Review

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 02 - March/April 2009

The Enterprise Server (ES) product suite from Xenos is relatively new as a product, but many of the functions pulled together under the 'ES umbrella' have actually been available for some time, albeit in different guises.

With Xenos ES, though, the company has made huge steps forward in usability and integration between the various document systems, which now share a common 'look & feel' and operate in similar ways.

Considerable expertise has been brought to bear to develop an entirely new and highly user-friendly GUI which exploits the best features of Windows such as rightclick interaction, context-sensitive menus, and cursor 'hovering'.

xPression is the document composition software element of Xenos ES, based on an offering originally developed by Document Sciences. It offers neartransparent integration with documentcentric applications such as Adobe InDesign, Dreamweaver and MS Word to allow complex manipulation and assembly of data from various sources to be used in high end output such as print runs, mailings or even e-mailshots. A highly intuitive Process Flow Designer allows end user departments such as Marketing Teams to use XML data feeds from a variety of sources to create personalised output streams without having to worry about altering those systems that feed into them.

What makes xPression so versatile is that the processing power resides on an engine on the server, as opposed to processing at the client end. It will cheerfully handle pretty much any output format 'out of the box', including PCL, AFP, PScript, metacode and the increasingly popular PDF/A format - often priced as optional extras on competing systems.

A key benefit to marketing departments and the like is that xPression gives them new ways to present information dynamically on very high volume output runs, using data driven graphics and complex layout functions - for instance in personalised pension forecasts or other financial documents. Both Word and InDesign have plug-ins, called xPresso, which give simple menu-driven access from within those systems to the power of xPression itself.

An additional advantage for Word users is that xPression can use existing Template Styles: a change of text colour, for instance, is as easy as changing it in the template, rather than having to go through all the documents that might use that template. With major corporate rebranding exercises becoming increasingly common (e.g. Norwich Union/Aviva's recent much-publicised campaign), this flexible approach can make the process of modifying thousands of document types a far simpler task.

With the xPresso plug-in, it becomes feasible for knowledge workers within business units to build their own documents, with no knowledge of coding required, which the IT department can then load, test and put into production. Overall, the xPression offering complements the core Xenos transformation technologies very well - adding an extra layer of usefulness and business practicality to an already impressive set of products. Different team members can now work independently on their own elements of a document 'pack' (e.g. letter, application forms, personalised illustration, marketing brochure), confident that the overall output will be of a generic quality and style, without having to modify the various systems that feed data into those documents. More info: www.xenos.com

VERDICT: Many competing products claim to offer similar ways to combine data and documents, but we haven't seen anything to compare with the intuitive and user-friendly interface and design of xPression

Review