BackWeb enhances ProactivePortal Server to support 2-way Synchronization in new version 3 release

Enhanced technology platform extends HTML to offline-enable any portal, intranet or Web application

San Jose, Calif.—March 24, 2003—BackWeb Technologies (Nasdaq: BWEB), a leading provider of offline web infrastructure software, today announced Version 3 of its ProactivePortal® Server offering. The new product release helps companies maximize the value of their portal investments, by enabling mobile professionals to not only access their portal offline, but also to update critical portal data while they are disconnected from the network.

Enterprises looking to bolster profits by reducing costs and improving productivity are increasingly migrating to an ‘online portal' architecture to consolidate critical content and business applications. However, the ‘online portal' architecture with all of its strengths is sub-optimal with the working requirements of the intermittently connected employee base such as customer-facing field sales and service organizations. The productivity of these employees, depends on in their ability to interact with the portal anytime anywhere, including when they are out of the office doing work and without a network connection. The latest release of the ProactivePortal Server uniquely addresses these challenges via an efficient offline-enabling method that requires a simple integration process of extending HTML by inserting OTML (Offline Tagging Markup Language) Tags into selected ‘portlets', thus requiring no code re-engineering to provide full-featured interaction with corporate portals, regardless of network connectivity status.

"As our enterprise portal initiative grows in strategic importance, enabling portal interaction of our field sales force regardless of their connectivity is paramount," said Jorge Steinfeld, VP, Information Systems at Check Point Software Technologies, a BackWeb customer. "BackWeb's ProactivePortal Server is a key to the productivity of our Portal as it gives our field sales force offline access to the pricing tools, sales tools and technical information needed to more rapidly achieve their objectives. With BackWeb, we were up and running in a matter weeks and the initiative required no re-engineering to our applications or portal infrastructure."

As an enterprise-class solution, the BackWeb® ProactivePortal Server integrates with portal frameworks to enable offline interaction with critical content and applications with essentially the same personalized user experience that occurs online. ProactivePortal Server v3 delivers increased value to customers through the introduction of offline data entry, a two-way synchronization capability that enables end users to fill and submit portal-based forms while disconnected from the network. Once the user reconnects online, the forms are synchronized up to the BackWeb ProactivePortal Server and applied to through the portal to the underlying applications. This key innovation ensures all updated and altered information is automatically stored and synchronized, increasing the utility and usefulness of the enterprise portal and increasing mobile workers' productivity and efficiency.

Additional advantages of Version 3 of the ProactivePortal Server include:

• Network-friendly content updates: ProactivePortal Server v3 automatically syncs content or users can sync on demand. BackWeb's patented Polite communications uses bandwidth-sensitive delivery to update the PC in the background only when the user's network connection is idle;
• Reuses portal investment in development, personalization, presentation and security: ProactivePortal Server v3 offers an extremely cost effective way to provide offline portal capabilities and requires no change to portal code, portal environments or portal deployment processes;
• Alerts: Users can now be alerted to new content via an impactful notification that solves the information glut problem;
• Increased portal effectiveness and ROI: ProactivePortal Server v3 also tracks offline interaction with content to understand habits, content usage and ultimately ROI;
• Improved scalability: Enhancements to ProactivePortal Server v3 include a significant increase in user capacity

"As enterprises continue to move their applications to the web, offline portal interaction is fast becoming an everyday requirement for mobile workers," said Eli Barkat, BackWeb's chairman and CEO. "Version 3 of our ProactivePortal Server solution bridges the gap between enterprise's online web architectures and the mobile workforce. It enables the mobile users to take their portal on the road and do offline work with critical portal applications such as sales opportunity management, service request tracking, expense reports & time sheets, employee self service, project collaboration, and others in a similar way to how they use offline e-mail today."

"Portals are one of the fundamental technologies in the smart enterprise suite, and for many users, offline, interactive portal access should become a non-negotiable requirement," said Gene Phifer, vice president and research director of Gartner. "We view the introduction of two-way synchronization capabilities as a major leap forward in evolution of the offline market, and recommend for any company that views intermittently connected users, such as customer-facing and revenue generating field employees, as a critical portal audience, to seriously consider such capabilities."

Availability
BackWeb ProactivePortal Server v3 is available immediately and can be purchased through SAP, IBM and BackWeb.