Next week the content management crowd will converge on Boston for the annual Gilbane Conference (where we will speak about globalization standards). Expect plenty of announcements about the next version of your favorite CMS product. But Lionbridge cut to the front of the line by making its show announcement today during the slow-news-in-the-U.S. Thanksgiving week. There are 2 important developments reflected in the announcement.

• Lionbridge published a “Program Kit” to help systems integrators and CMS vendors to plug into Freeway. The kit includes web services application programming interfaces (APIs), documentation, code samples for .NET and Java, and a Freeway demonstration account. By announcing APIs, Lionbridge joins a growing number of companies with language technology — Idiom and Sajan among them — opening up their connectivity kimonos. Some remain conspicuously shut.

• Lionbridge assembled a motley but interesting group of partners — including Interwoven — to agree to have their names taped to the wall for this release. Rather than simply announcing platform partnerships, due is also given to the implementers who make such systems work. It’s likely that more names will be added to the list this winter.

Is there any news here? Yes, the most significant is that Lionbridge’s SaaS technology has progressed beyond vaporware. There were no APIs in previous incarnations (pre-carnations?) of Lion-this and Lion-that because there was nothing to connect to — at least, nothing that seemed solid enough or durable enough to warrant publishing its specifications. But the day has arrived. Lionbridge has technology, and you can connect to it through a published and supported application programming interface.

Lionbridge aimed its news chiefly at the dozens of companies making CMS software, and the hundreds of systems integrators working the space. These players now have a packaged kit to get them started when a client using Lionbridge wants to extend workflow automation to include translation procurement. Lionbridge has hundreds of customers, so this is not an insignificant matter for many integrators.

Those customers may not know or care, but if and when they want to, they will find it easier to incorporate Lionbridge translation services into a formalized content workstream. For translation buyers who don’t use Lionbridge today but might want to use them in future, we doubt this will make it onto their radar screen today. But they’ll have one fewer objection to throw in face of the Lionbridge salesperson when the RFP responses are read out.