XMetaL Author Essential - What's that?

[S. Strube]

Hello everyone,

I just received a newsletter about the upcoming XMetaL Author Essential.

From the information, it's a little bit hard to guess - is this a normal XMetaL Author version, just without DITA and Repository-Connectors? So is it usable for COM-Interop and simple XML-Editing w/ Customizations (XFT, CTM, MCR) like the other XMetaL Author versions?

XMetaL Author Essential - Coming Soon!  

Industry Leading Structured Authoring Solution That's Customisable and Easily Integrated for your Enterprise Needs

XMetaL Author Essential is the ultimate authoring solution for organisations that need to generate large volumes of information requiring customisation, personalisation, or distribution in multiple formats and languages.

With XMetaL Author Essential, anyone can produce valid XML content with confidence. The world's most intuitive XML authoring tool, XMetaL Author empowers web specialists, technical communicators, and general business users to rapidly and easily create consistent, high quality content for multichannel publishing.

Flexible: Easily customise to create a comfortable working environment that hides various levels of complexity of structured content and ensures the validity of your XML -whether from desktop software, embedded in another application or inside a web browser.
Extensible: Accelerate custom integrations with high-level APIs and out-of-the-box connectors that support both open-source and commercial systems to create your own end-to-end solution from authoring to publishing, translation, and content management.
Built to Last on Open Standards: XMetaL Author Essential offers unparalleled support for industry standards and interoperability with enterprise applications. Ensure a familiar work environment and avoid costly, locked-in proprietary technologies by taking advantage of standard programming languages, development environments, style sheets, access protocols and all major XML specifications.

[Derek Read]

You are basically correct.

All the APIs described in the Programmer's Guide are included with XMetaL Author Essential and the product is meant to be customized for use with any DTD or Schema (except DITA for which I'd suggest people use XMetaL Author Enterprise which is specifically designed for that).

Typically people will use XMetaL Developer to create the necessary customization files for use with XMetaL Author Essential (MCR, CSS, CTM, XFT, etc) or obtain a pre-configured set of files from one of our partners or elsewhere.

All of the improvements that have been made to the core product over the years (currently the xmetal55.exe and our core DLLs) are included, including an updated UI, more APIs, new events, CSS support, various bug fixes, etc. The xmetal55.exe program included with XMetaL Author Enterprise and XMetaL Author Essential are essentially the same.

XMetaL Author Essential does not include the following (compared with XMetaL Author Enterprise):

• XMetaL Reviewer integration capability.
• XMetaL Connector for integrating with CMS systems (in theory it might be possible to build a connector to a CMS the "old fashioned way" but with a lot more effort and no guarantee it will be possible).
• DITA editing functionality (no DITA DTDs, templates, menus, DITA-specific help, reusable components, direct DITA OT integration, etc).
• DITA publishing functionality (XMetaL Author Enterprise includes a pre-configured copy of the DITA Open Toolkit and corresponding UI to make publishing to all formats supported by the DITA OT easy for authors).
• Licensed copy of RenderX XEP (XMetaL Author Enterprise includes this for generating PDF documents with or without the DITA OT).