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Cross Media Manager

Critical to effective Product Information Management is the ability to address all sales channels from a single product data repository. The Cross Media Syndication Manager allows the syndication of product information directly from the data contained within the Product Information Manager, guaranteeing the quality of information regardless of the output media. Media formats include:

• Online Stores
• Print Catalogs
• CD-ROM

Online Store Manager

The SellFast Online Store Manager provides your customers a powerful tool to search and shop within your e-commerce website. This web based tool can be integrated into your sell-side website and is ideal for companies with large numbers of items in their catalogs such as parts suppliers and industrial distributors.

jCatalog has designed the search engine for high performance and has implemented trend setting technologies to help your customer identify the desired products easily.

Sophisticated Search methods: jCatalog provides a simple full-text search which requires your customer to only enter one or more keyword(s) to initiate the search. Should this not be sufficient to identify the required products other more advanced tools are available:

• Full-text search
• Parameter search
• Hierarchy search
• Iterative search
• Similarity search
• Fuzzy/phonetic search

Qualifying search results: Each search query provides a list containing the results of the search. These results can be sorted in ascending or descending order of the displayed data.

Comparing the Products: When comparing selected products, a "master" is identified to be the basis for comparison. All differences between the compared products and the "Master" are then high-lighted in color.

Selecting the correct model or configuration: The variant manager helps your customer select the required model, size or characteristic of a product or service. SellFast then identifies the correct item number and price for that selection and places the item in the shopping cart.

Checking Product Details: The Product Details page displays product information including detailed description, classifications, manufacturer information, pricing and pricing units, specifications and product attributes, related accessories and products.

Catalog access and views: The catalog view manager allows restricted access to the catalog for customers, roles and individuals. This can include customer specific pricing.

Printed-Paper-Catalogs

Publication Specific Product Structures: The product structure within the published catalog can differ depending on the requirements of the channel and media being addressed. The Syndication Manager allows the creation of publication specific product structures ensuring that the individual publications are not dependent on the internal catalog structure.

Publication output format: The Syndication Manager outputs catalog data into a standard XML format. XSL style sheets created by the Print Catalog Designer translate this output XML stream into another formats cross media formats.

Creating Print Catalogs: the Syndication Manager supports print-on-demand. This is achieved by utilizing XSL style sheets to create a catalog based on XML data published by the product information manager, resulting for instance, in a customer specific PDF document catalog publication.

Creating High Quality Print Catalogs: High quality print output is supported utilizing industry standard desktop publishing (DTP) systems. While jCatalog does not replace DTP, it can save up to 90% or the preliminary work involved in page generation. Once again XSL style sheets are used to transform the XML files to DTP specific formats. An example is the creation for an CSV file format for importing into QuarkXpress, using XTAG.

CD-ROMs

CD-ROM based catalogs are significantly cheaper to publish than equivalent Print Catalogs. The creation of product catalogs on CD-ROMs follows a process similar to the creation of paper catalogs. Typically the layout of the CD-ROM is pre-defined and does not require further editing using Desktop Publishing Tools. The resulting CD-ROM runs without having to be installed on the customer's PC.

The Syndication Manager automatically generates product group views and indexes enabling convenient full-text and index searches across the data contained on the CD ROM.

Benefits:

• No installation on the client hardware necessary (runs with HTML, Java-Script)
• Generation of the CD-ROM is fully automated
• Supports creation of customer specific CD-ROM's
• Offline Shopping Basket and Ordering with Upload capability to the online shop
• Easy-to-use
• No 3rd party license fees for the CD