PRESS RELEASE
January 31, 1996
Innovative documentation
tools save time and money

More efficient information management means lower costs and shorter lead times, especially in major technical development projects, so the demand for tools for working with documents is increasing very rapidly. At the CeBit Fair from 14 to 20 March, Excosoft will be showing its new products Exco Navigator and Exco Documentor and the new version of the CM-tool ExcoConf. The new products mean a totally new approach to working with information.

To process information rationally, the most important thing is to be able to access the relevant information, to be able to display it quickly so that its meaning can be understood and so that the information can be re-used and refined. Excosoft’s new tools are focused entirely on this task: Exco Navigator is used to search various kinds of tree structures to access and display a particular document; Exco Documentor is then used to modify the information and publish it in different formats; ExcoConf is used to keep track of the versions of the document structure.
A common feature of the new tools is the presentation, which makes sure you do not lose your place. If you open a link to a document it is displayed at its marked position. The text above is pushed up and the text below is pushed down. The reader can then scroll up or down in the document without ever getting lost. The internal structure of the document is presented in the same way.
“Our new products solve the problems of sequentially stored information, a long series of characters, words, lines and pages, which is the most common way of handling information in today’s word processors and editors. But to get an overall picture and find your way easily the information should be presented hierarchically”, says Håkan Lothigius, Excosoft’s product manager.
Exco Documentor is used to produce documents that will have a long life, that will be refined and re-used. The tool uses the screen to simulate more than just a sheet of paper. It allows the user to get a rapid overall picture of large documents, to reach detailed information directly and to access other documents quickly by means of hypertext links. The product can also work with SGML files in a new way, utilising the document’s own structure (DTD) and making it possible to work with the information hierarchically.
Exco Navigator can be used to search for information internally within the company in both fixed and dynamic structures. The tool also displays files in several different formats, such as SGML, HTML and a number of graphical formats.
ExcoConf is a standalone document handling tool for version handling and configuration control of all kinds of files. It can be used to group documents and document groups; it supports both parallel and distributed working and the checking of structures across mixed networks.
The Exco tools are developed and marketed by the Swedish company Excosoft AB, which has 20 employees. The company has been working on the structuring of information since it was set up in 1986. Its main customers are large Swedish industrial companies such as ABB, Ericsson, Saab-Scania and Volvo companies.

For further information:
Håkan Lothigius
Excosoft AB
Electrum 420
S-164 40 KISTA
Sweden
Phone: +46 8 703 9190
Fax: +46 8 703 9490
e-mail: lhl@excosoft.se


Facts:
Documents created with Exco Documentor can be used to print out on paper, for WWW-network publication, for archiving in a general format or for on-line help.
The information is marked up according to its content and not only according to what it will look like when printed on paper; this makes the information more searchable and re-usable. This is the basic idea of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language), which is on the way to becoming an industrial standard.
Exco Documentor can read many different kinds of document, present them in a way that makes them easy to work on and then save them in accordance with several different SGML variants (DTDs). In other tools, this often calls for extensive customisation.
Exco Navigator can be used to search for information internally within the company in both fixed and dynamic structures. You can search through file systems, hypertext networks and other document structures. The tool displays different formats such as SGML, HTML and several graphical formats.
The method of working and the new user interface are more user-friendly and efficient than traditional SGML editors. These normally show the ‘tags’ which identify the various parts of the text. Instead Exco uses the structure to display the information hierarchically.