Austin, Texas-based document output management company Dazel Corp is the latest company to take itself on to the Web: this month it will demonstrate MetaWeb, which it says will enable users to receive information to their browsers. In addition to sending documents to printers and send facsimile messages and electronic mail through the Dazel Output Server, users will be able to publish documents to MetaWeb, an Output Server add-on in the form of a Web repository. Instead of requiring users to surf Web pages for the published material, MetaWeb incorporates a subscriber feature that enables users to sign up for particular document feeds and have them delivered into a Web box. MetaWeb goes to alpha customers in November and is due to ship next April, supporting the 2.5 release of Output Server introduced last week and a 3.0 revision due in the same timeframe. Dazel will add other HyperText Mark-up Language transformation mechanisms to MetaWeb, plus extensions for handling Adobe PDF, GI F and JPEG file and image formats. Further down the road, it envisages MetaWeb handling audio, voice mail, even print-to-audio services. The new Output Server 2.5 has been enhanced to support department-level print policies. Administrators can now configure specific output domains – facsimile, printers, electronic mail systems – for individual departments or offices. Specifically output can be segmented to multiple domains. It is looking for a partner or will develop its own browser-based administration for Output Server. The Dazel software no longer requires Distributed Computing Environment underneath, which it did in its early days. The company says that it doesn’t know how long it will continue to support it. Although an NT version of Output Server will be announced around the year-end, it may not ship until towards mid-1997 and users will still require a Unix server to do inter-domain routing. There is also a new 1.4 release of the Dazel Express client for Microsoft and Motif desktops. Output Server costs from $420 per user for a 100-user license; Express is $100 per user. Dazel claims around 70 customers, a third of them production sites. It will use its recent $9.5m venture funding to ramp overseas distribution and will likely open direct operations in the UK, Germany and France from which it will hang regional distribution networks. It is also looking at technology acquisitions for some of the MetaWeb enhancements.
