Percussion Software Introduces Rhythmyx 5.7, Newest Version of Award-Winning Enterprise Content Management System

WOBURN, MA – November 7, 2005 – Percussion Software, a leading developer of practical software solutions enabling customers to maximize the value and quality of enterprise content, today introduced Rhythmyx™ 5.7, the newest version of its award-winning Enterprise Content Management System (ECM). Rhythmyx 5.7 enhances Percussion's leadership position in the Web Content Management (WCM) market by providing new content creation/editing and analysis tools that are particularly important to organizations deploying large multi-site, multi-language Web environments. It features a new cross-platform rich text editor: EditLive! for Java 5.0 from Ephox, which offers extensive content authoring capabilities, international language support and accessibility features for Section 508 compliance. (See separate release on the Percussion-Ephox Partnership.) Rhythmyx 5.7 also adds Content Lifecycle Analysis, a capability that allows Web site managers to track and analyze content as it proceeds through the production lifecycle.

“As customers continue to deploy Rhythmyx in multi-site environments, a critical success factor is widespread user adoption,” said Percussion CEO, Barry Reynolds. “Rhythmyx 5.7 with the Ephox EditLive! editor enables us to speed user adoption by providing richer editing capabilities to more users on their platform of choice. We've also made multi-site environments easier to handle by giving customers the ability to better understand and manage the content process though Content Lifecycle Analysis. With these enhancements, we've made Rhythmyx an even stronger choice for customers with a large, global Web presence.”

New in Rhythmyx 5.7

Rich-Text Editor for Multiple Platforms – The new Rhythmyx rich-text editor, EditLive! for Java 5.0 from Ephox, is certified on all Rhythmyx-supported browsers and platforms, including the Mac platform. In addition to offering extensive content authoring and editing capabilities, EditLive! includes international language support and provides accessibility features for Section 508 compliance. EditLive! for Java features:

• Intuitive, Easy-to-Use Interface – The EditLive! interface provides a user-friendly environment for content contributors of all skill levels. It requires little or no training for contributors to be productive immediately.
• Clean copy and paste from Word, Excel and PowerPoint – Retain original formatting and layout while removing invalid or excess html with a range of filtering options.
• Full Screen Mode – Full Screen Mode enables content contributors to temporarily "pop" out the EditLive! Editor window from the browser to expand their available workspace.
• HTML Forms – EditLive! offers the most comprehensive forms support of any browser-based XHTML editor, providing coverage for everything from text areas to check boxes.
• Source Editing Support – An optional source editing mode enables advanced users to modify XHTML or XML source code as necessary.
• Superior Rhythmyx Integration – The EditLive! interface includes embedded Rhythmyx functionality such as Insert Hyperlinks, Insert Images, Insert CMS Images, Insert In-Line Links and Insert Snippets (as well as the necessary search functionality for these options).
• Additional Capabilities – Other capabilities include spell checking, table and list editing and keyboard shortcuts.
• International Language Support – EditLive! supports all Latin and double-byte character sets. It also provides spell checking dictionaries for the following languages:
  

  English – UK English – US Danish Dutch Finnish French

  German Italian Norwegian Portuguese Spanish Swedish

• Accessibility and Section 508 Compliance – Like Rhythmyx's Content Explorer interface, EditLive! is designed to comply with US Section 508 regulations regarding software accessibility. Its full keyboard accessibility allows users to navigate its interface without a mouse. EditLive! also includes an Accessibility Check feature, which allows contributors to validate the compliance of their XHTML content against the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and against Section 508 standards.
• Platform Support – The EditLive! rich-text editor is certified on all platforms and browsers that Rhythmyx supports including:
  • Netscape, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on the Windows platform
  • Safari on the Mac OS platform

Content Lifecycle Analysis – Rhythmyx 5.7's Content Lifecycle Analysis gives Web site managers access to Microsoft Excel reports that provide a comprehensive view of the content under Rhythmyx management throughout the lifecycle, including content creation, approval, publishing and archiving. It offers Web site managers the necessary metrics to eliminate bottlenecks in the content lifecycle, to add efficiencies to the publishing process, and to make better decisions about optimizing their content production environments. Content Lifecycle Analysis provides the following reports:

• Stale Content: A report of non-public content that has not been modified for at least seven days.
• Content Inventory by Community and Workflow: An inventory of how much content is in each Rhythmyx community by workflow state.
• Content Inventory by Content Type and Workflow: An inventory of how much content is in each workflow state by type of content.
• Publish Status Summary by Community and Content Type: A summary of how much content was published by type of content (provides publishing success/failure results).
• Publish Status Details: A detailed report on which content was successfully published.

All of the above reports include hyperlinks to relevant content in Rhythmyx, allowing Web site managers to directly interact with the content through the Rhythmyx Action Panel. The Rhythmyx Action Panel provides a quick way to correct problems or to simply view further details regarding a specific piece of content. Web site managers can utilize well-known Excel capabilities to manipulate data and produce additional graphs, reports and calculations as needed. They can also export report data from Rhythmyx as XML for integration with alternate analysis tools.