Microsoft has made the gold bits of Zentity version 1.0 available for download. Formerly code-named Famulus, the project is designed as a Research-Output Repository Platform meant to streamline the process associated with the creation and maintenance of an organization’s repository ecosystem. Version 1.0 of Zenity was introduced the past week by Tony Hey, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research's External Research group, at the Open Repositories Conference. The Redmond company has emphasized that it views Zenity as an integral part of its commitment to provide support for the academic community.

In this sense, Zenity 1.0 is advertised as a collection of building blocks, tools, and services set up to help developers put together and administer a digital library ecosystem. “Our Research Output Repository Platform provides a built-in ScholarlyWorks data model with pre-defined entities, such as Lecture, Publication, Paper, Presentation, Video, File, Person, and Tag along with basic properties for each of these and well known relationships such as Author, Cites, Version, etc. The platform also provides support to create custom entities and design custom data models using our Extensibility API,” Microsoft explained.

The software giant has pointed out that support for Zenity 1.0 covers a variety of not only formats but also services. The research-Output Repository Platform has been built to play nice with OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX, SWORD, AtomPub, RDFS, and OAI-ORE. It took Microsoft no less than nine months to provide two Beta releases of Zenity and to release the project to manufacturing. The wrapped-up version brings to the table new user interfaces as well as additional controls.

“Included is an easily extendible (ASP.Net) web interface. The web interface is built using custom controls developed as part of the included UI Toolkit controls,” Microsoft stated. “The Search API is included, which supports Advanced Query Syntax similar to that provided by Windows Search. Included in installation is support for services such as RSS, OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, AtomPub and SWORD. Also provided is a pluggable Security model for Authentication and Authorization to allow an administrator to secure repository content.”

Zentity 1.0 is available for download here.