Waltham, Massachusetts-based Interleaf Inc has just managed to turn the company round and become an open system vendor at the same time. Within the computerised documentation market you may have thought that going open system meant rewriting for Unix boxes but there is more to it than that, and Interleaf’s new product WorldView is part of the open system strategy. The idea behind WorldView (CI No 1,869) is that everyone can have access to documents on any computer. Furthermore, the documents can be documents of any source so long as they generate PostScript files. Consequently, documents can come from Interleaf, Frame, PageMaker, Word, Wordperfect and so on. They can be brought into WorldView and indexed and filed. Full text retrieval is supported as well as hyperlinks so documents can be cross-referenced and compressed by up to 10 times and viewed in WYSIWYG. What is more, Interleaf president Mark Ruport claims that WorldView runs in 2Mb on a 6MHz 80286 machine. For a Windows front end this sounds astonishing but Ruport says that you can open up to eight frames quickly with this configuration. WorldView also supports Open Look, Motif and Mac System 7.0. IBM mainframe support requires a 3270 graphical terminal. But the key point is that you do not have to use Interleaf as the authoring tool – you can gather in other documents add value to them and present the information. Interleaf offers compression techniques, disk storage and speed across the network. The Interleaf file format is not standard but now files in native PostScript can be taken, put through the WorldView Press and displayed. Over the last 18 months Interleaf has embarked on a strategy of being open with all its technology. Lisp hooks have been built into the functionality of Interleaf 5 and the company’s Relational Document Manager, which can manage objects from any type of document including word processing packages. With WorldView, Interleaf expects to work with major corporations and build enterprise-wide systems from the word processing package through to printing and viewing. For the desktop publishing function, WorldView can automate cutting and pasting, the management and distribution of information – in other words addressing the entire document life cycle. The company is participating with the Open Software Foundation for the standardisation of document tools. Of course, Interleaf is not going open simply for the sake of openness, rather opening up to other vendor’s products is the key to getting a portion of computing budgets. The past couple of years has been quite painful as Interleaf repositioned itself to move from the CAD/CAM world of publishing to the wider corporate world of the document life cycle. Interleaf 5 enables the programmer to hook a call to a C program, so you can write a script in any programming language you want. Furthermore, the front end of the system has been rewritten to hook into SQL databases. And, of course, these changes in company profile have necessitated changes in personnel at mid to upper level management. Skills had to be changed from the publishing side of things to an appreciation of the finer points of systems integration. The past two years have been tough and the company might not have made had it not been for the TPS 4 user base of 130,000 that had strategically chosen Interleaf as their supplier and could not easily switch to a rival product. But both supplier and user base appear to have now made it through the rain – Interleaf has been profitable for eight out of nine quarters and is forecasting growth of 20% to 25% next year on the back of Interleaf 5, Relational Document Manager and WorldView, which add up to a strong product offering.
