About Us

Weborganic Pty Limited is a private company based in Sydney, Australia. PageSeeder is the company’s flagship development platform. CTO and Chief Architect Philip Rutherford, and company directors Nick Carr and Andrew Bird have each been at the forefront of the professional publishing industry for over 15 years. With a 10 year track record of successful implementations, Weborganic is now 100% focused on supporting developers build their own PageSeeder platform powered solutions.

Philip Rutherford is a 20 year veteran of the software development industry, specialising in Java, XML and internet technology. For the last 10 years he has built PageSeeder powered solutions for a global client base. Philip presents papers at numerous conferences and was the winner of the IBM Java Brainwave Award at the WWW7 conference in 1998 for his co-development of PageSeeder.

Nick Carr is a well known figure in the publishing technology field. In addition to his involvement with Weborganic he is also the founder of Allette Systems, the specialist XML design, training and implementation systems integrator. Nick is also the convenor and chair of the long running OpenPublish and OpenStandards annual industry conference series.

Andrew Bird is a successful publishing industry executive and entrepreneur. In addition to holding senior positions in multinational professional publishing companies, he also founded equity information firm Aspect Financial (later Aspect Huntley). Aspect Huntley was acquired in 2006 by Morningstar Australia and New Zealand, where Andrew is now CEO.

History of PageSeeder

Java Brainwaves

When software developer Philip Rutherford and technical writer Julie Gibson accepted The IBM Java Brainwave Award for PageSeeder they could not have imagined that in less than a decade their platform would be used by a growing list of companies, publishers and government departments around the world. Here’s how they did it.

Constraints, challenges, no budget

Working in a publicly (under) funded, technical training institution in 1997, Julie and Philip jumped at the opportunity to use some of their time to try to develop a publishing solution to reduce the costs of creating and maintaining thousands of class lecture notes.

With no budget they set about building a system to address a very complex publishing problem:

• Writers were technical experts who weren't expected to learn XML or invest in purpose-built editors.
• Content was complex technical data demanding a rich, flexible object model.
• Web based training was relatively new and lecturers wanted the same flexibility as they were used to with paper.
• Lecturers wanted to collect comments, like modern blog comments, at arbitrary points within the documents.
• Documents needed to be available to multiple, simultaneous, but unsynchronized classes.
• Corrections needed to reflect instantly to all users, however, class specific answers and discussions were to be visible only to that group.

(Remember this was 1997 – dialup lines, no plugins, need to support off-line use, etc.)

In the end, they set out to create a publishing system that:

• Enabled collaborative document creation by untrained users.
• Enabled offline document updates and reviews.
• Supported complex data models using nothing more than HTML 2.0.

Found, a solution

Philip and Julie were able to conceptualize a solution that overcame the seemingly impossible constraints. By embedding small unique identifiers (our "seeds") at nominated points in the HTML page and using the XLink standard to externally manage the capture and display of student comments.

It's taken some time, well spent

It's one thing to conceptualize an idea, quite another to successfully implement a new document processing solution in a client organisation. The PageSeeder platform has been built, rebuilt, refined, enhanced and tested in the unforgiving and demanding real world, resulting in dozens of successful PageSeeder powered implementations.

With the realization that PageSeeder has the potential to revolutionise how complex documents are created, managed and published, our strategy now is to focus 100% of our efforts on the platform and enabling developers to build PageSeeder powered applications for their own end-users.