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To: Edward Hardaway who wrote (5038)	6/26/1998 5:09:00 PM
From: Urlman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8581

Inso makes its digital mark in the Web-top publishing revolution South China Morning Post June 23, 1998 DANYLL WILLS Two things since the invention of the printing press have radically changed the face of modern publishing: the Macintosh desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s and the World-Wide Web of the 1990s. The desktop publishing revolution is well documented because it mainly concerns three companies - Apple for its Macintosh and user interface, Adobe for its PostScript printer language and Canon for its laser-printer engine. The Web revolution is a little different. Although many companies and people are involved in the creation of Web-top publishing - even some familiar names such as Apple and Adobe - it is a revolution of a radically different kind. There are many new players and, because the distribution system is open to all, almost anybody can play. One company creating a significant presence in this area is Inso, which makes sophisticated digital publishing software for Internet, intranet and multi -media publishing. Inso was the creation of the publishing giant Houghton Mifflin in 1982 when it wanted a software division. The division was finally spun off in 1994, with Steven Vana-Praxhia continuing to run the company as its president and chief executive. Mr Vana-Praxhia said the move from traditional publishing ideas to Web-centric or digitally based publishing had not been easy for all to grasp. Digital publishing, whether Web-based or CD-Rom-based, is fundamentally different. Unlike printed texts, which are generally read from beginning to end, readers of digital documents can easily jump to sections that are of immediate interest or concern to them. This is particularly true of manuals or any large documentation project. "Most Fortune 500 companies have an average of 15,000 Web pages" either on the public Internet or on their private intranet, Mr Vana-Praxhia said. Many pages were duplicates, and controlling them was an organisational nightmare. Inso had the tools to make it all manageable. Among the tools Inso creates are DynaText, DynaBase, QuickView Plus and HTML Export. All are publishing tools based around the DynaWeb technology, a creation of Inso. Inso's technology is based on the most important markup language standards for the Web, including SGML (standard generalised markup language), HTML (hyper -text markup language) and XML (extended markup language). The files it creates can be used for virtually any form of publishing. Although it seemed many of its products could be in competition with Adobe or even Oracle, Mr Vana-Praxhia said this was not the case. "Adobe is interested in authoring. We look at the world as objects; Adobe looks at the world as pages," he said. As for Oracle, Mr Vana-Praxhia said he hoped people would view Inso products as complementing Oracle's. Inso was not in the database business, he said. Of the many examples of successful implementations of Inso, Mr Vana-Praxhia pointed to companies such as Sun Microsystems, Novell, Sybase and the helicopter company, Sikorsky. He said the Sikorsky project was interesting because it had immediate financial benefits that were quite visible to the company's executives. "The pay-back period was six months - an extraordinarily fast time in this business," he said. The firm went from a paper-based diagnostic system to one driven by electronics and Inso software. In the past, a helicopter experiencing difficulties would be brought to a service centre and examined for a long time until the problem was found. Then the manuals would be brought out and the search for a solution would begin. With the digitally based system, the entire process was controlled and repairs were made quicker. "Sikorsky told us that they now have a 70 per cent reduction in repair time," Mr Vana-Praxhia said. "They can now even keep detailed service records that can be accessed whenever they want." *With technologies such as Java chips being put into cars and other devices, it will not be long before machines will be able to warn users of problems before they happen.* In a few months, we may see the results of Inso software in Hong Kong. The largest local publisher, the Housing Authority, soon will be implementing a digital solution based on Inso products.