Start-up Has Designs On Web Documents

Since 1996, the staff at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine had been looking for a tool that would let faculty and students mark up, in real time, Web-based lecture notes that had been converted to HTML pages.

Until recently, no such technology existed, says David Pilasky, the school's manager and network administrator for biomedical IT.

Then Pilasky read about Vista, Calif.-based iMarkup Solutions Inc.'s iMarkup and iMarkup Workgroup Server products - Web page annotation tools that let users with a Web browser "attach" notes and other markups to live Web pages. The markups - including sticky notes, freeform drawings (using a paintbrushlike tool), text and highlighting - appear as a page overlay and are stored securely either on a user's PC (in stand-alone mode) or on a central server for display the next time the user navigates to that Web page.

IMarkup Workgroup Server requires a Windows Internet Information Server and an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database to store markup data. Clients need Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and a plug-in to access the system.

'Perfect Solution'

Cleveland-based Case Western purchased the product to let students annotate Web page content. "IMarkup is the perfect solution for us," Pilasky says. "It's the only one I've found, and I've been searching for years."

IMarkup's products also appeal to business users who want to collaborate about the Web on the Web, according to the vendor. Using iMarkup Workgroup Server's annotation capabilities, Web developers, designers and enterprise users can share thoughts about Web pages in real time, says John O'Brien, iMarkup's president and CEO.

One business that's taking advantage of iMarkup's technology is Omnibility, an Internet development firm in Campbell, Calif.

"Omnibility's problem was finding a way for the marketing and communications people in our clients' companies to communicate [to us] the changes they wanted to make to their Web sites," says Dean Dubbe, Omnibility's vice president of client services.

Before it started using iMarkup's product, Dubbe says, Omnibility had to engage in an often frustrating back-and-forth process with its customers to understand all the changes they wanted made to their sites. "Customers were clamoring for an easier, more efficient way to do business," he says.

"With iMarkup, our clients can describe what they want done in a sticky note on the Web page, and we can look at the note and [make the changes]. It eliminates all the back and forth," Dubbe says. "It was just what our clients wanted, because the faster we are able to implement the changes, the faster they are able to get the newer information to their customers."