Happy New Year!
Posted by Kate McDonald on Mon, Jan 03, 2011 @ 02:59 PM
Happy 2011! I managed to avoid (once again) having to eat a spoonful of black eyed peas (a New Years tradition in my part of the world that I am not particularly fond of) and am ready to tackle the new year. This year is an exciting one for us at Crowell and I wanted to share some of the highlights of 2010, as well as upcoming events for 2011.
2010
In 2010, we saw the roll-out of our first application and the “birth” of our second. We initially developed DecisionPoint™ (www.s1000ddecision.com) as a means of solving an immediate problem:
How do companies quickly and effectively develop S1000D business rules?
DecisionPoint™
DecisionPoint has since grown to not only take on the task of developing business rules, but creating and managing BREX documents as well. DecisionPoint is the manifestation of what everyone in the S1000D community is realizing: S1000D business rules are “living”, “changing” things. As such, they need to be stored and managed in a manner that allows for easy update and dissemination. Although it will certainly continue to be available for individual purchase, in 2011, DecisionPoint is becoming one part of CapStone™, our new S1000D Productivity Suite…but more on that later.
RocketSled™
In 2010, we also continued developing RocketSled, our full-featured XML editor in MS Word. As our tagline says, RocketSled provides the power of XML, and the ease of Word. Content creators can use the familiar Word environment to create XML documents that are completely conformant to the XML Schema of their choice (future editions will support DTDs as well). RocketSled is the first true XML WYSIWYG editor: What you see on the screen is, indeed, what will print. And, BONUS, you don’t need a costly transformation engine or complicated XSL-FO documents to publish your content! Simply choose a free PDF generator and print to PDF…and you are done!
We debuted RocketSled at the Gilbane Conference in Boston in November of the past year. We have signed up our Beta customers as well as more customers who are ready to buy once RocketSled goes into full production. We have worked long and hard on RocketSled and have accomplished what few thought or believed was possible. We are very, very proud of it and look forward to rolling it out this year. We believe that RocketSled is a game changer in the truest sense of the term and believe that it will not only revolutionize content creation for those familiar with XML, but, because of its competitive cost and ease of use, bring the notion of creating content in XML to those who never would have considered doing so in the past.
Services
Of course we are, at our core, still a services company. We enjoyed many successful projects this year and look forward to even more in 2011. If you have not met us, ask around. We are confident enough in our reputation that we do not employ a sales staff. Instead, we rely on our reputation and word of mouth. We look forward to continuing to serve our existing customers in 2011 and adding new customers to our growing list of references.
2011
As for 2011, we have a lot on our plate.
RocketSled™
RocketSled begins beta testing in the first quarter, with full release in the second. And, I have to admit, we could not be more excited. We will be attending a number of trade shows in order to show off RocketSled, but the quickest way to see it is just to contact us and ask us for a demo. We are more than happy to show it off!
CapStone™ S1000D Productivity Suite
We are developing a new S1000D productivity suite called CapStone™. CapStone represents what we are referring to as the “second generation” of S1000D applications. The first generation of tools were worried about storage and retrieval of documents. While storage and retrieval is indeed important, it frankly, is a fairly trivial challenge in the IT world. In order to make an S1000D environment truly robust and usable, additional features are required. More details to come...
Well, that’s my update for this new year. Here’s to a great year and our combined and continued success!
-- Rick Schochler