Publishers Weekly once noted that “Publishers sneeze, and the book manufacturers get a cold.” Spend any un-automated day in the tightly linked life of a printing and publishing shop and it won't take long to realize what can send both partners into quarantine. Although business in general has made use of software that can generate a true flow of data through the supply chain, the day-to-day exchange between publisher and printer is still largely paper-based, paper-chased, and fax-blurred. Purchase orders, price requests, order-status tracking, shipping instructions, and specs are the kinds of information that printers and publishers need to continuously pass along. The very concept of efficiency advantages to be gained by shaking off dependence on hard-copy orders and invoices in favor of a B2B electronic exchange of documents is not a difficult one to sell.

C’mon, you might think, no software has existed until now to help automate simple requests for pricing and order tracking?

Oly about three years ago did those linked to the printing and publishing industry resolve to come up with an application that could specifically be targeted for their linked transactional worlds. The group of printers and publishers began meeting to discuss the implementation of a web-based software application that could replace their industry-specific paper transactions with electronic equivalents. 

Enter Tambora, an open source web-based B2B application to allow printers and publishers to exchange their documents via a secure web site or directly from company to company.  

“When we started the Tambora project in 2000,“ says Dave Molster, who is Tambora’s project manager, “people in printing and publishing doing the simple everyday things like handling POs and invoicing did them by faxing back and forth. A few tech people as well as executives got together and decided to implement an e-business solution. The project just grew and grew, with more input from more companies.”  The name ‘Tambora’ was inspired by the fact that “One of the lead programmers on the project was into drums,” says Molster

At the hub of the project is Tambora’s project hosts, a Manhattan-based B2B software integration and services outfit focused on printing and publishing customers called Zenplex Inc., whose three developers actively work on the code base and are on the “committer” project level. Tambora project participants include Pearson Education and Phoenix Color (printers). If Zenplex is the hub, Pearson Education (part of Pearson) is the publisher bootstrapping the network. Pearson, (Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall) as publishers, is beta-testing Tambora, behaving as Tambora’s channel mavens. All participants see Tambora as a collaborative effort that will save them valuable time affordably.

Pearson is obviously cognizant of the value of open source methodology. In documentation prepared by Pearson Education about Tambora, the focus is not only on Tambora’s features but the business advantages that Tambora carries because it is open source: “Tambora is being developed as an open source application…Since Tambora is a open source solution, you can be confident that you will not find yourself locked into a proprietary system with no way out. All source code and all database structures are available to anyone.”

Exchanging information in XML format via standards in a secure environment protected with SSL encryption, users can send documents like purchase orders directly to a web page for others to see or send the information via the Internet directly to the other company. Molster, though, with all the support and enthusiasm, also notes that Tambora still is in beta. Tambora beta Version 2 was released in April 2001; testing continues along with the development of version 3.

Molster tells Open that companies have said they now want to see the following as important to them: “They want this to run on a single box (Version 2 required two boxes) with components that are pluggable, so that you can add requests from publishers and printers dynamically.” But the real turning point for Tambora lies in something bigger than Tambora, called XBITS. This stands for: XML Book Industry Transaction Standards.

In the industry’s bid to see better work efficiencies between publishers and printers, they confront the overall need for standards governing Tambora-targeted transactions. As the title suggests, XBITS is a group made up of printers and publishers, paper mills, and component vendors, designing Extensible Markup Language (XML) transactions. XBITS is providing the set of XML message standards needed for the entire book manufacturing supply chain. Members include McGraw-Hill, Time Inc., Courier, and Xerox. The launching date for XBITS readiness will be sooner than later. All major XBITS transactions are scheduled to be completed and published by this summer. These range from specs, RFQs, and purchase orders to inventory-status documents and business acknowledgments.

 But what’s in Open Source Tambora for a commercial company like Zenplex?

 “That’s the most common question we get,” says Molster, who is director of integration services at Zenplex. “People ask us how we make money off this. We answer by saying we hope to get the ‘business from installation and support services, including tying the services into the back end.”

 Tambora is being released under the Zenplex Public License, which the Zenplex.org site explains is a “variant” of the Mozilla Public License, functionally equivalent to the MPL “with ZPL only trivial changes such as mentioning Zenplex rather than Netscape.”