Seybold '99: UK firm shows Vignette rival in Boston

Mediasurface, a new Web publishing system from the UK is expected to make a splash at Seybold this week, throwing down a challenge to industrial strength Web site publishing systems such as Vignette. Produced by a London-based company, also called Mediasurface, the system is under evaluation by high-profile European Web publishers, including Reuters, Oxford University Press and CNN.

The Mediasurface system server runs on Sun systems on top of an Oracle 7 or 8 database with the Context option for full-text retrieval. It interfaces to most Web servers; Perl is its primary scripting language.

The primary client software is a Java application. As an alternative, an HTML Web browser may be used for most editorial operations. Mediasurface includes six modules, covering administration,production, design, publishing and integration with external data feeds. Mediasurface sees its system competing with other high-end systems -- the likes of Vignette, Inso and FutureTense --- aimed at high-volume sites with hundreds of contributors.