ComponentOne Announces Optional Natural Language Search Option for Doc-To-Help®

ComponentOne has announced that it will be releasing version 6.5 of its Help authoring tool Doc-To-Help in March 2003. Free to all current license-holders of Doc-To-Help 6.0, the new release irons out the wrinkles in 6.0 and consolidates the product’s position as a single-sourcing tool for Microsoft Word users.

The most notable aspect of this new release is its support for a brand new Natural Search add-on module that is available separately for just under $300. This enables Doc-To-Help 6.5 users to build a natural language search capability into its Help systems.

Interestingly, the technology behind ComponentOne Natural Search^TM is quite different from that of competing products, such as WexTech’s AnswerWorks. Instead of using linguistic processing techniques, ComponentOne Natural Search relies on statistical analysis—as a result it's language independent and theoretically works just as well after a Help system has been translated. It remains to be seen how the quality of its search results compares to that of its competitors.

The Doc-To-Help 6.5 release also adds a small number of other new features, including Customizable HTML themes with different layouts for secondary windows and popups. However, the browser-based Help technologies that ComponentOne acquired from ForeFront over a year ago have yet to find their way into the product.

Also scheduled for launch in March 2003 is ComponentOne Response^TM, described in the press release as "an intelligent Web and E-mail self-service solution." The idea behind this product is to empower customers and reduce support costs by enabling customers to use natural language searches through a Web and E-mail interface to find solutions to their inquiries. Doc-To-Help 6.5 includes a new output format for creating content for ComponentOne Response.

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