Companies are buying software to remove barriers that inhibit the speedy and accurate exchange of information between themselves and their customers, suppliers and service providers. As the economy improves, this trend will accelerate, and an increasing share of IT budget will be directed toward externally facing supply and demand management solutions, according to the Yankee Group report, Build an Effective Business Case for B2B Integration: Assess TCO and Benefits.

Orbeon is pleased to announce the release of Orbeon Presentation Server and Orbeon Studio as open source software under the LGPL license. The projects are hosted on Sourceforge.net. Presentation Server 2.5.3 (formerly OXF Server), an MVC Framework purpose-built for creating Composite Web applications using XML technologies such as XForms and XSLT. Presentation Server includes a full-fledged XML pipelining engine based around the XPL pipeline definition language.

4D, Inc., publishers of the 4th Dimension RAD/RDBMS environment, 4D Business Kit and 4D WebSTAR Server Suite, today announced it is shipping 4th Dimension 2004, with a new streamlined Design environment, new deployment features that lower its already legendary low cost of ownership, enhanced Web serving capabilities, new XML and Web services technologies, and much more. 4D 2004 has been radically designed to take advantage of new exciting Windows XP(R) and Macintosh Panther(TM) technologies. Boasting a completely redesigned interface, 4D Developers can now build truly native, beautiful applications for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X. 4th Dimension 2004 is available today directly from: http://www.4D.com.

IDEAlliance, a leading industry association dedicated to fostering XML and other information technology standards, today announced the full program for XML Conference and Exposition 2004, being held Nov. 15 - 19 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The Applied Technologies Group (ATG) of the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) has announced the release of a UN/CEFACT XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR) specification for public review.

FeedStream Inc., a Canadian software company that has been growing steadily since early 2000, today announced the launch of FLUiD CMS 4.5, the latest version of their Web Content Management System (CMS). FLUiD CMS 4.5 is an XML-based CMS that simplifies creating and managing a professional Web site. Sites are developed using the FLUiD CMS 4.5 template so they are easy to navigate and optimized for search engine ranking.

Richmond, VA-Tridium Inc. reports that it's playing a key role in the Open Building Information Xchange (oBIX) technical committee recently organized under the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which is an international standards development consortium. The oBIX group consists of technical professionals working to develop a standard Web-services protocol for connecting facility systems to the enterprise.

The Forumzilla project has been around since about May/June of 2004. It is an extention of the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client that allows you to use it as a RSS/XML feedreader.

Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE:Q) today announced it has signed contracts with more than 400 business customers to provide Qwest Web Contact Center(TM) (QWCC) services as part of the customers' call center solutions.

IDEAlliance, a leading industry association dedicated to fostering XML and other information technology standards, today announced the full program for XML Conference and Exposition 2004, being held Nov. 15 - 19 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The recent interview conducted by IT-Director.com with Ronan Bradley the CEO of PolarLake was an interesting vendor view of the changing requirements for integration software. It stirred a number of thoughts concerning the ability of the FS providers to keep ahead of the technology race with yet another new acronym hitting their in-trays.

I think the most pervasive problem in XML adoption is ingorance and even wilful sabotage of the international foundation on which XML is built. In several recent incidents, both in my consulting work and in my OSS/community work I have come across systems that ignore or break XML's Unicode character model.

Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE:Q) today announced it has signed contracts with more than 400 business customers to provide Qwest Web Contact Center™ (QWCC) services as part of the customers’ call center solutions.

Speakers Include Executives from IBM, Microsoft, DaimlerChrysler; World's Largest XML Trade Conference Slated for Nov. 15-19 in Washington, D.C.

DataPower Technology Inc. on Tuesday announced it has been granted a patent for its core XML processing and data interchange technology. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company said it filed for the patent in 1999 and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent covering DataPower's compiler techniques and dynamic code generation for data transformation, including XML processing.

Want to know what is on the minds of folks like Tim Bray, Sam Ruby, and Don Box? Register for the upcoming Applied XML Developer's Conference today!

According to the current version of the Chris Sells XML DevCon page (don't bother bookmarking it, Chris Sells doesn't believe in permalinks so all the content on that page is transient) I noticed that Chris Anderson is presenting the following:

Anders Norås has an interesting blog entry entitled A JavaScript XmlSerializer where he shows how to build a class equivalent to the .NET Framework's System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer class in Javascript.

Softshare Inc., a provider of e-commerce products and services, announced availability today for its 4.0 suite of e-commerce software. Officially released today, Softshare Delta(R) 4.0 and Softshare ECS(C) 4.0, when run in tandem, support Web services and XML business frameworks such as ebXML, RosettaNet, BizTalk, ACORD, SOAP (versions 1.1. and 1.2), and SOAP with Attachments.

Label printing specialist Zebra Technologies has added support for extensible markup language (XML) to its new high-end RFID smart label printer-encoder, the R110Xi. The company claims it is the first to offer such capabilities in a printer-encoder.