Users that typed "help" at any DOS prompt on a Novell network were presented with the online NetWare manuals in the Folio Infobase format.
[4] It was in 1990 that Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart, two graduates of BYU, created Infobases, Inc., and began offering LDS Church publications on computer floppy disks.
[citation needed] In March 1991, Folio released MailBag, an infobase application that stored and retrieved electronic mail messages on a Novell LAN.
[6] The Electronic Labyrinth described Folio Views 2.1 as follows: "a document indexing and retrieval package for DOS text mode.
Reference links may be made to other folios, external programs, PCX graphics, or audio files in RealSound format.
On December 31, 1992, Mead Data Central, Inc., provider of the LEXIS and NEXIS computer services, purchased Folio Corporation.
Included in the description of the sale was that Folio software was being used by more than 80 commercial publishers in creating and distributing electronic versions of thousands of popular printed works, principally on compact discs and magnetic media.
The market leader was Lotus Notes, and Mead Data Central, with annual revenues of $469.5 million, was well placed to compete.
[8] When Folio Corporation announced a planned move to a new location in the RiverWoods Research and Business Park in north Provo, the company stated that it had 104 employees, twice the number of a year before.
Folio stated that its "infobase publishing platform is rapidly becoming a standard for professional and business content providers in industries such as legal, accounting, tax, medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance."
Folio added that they had as their customer base, nearly 600 commercial publishers, and that they were "the world's leading provider of infobase software with its products installed on an estimated 30 million desktops.
Two weeks before this, Open Market had purchased WayPoint, a business solution designed to create Internet-based business-to-business catalogs by retrieving complex product information from databases.
[12] In an industry-wide review of network-based internal search engines, Network Computing magazine ranked Folio SiteDirector 3.1 number 8 of the 10 products it reviewed, saying, "Folio's SiteDirector is a completely different approach to providing a searchable index of a Web site, quite unlike the other search engines we tested.
In fact, SiteDirector assumes you've rendered the contents of your Web site as an infobase--Folio's term for its searchable, multilinked, compressed repository of text and graphics.
This was in the days before the emphasis on more recent World Wide Web standards, and this review made comment about the specialized HTML tags used by Folio.
The special HTML tags let SiteDirector deliver specific infobase documents or elements when called for by the Web page.
The SiteDirector server instantly converts infobase files to HTML format when a browser requests a Web page.
One of the users was the Salt Lake City Tribune, which used SiteDirector to sell access to their archives, stored in Folio's infobase file format.
Several companies that use Folio's products internally were adding SiteDirector to sell access to their private repositories on the Web.
)[16] "Open Market's first quarter 1999 revenue of $12.6 million for its e-commerce products grew 116 percent over the same period of the previous year.
The competition was focusing on smaller simple products aimed at individual businesses, and being able to respond to customer's rapid changing needs.
In addition, nearly all of Open Market's 90 Folio employees were retained to work in the new company that was to be headquartered in Provo, Utah.
[citation needed] The sale of Folio would allow Open Market to focus on its Internet commerce products, which were to combine order processing and secure payment collection.
In 2004 FutureTense, and associated Open Market technologies were part of FatWire Software Corporation, owners of UpdateEngine, a Java-based content management solution.
NextPage soon embarked on an expanding effort to leverage the benefits of Folio technology into what was variously called Peer-To-Peer Content Networking and eContent Platform.
[25] NextPage CEO Brad Pelo gave testimony before a committee of the U.S. Senate in Provo, UT on October 9, 2000, on the advantages of NextPage's Folio server-based peer-to-peer document management, in a hearing about the future of the Internet, and on the negative impact of Napster, a similar peer-to-peer technology that allowed users to share music across the internet.
An inauguration ceremony was held on October 16, 2000, attended by 300 guests, including Pelo, Ashton, and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt.
Their promotional literature stated that once these sources were linked together in a secure "Peer-to-Peer Content Network," they became a single, virtual repository.
[29] In October 2001, NextPage released an upgrade to the NXT suite of products that allowed peer-to-peer collaboration over a customer's secure network.
[32] On September 1, 2004, NextPage, announced that Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian-based developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, had agreed to purchase the technology, product lines, and the over 500 customers and partners of NextPage's publishing applications business unit, including NXT, Folio, LivePublish, and GetSmart.