Percussion Software Introduces Rhythmyx 6.5 Featuring Enhanced Active Assembly Interface

WOBURN, MA — April 17, 2007 — Percussion Software, a leading developer of Web Content Management (WCM) software for multi-channel, customer-centric applications, today introduced Rhythmyx™ 6.5, the newest version of its award-winning WCM solution. Rhythmyx 6.5 extends Percussion’s leadership in the WCM market by providing sales, marketing and business professionals with a Web Content Management solution specially designed for managing their customer-centric content on the Web. The new release includes a number of dramatic new enhancements to Rhythmyx’s powerful Active Assembly user interface, all designed to make it easier than ever for sales, marketing and other business professionals to create, maintain and manage their content.

Rhythmyx's newly-enhanced Active Assembly interface provides a straightforward, drag-and-drop interface that enables users to create pages, arrange and change page layout and content for specific audiences; embed images; place inline links to related content and sites; and directly edit any content in the context of specific Web pages – all within a live WYSIWYG Web page environment.

“Today’s enterprises are achieving measurable, top-line growth by investing in Web Content Management (WCM) solutions that increase the value of their customer-centric content,” said Percussion CEO Barry Reynolds. “Organizations that rely on Rhythmyx 6.5 gain a competitive edge with the ability to consistently deliver compelling content in a dynamic, constantly-changing world. By helping to deliver frequently-updated information to audiences across multiple channels, Rhythmyx 6.5 helps our customers to extend their marketing reach, encourage self-service and better engage with their customers.”

New in Rhythmyx 6.5

The new Active Assembly taps the power of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript) to deliver more immediate control over page elements. Users can easily control content, layout and formatting without giving up any of the powerful underlying functionality of Rhythmyx’s unique Active Assembly. They can also make split-second content presentation decisions without requiring template changes or other assistance from IT. Rhythmyx 6.5 also makes it easier to contribute content to multiple channels, with a variety of types of straightforward, familiar interfaces that allow you to quickly author, edit and approve content. In addition, enterprises can leverage content from every corner of their organization, using a forms-based authoring approach for direct contribution of data and other needed content from anywhere in the organization – not just from frequent Rhythmyx content authors.

New enhancements to Rhythmyx’s powerful Active Assembly user interface in release 6.5 include:

• Dynamic Page View of screen components allowing content contributors to immediately observe updates and preview how content will look once published;
• Ease of identification for editable content: slots and snippets are delineated and other editable areas of content highlight upon mouse over;
• There’s a new template picker that allows users to preview a template before choosing one for a content item;
• Drag and drop capability, which allows the user to move content within and across slots on a page;
• Content is immediately updated to reflect a change;
• Also included is an Outline View which is an exact hierarchical representation of the Page View, only in table form – content contributors can use the Table View or the Page View to make changes and additions to content; and,
• A new search and browse that utilizes familiar Windows-like features such as a browse-to-folder option for both site folders and folders that reside outside the site folder structure. The same powerful search of previous releases remains but has its own tab – search options are assigned a tab.

Rhythmyx 6.5 is available next month and supports Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux and Sun Solaris platforms.