Magnolia 2.0
Magnolia 2.0
Basel (Switzerland), Nov. 15th 2004With today’s release of Magnolia 2.0, a new generation of Open-Source Content Management is entering the highly competitive CMS market. Great usability paired with all advantages of web-based systems and built for the enterprise strength J2EE platform: a combination only Magnolia offers.
As open-source software with the well-known advantages regarding TCO (total cost of ownership), security and expandability, Magnolia is also foremost in adopting new standards. Magnolia accesses content using JSR-170, the "Java Content Repository API". According to industry experts, JSR-170 will bring about major advances in interoperability and investment protection.
Here, Magnolia delivers today what commercial vendors will tomorrow.
Magnolia 2.0 from Obinary is the most progressive open-source J2EE Enterprise content management system today. Magnolia 2.0 offers some outstanding features, even compared to commercially licensed systems.
The developers at Obinary succeeded in transferring well-known desktop software behavior to the web-based user interface. The result is a substantially improved user experience, which for once earns the often-strained description "intuitive". All actions can be performed directly in the web-browser using the right mouse button. Content elements can be moved and sorted using drag & drop.
Thus the use of the system is simplified and faster, and required user training and resulting costs are minimized.
Magnolia 2.0 is first open-source CMS and one the first products at all based on the new JSR-170 standard, which defines the "Java Content Repository API". Communication between "Content Repositories" and applications is standardized and implemented vendor-independently. Content repositories specialize on intelligent content storage, while applications like Magnolia can focus on the management and presentation of content. Content from different applications supporting this standard can be shared easily, managed vendor-neutrally and stored future compatible. Magnolia 2.0 uses the open-source licensed JSR-170-implementation "Jackrabbit" as a content repository, based on version 0.14 of the JSR-170 standard definition.
Magnolia 2.0 has a modular architecture, which offers efficiency and performance and allows easy and precise extensibility. As a J2EE solution, Magnolia 2.0 offers the excellent scalability, availability and performance this technology is known for. Companies like Siemens Enterprise and numerous customers from the pharmaceutical industries are already using Magnolia today.
Magnolia 2.0 has been developed by Obinary, a software and consulting firm located in Basel/Switzerland that also offers commercial support, hosting, training and implementation services for Magnolia. Magnolia 2.0 is available from http://www.magnolia.info/ and can be tested online at http://www.magnolia.info/demo.
Details
Magnolia 2.0 brings functionality to the web that has so far only been available on desktop systems. All actions can be performed directly in the web-browser using the right mouse button. Content elements can be moved or sorted using drag & drop. Thus the use of the system is simplified and faster, and required user training and resulting costs are minimized. Furthermore, no client software installation is necessary. This makes the royalty-free offering even more attractive.
"Magnolia it is so simple to use that we were able to substantially reduce training course expenditure for authors with its introduction. Owing to Magnolia, content is published more timely and more frequently today, thus substantially increasing the value of our Intranet" says Beat Schoepflin, Head IT of Mepha, a Swiss based pharmaceutical company.
Magnolia 2.0 is first open-source CMS and one the first content management systems at all based on JSR-170, the standard that specifies the "Java Content Repository API" (JCR). Magnolia therefore manages content vendor-independently and future compatible. The advantage: content from different systems can be easily combined or copied. The decision for a certain CMS no longer automatically means the decision for a proprietary form of storage of your valuable content, whose production and management often represents 75% of the total cost of ownership for a content management system.
The Java Content Repository standard removes barriers for the migration of content between systems. The substantial investment into the content production is lastingly secured. Since all major manufacturers in the database and CMS market have announced their support for JSR-170, customers will be able to select between the different JSR-170 compatible implementations. This lets customers combine the most suitable content management system with the most suitable repository.
Magnolia 2.0 uses the open-source licensed JSR-170-implementation "Jackrabbit" as a content repository, based on the JSR-170 standard definition version 0.14.
Magnolia 2.0 is a completely new development, utilizing state-of-the-art software design principles and sporting a modular architecture. "We have built a system that initially offers a slim and efficient core which is transparent and expandable. Many competing systems contain hard to resolve structural problems and suffer from their legacy, something we were able to avoid due to our extensive industry experience", says Boris Kraft, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of obinary. Apart from its inner values, Magnolia offers content
editors an easy to understand user interface, thus lowering the barrier of entry for those with limited technical knowledge. While Magnolia focuses on the essential and thus substantially simplifies using a CMS, modules delivering additional functionality can be added at any time. Even custom-developed modules can be integrated without touching the system's core or risking update compatibility.
Magnolia 2.0 impresses with its combination of advantages. Daniel Hinderink, responsible for marketing and innovation of TYPO3, a hugely successful content management system based on PHP, is convinced: "Magnolia meets all conditions to be just as successful in the J2EE area as TYPO3 is in the PHP area".
As a J2EE solution Magnolia 2.0 offers enterprises running business-critical and performance demanding applications big advantages compared to PHP-solutions often implemented today. Magnolia meets common enterprise requirements like availability, performance and scalability through built-in clustering and an intelligent cache. Magnolia's optimized high-performance cache stores compressed pages. Magnolia therefore delivers pages more than twice as fast as a typical web server, which compresses a page for each request.
But even J2EE-newbies will find deploying Magnolia trouble-free. Magnolia is distributed as a self-contained, self-extracting installer package. A J2EE application server and Jackrabbit (v.0.14), the open-source implementation of the JSR-170 standard, supplement Magnolia 2.0 to be a complete package, which can easily be installed within 10 minutes on all major operating systems.
Magnolia 2.0 has been developed by Obinary, based in Basel/Switzerland. Obinary has been consulting enterprises and developing software for more than 11 years. Obinary is specializing in communication efficiency and technology control for Internet and Intranet projects. Obinary very early realized the importance of the JSR-170 standard, resulting in Magnolia’s significant technological lead. Obinary plans to extend its lead and is already working on document management extensions, workflow and electronic forms to complete the Magnolia offering. Obinary offers commercial support, hosting, training and implementation services for Magnolia.
Magnolia is on its way to become a complete enterprise CMS under an open-source license. With more than 40'000 downloads since its initial publication 12 months ago, it has become clear that a serious alternative on the overcrowded CMS market has worldwide appeal. Companies like Siemens Enterprise are already using Magnolia today. But not only large enterprises turn to Magnolia. The renowned design agency Tomato or the number one web application security portal OWASP.org demonstrate that there is a broad range of possible Magnolia implementations.
Magnolia 2.0 is available immediately and free-of-charge at http://www.magnolia.info/. An online demonstration can be found at http://www.magnolia.info/demo.
About obinary ltd.:
obinary is the developer of the "obinary compass", the premier enterprise-solution for process-oriented knowledge-management; and Magnolia, the first Content Management System (CMS), which is built from scratch to support JSR-170, the Java Content Repository standard (JCR). Obinary specializes in communication efficiency and technology control. Obinary has been developing software and consulting enterprises of any size since 1993.
obinary ag
Boris Kraft
Binningerstrasse 15
CH- 4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel +41 61 228 9000
Fax +41 61 228 9001
info@obinary.com
www.obinary.com
