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| Below are answers to the most commonly asked questions about Authentic® 2008, the FREE WYSIWYG XML and database content editor application from Altova.
Questions:
Answers:- What is Authentic, and what does it do?
Authentic is designed for end-users at organizations employing advanced XML-based document frameworks and business-management oriented databases and is well-suited for use as the content-entry and editing component in XML authoring, document management systems, Web publishing, and knowledge management applications. Users are typically business people, such as office managers, order processing clerks, salespeople, marketing professionals, copywriters, reporters, field representatives, etc. Information that users enter in Authentic can be saved to any content management system, database, or XML repository where it can be made instantly available to management applications across the organization.
Authentic provides an efficient and flexible means for collecting information in a standardized information format, which can then be easily validated and integrated with your server systems.
Back to Top - Who is Authentic used by?
Authentic users are people who create business content or collect and use information on a daily basis. Users of Authentic are often subject-matter specialists and could be reporters, analysts, lawyers, marketing professionals, order processing clerks, etc.
Back to Top - Why should companies or organizations use Authentic?
First of all, since it’s free, Authentic is the ideal the tool to implement a structured content solution for a large workgroup or across an enterprise. What could be more cost-effective?
Equally important, relational databases and XML applications are two of the most prominent data storage and management mechanisms in use today. However, databases and XML applications often lack a non-technical, user-friendly interface for editing and updating the content that they store, posing a significant a problem for non-technical knowledge workers who need to access and enter content in XML and/or database formats.
Authentic provides business users with an easy-to-use, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface for content editing that shields them from the underlying technical details of the database or XML application. Giving business users easy-to-use content editing tools increases productivity and efficiency, and at the same time frees developers and engineers to focus on the more technical aspects of their duties.
Back to Top - What are some of the typical ways teams and organizations use Authentic?
Authentic can be applied to solve a number of challenges across virtually any industry. For example, using Authentic:
- A government organization enables data entry into its main database across geographically dispersed sites
- A news media company streamlines authoring and editing of articles
- A retail company accelerates product catalog creation
- A financial institution more efficiently locates and reuses research information
- A sales team automates their status reports without having to install or learn complicated and expensive database software
- And more . . .
Back to Top - How much does Authentic cost? How is it licensed?
Authentic is offered under a free software licensing model and can be downloaded here.
Back to Top - Why is Authentic offered under a free software license?
Altova firmly believes that XML technologies can solve the problems associated with content fragmentation. Unfortunately, the high price tags associated with most content editor products today becomes a significant barrier for companies wanting to develop XML and database oriented solutions, especially given restraints on corporate IT spending. We believe that the high costs of content editors shouldn't deter people from adopting and ultimately benefiting from corporate-wide XML and database-centric applications. We've therefore made Authentic publicly available at no cost.
Offering Authentic under a free license affords corporate IT departments - even those under tight budgets - the ability to start implementing content editing solutions today and start realizing the benefits and cost-savings associated with reusing information assets.
Back to Top - How does Authentic fit with other Altova tools?
Altova XMLSpy® 2008, MapForce® 2008, and StyleVision® 2008 can all be used to develop information management frameworks that include Authentic as the content entry and editing component. The Authentic forms through which business users create XML and database content in Authentic are called StyleVision Power Stylesheets (SPS) and are created using StyleVision. The same SPS that was used to create the Authentic form autogenerates industry-standard stylesheets that can be applied to users’ content at any time to produce output in HTML, RTF, PDF, and Word 2007 (OOXML).
In addition, when content is captured into XML using Authentic, it is then typically transformed, saved to a repository, or accessed via a Web service. Altova's developer tools, XMLSpy and MapForce, provide advanced functionality for performing these types of XML operations.
XMLSpy also provides support for working with database data entered in Authentic, and MapForce offers powerful mapping capabilities for integrating XML, database, flat file, EDI, and Excel 2007 (OOXML) data.
Back to Top - What are the different editions of Authentic?
- How does Authentic compare to HTML forms?
Authentic is a powerful application that provides functionality including spelling checking in over 12 languages, auto-complete, and much more. Real-time syntax checking and validation automatically ensures data is valid based on predefined business logic, thus alleviating the need to write complicated client- or server-side data validation code. The dynamic forms of Authentic are ideally suited for Web-based information-gathering applications that take full advantage of the rich editing and validation capabilities of XML and XSLT that are not possible using simple HTML forms.
Back to Top - What servers and databases does Authentic work with?
Authentic features full support for standard Internet protocols and file transfer interfaces, including WebDAV and HTTP. This allows Authentic to be easily used in conjunction with the leading XML content repositories, including Oracle XML DB, Microsoft CMS via the Authentic Content Management Server Placeholder Control, Microsoft SQL Server, IXIASOFT TextML Server, XML Global GoXML DB, Lightspeed Interactive Astoria, X-Hive/DB, iLevel Software Insite Server, and many others.
Authentic forms can be created in StyleVision® 2008 to edit content in the following relational databases:
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MySQL
- Oracle
- IBM DB2
- Any ADO database
Authentic® 2008 Browser Edition works with both Microsoft IIS and Apache Web servers.
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