Active Navigation maps a path for Jane's visitors

SAN FRANCISCO - Jane's Aerospace Managing Editor Simon Michell was facing a daunting task. Visitors to Jane's 20-plus electronic publication sites appreciated the wealth of defense, security and transportation information they found, but they felt overwhelmed by it.

It's a common problem as companies increasingly move information to the Web, giving employees and customers access to a range of resources through a single portal. The trick is to manage the data to make it easier to use. Analysts agree that as the portal market grows, so too will the demand for search and content management tools.

"It doesn't matter how great your technology is. If you don't have the content to put in the portal, the information people need, that can be put into a form they can use, then your technology does not do you much good," says Nancy Tubb, a senior analyst with the Delphi Group.

Jane's, a provider of print and online global defense information in England, turned to a company called Active Navigation to organize its content. Active Navigation implemented its Portal Maximizer for Jane's, and within a month had thousands of documents analyzed, indexed and categorized without manual tagging or heavy coding.

The Portal Maximizer, unveiled last week, provides a browser front end, but works from the back end to categorize and index information, giving users links to information they may not have thought to look for themselves. For example, an internal memo referring to a previous project would appear in an enterprise portal with links to the related document - and any other related information such as spreadsheets or news feeds - automatically inserted.

With Jane's Aircraft Fighter Online, portal visitors can navigate through more than 45,000 documents on specific aircraft types with just a few clicks.

"The Active Navigation Portal Maximizer allows us to bring together all our content on the same subject in one easy interface. As Jane's has over half a million different document files, this is proving a very powerful tool," Michell says.

Active Navigation executives say they're approaching the problem of content management in a new way.

"Search, navigation, dynamic linking, related articles, they're all different ways to navigate information in a Web space," says CEO John Darlington. "Providing just one navigation mechanism is not the answer. . . . We offer four or five."

The Portal Maximizer uses text analysis technology that employs linguistic and statistical techniques. The person in charge of the portal can define concepts and names, or the analysis can be done automatically. The information is automatically indexed and transferred into an XML document for integration with numerous apps and environments.

Active Navigation's Portal Maximizer runs on Windows NT and 2000, Solaris and Linux. The product is priced per server for portals and per seat for intranets, and the average cost is about $75,000.