Convera and IXOS Software Inc. have announced a new partnership designed to assist enterprise customers in managing large volumes of business documents and email communications. Under the agreement, IXOS will sell Convera's RetrievalWare search and categorization software as an optional component of the IXOS-eCONserver product. The combined solution will add Convera's search capabilities to enable customers to retrieve email messages, attachments, and other business documents from the IXOS-eCONserver archive for a variety of purposes, including records management, discovery and general knowledge management. The solution, available immediately, will be sold to the commercial and federal market by IXOS' North American sales teams in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Convera has also announced that it has certified ten partners as part of its new Taxonomy Developer Certification Program. Under the program, Convera trains and certifies IT and knowledge management professionals in the development and deployment of custom taxonomies and classifications using Convera's new RetrievalWare Categorization and Dynamic Classification product. Participants who completed the five-day certification program include Access Innovations, Advanced Technology Systems (ATS), Bleuphish, Creative Technology Inc., IBM Italia, KAPS Group LLC, Mitre, MZM Inc., SRA International Inc., and Veridian Engineering. Certified Taxonomy Developers will serve as consultants and service providers to assist Convera customers in understanding their information management needs, organizing their information in a way that best serves their objectives, and developing taxonomies for use with Convera software. Certified Taxonomy Developers also will have the opportunity to market cartridges that they have developed within the Convera customer base as pre-built taxonomies. Convera's chief scientist, Dr. Claude Vogel, developed the five-day certification class curriculum. The class includes topics such as: the history and theory of taxonomies, standard thesaurus concepts, importing existing taxonomies and thesauri, semantic networks, taxonomy design concepts and strategies, performance benchmarking and analysis, and taxonomy validation and refinement. During the hands-on sessions, participants use Convera's RetrievalWare Cartridge Editor to import, edit, and benchmark taxonomies and classifications.

(http://www.convera.com), (http://www.ixos.com)