the efficiency of product marketing and could virtually eliminate the risk of incorrect product information being provided to customers.

We've just added a "dashboard" to our content management system, allowing users to get a quick overview of what they have been working on, what's new on their site, what still needs to be done, who is currently using their site, etc.

For those customers with lots of editors and contributors this makes it possible to tell at a glance the current state of the site.

Screenshots to follow (when I've made it prettier!)

We're building a travel related site which will incorporate reviews of certain destinations and services. To this end we have now added a review module which allows reviews of any type of content in our system. Reviews often include ratings (overall, how good was the service, value for money, etc) so our module allows a site to create any number of rating "types" which users can then fill in as part of a review, or separately.

Reviews and ratings can be retrieved for a given content item but the review module can also be used to return items (from any module) ranked by rating (i.e. highest rated items first). This means the functionality is fully extensible - any modules added in future can also have reviews and/or be rated.

We'll provide more detail once the travel related site goes live.

Just improved our "blocks" system by making it possible for the settings in a block on section X to apply to all sub-sections of X. Or not - the choice is yours. The makes it possible to use a block for a sub-menu. The styling system has also been improved - you can now create any number of XSL files and use them for styling the content in (most) widgets.

We also added a couple more widgets for use in our blocks

• display content from another edeptive-powered website
• display content from another web page

The first allows you to drill down in the structure on another edeptive-powered site, choose a section, how many items of content you want, how to display them, etc. Obviously this is really only useful to customers who have more than one site but for them it is invaluable.

The second allows you to enter a full URL for a web page somewhere out there. The widget requests that page, extracts the bit inside the body tag and puts that onto your page. Or you can use an HTML snippet (i.e. no head tag, etc - just a bit of HTML) so you can reuse ad-hoc HTML (and client-side scripts) easily.

XML is extremely useful in a wide variety of applications but using it can be a bit slow when a browser has to deal with a lot of it. The JSON format gets around this by being both smaller and in a format directly usable by JavaScript in a browser. So we have duplicated many of our webservice methods to offer JSON as an alternative format for the returned content. We're already using it ourselves on one of the Umbro sites to improve the response time of a complicated page, and reduce the overhead on the server (because only data requested by the user has to be fetched, rather than everything they might need). If you are interested in using our API please contact us for details.

After considerable research into what our customers would like, a fair amount of hard programming, and several mugs of coffee, our DAM is about to undergo user testing. After which we will plug the holes they have poked in it, refill it from a fresh river of images and files, and then unleash its awesome power on an unsuspecting world! And you thought all we did was write a content management system.

For those still in the dark, DAM stands for Digital Asset Management. This has nothing to do with fingers and everything to do with files. Any files - word processor documents, print-quality images, spreadsheets, thumbnails, PDFs, ZIPped anything, you have it the DAM can store it. More importantly, it can make all of these files accessible to other people, complete with access rights, validity dates, versioning, usage tracking, and anything else useful we can think of.

edeptive™ DAM will be available in several versions, either integrated with edeptive™ CMS, or as a stand-alone system for managing the assets within your organisation. More details to follow - watch this space!

Yes, that's right, we now have a form creation module in R4. We've long had the ability to store data from an HTML form, and to e-mail it (as text, CSV attachment or XML attachment) to multiple recipients. Now we also have a form editor, allowing users to build forms, just as with any other content type, no HTML knowledge required.

P.S. The title is a joke, we're not calling it Formzr, ok?

Traditionally a new (print) journal would begin with a statement of purpose - what do we intend to use this for? Blogs are tricky though; you can start with one aim and end up covering anything and everything which grabs the attention of the blog writer(s). With that in mind, I declare that this blog will be about the edeptive content management system, especially new ideas we are working on. But don't be surprised if we mention toy helicopters.

We are, naturally, writing this blog using our own software. After all, a blog is just a very simple CMS, right? But edeptive isn't a very simple CMS, it's incredibly flexible and functional. Which means we need to play around with various ideas as to how best to present 'blog' pages so they make sense to the millions who visit and create other blogs. In other words, expect the format to change while we work out what we're doing.