Support for convergent newsrooms | Enhanced performance and extendibility | Improved photo management | Editorial workflow automation functions

RAPID Browser 1.5 offers dramatic performance improvements – with search speed increased by an order of magnitude – and great extendibility, with a connectivity toolbox that allows it to integrate with paper, web, mobile and television production systems in a convergent newsroom work environment. So far, plugins for Adobe InCopy and InDesign, Drupal web CMS and Picsel Technologies mobile publishing have been completed using the XML-based connectivity toolbox; other plugins are being developed.

For photo editors, RAPID Browser 1.5 offers Mosaic views, and the ability to apply common profiles to groups of photos – a feature much requested by users. The powerful and easy-to-use editorial actions have also been extended to allow for cascading actions – for example, journalists can choose to tag, classify and send items with a single click. These features, and many more, were in response to users’ feedback from a number of workshops held by KnowledgeView in the course of 2006-2007.

Steve Liles, KnowledgeView's Development Manager said: “RAPID Browser 1.5 is actually a significant re-write, providing many avenues for further extensibility in the coming months. We have incorporated the superb Lucene full-text indexing engine to significantly speed up complex searches and filters, improved our caching mechanisms to reduce load on the database, and streamlined our action framework to improve testability while reducing the number of database transactions.”

Hydar Al-Dewachi, in charge of software deployment and testing at KnowledgeView added: “We have also implemented automated and rigorous testing procedures over the last few months, to ensure robust software performance and scalability, so that upgrading our existing customers is done as efficiently as possible.”

Guy Abou Jaoude, in charge of customer support at KnowledgeView said: “We are working with our integration partners and customers to roll out the upgrade in the coming weeks. We are also initiating RAPID Browser Users Group meetings and online forum so that we continue to involve our customers in defining functionality in future releases of RAPID Browser.”

Nawal El Baba, marketing executive at KnowledgeView added: “We are very excited by this significant upgrade that will add real value to our publishing customers. RAPID Browser 1.5 will be showcased at Ifra Vienna on 7 October, and at the Ifra and KnowledgeView conference in Kuwait on the 31 October – we invite publishers to join us at these events. At Ifra Vienna we will also demonstrate the integration of RAPID Browser with an an advanced rich-media mobile application from Picsel Technologies.”

For more information: please contact Ms. Nawal El Baba at nawal@knowledgeview.co.uk