Rubric's upgraded Streamnet™ system streamlines project management and enhances the customer experience
Monday, February 26, 2001
Rubric's upgraded StreamNET™ Extranet system streamlines the process of housing, maintaining and reporting critical localization project data. Rubric, a localization services provider for information technology companies, has been using its StreamNET™ Extranet system to assist in the management of its localization projects since 1997. The new architecture provides full scalability and flexibility so that Extranets can be highly customized in response to customer needs. The new design provides a user-friendly interface enabling fast and easy access to each component of the Extranet.
The new StreamNET™ Extranet system includes modules for communications and status reporting, scheduling, file transfers, and language management. In addition, a completely new feature of the system is its "Resource Library", which acts as a globalization portal with more than 150 localization resources, including localization handbooks, checklists, tutorials and other globalization-related information.
StreamNET™'s newly developed architecture utilizes ASP, XML, and VBScript/JavaScript technologies on a Windows 2000 Server system to generate accurate, consistent and up-to-the-minute information. The system is highly scalable, supporting an unlimited number of products and target-languages for each customer. The StreamNET™ system has been architected to support multiple language interfaces as well. The system's design and its ASP/XML architecture ensure that an additional interface such as Japanese or Korean could be provided for an existing StreamNET™ site with minimal effort, leveraging the underlying data whenever possible. The system's XML-based structure is extremely scalable, as it allows for smooth integration with future enhancements and complementary services with a "plug-and-play" simplicity.
The core of the system is configured through XML files, as XML provides a sound method to store the underlying data. Eliminating the need to directly edit HTML code has the effect of ensuring consistency between updates, in addition to reducing the scope for browser-incompatible code. The modular nature of an XML-based configuration allows for increased integration with Rubric's production process.
The use of custom ASP scripts allows for the StreamNET™ pages to be automatically formatted with information and links to online and downloadable product data. This automatic formatting is based on the latest available product data for individual products and languages. This ensures that new product data is immediately available from StreamNET™ as soon as it is published to the StreamNET™ server, and that product data is current and accurate.
About Rubric
Rubric assures a better localization experience. Specializing in globalization services for the high technology industry, Rubric brings flexibility, on-demand scalability, and integrity to guarantee localization success. Rubric's refined processes adapt to the high tech sector's need for proactive localization planning, anticipation of dynamically changing requirements, and agile response capabilities. For more information, visit www.rubric.com.