Offline Access an Important Component to Successful Enterprise Portal Initiatives, Says the Patricia Seybold Group

Independent research firm spotlights BackWeb Technologies as a key provider of technology infrastructure to offline-enable enterprise portals

Boston, Mass.—May 5, 2003—According to the Patricia Seybold Group, offline portal access is an increasingly important success factor for portal initiatives that aim to improve the productivity of mobile employees, such as sales people, field service personnel and other key employees who are frequently disconnected or poorly connected to the network.

In a new report titled "Taking Portals Offline: BackWeb ProactivePortal Enables Almost Seamless Offline Portal Usage," the Patricia Seybold Group concludes that offline access and synchronization at the portal level adds significant value to portal deployments by providing a way to maintain end users' customized experience online and offline. The report also states that this technology enables anytime, anywhere access to critical information and applications, adding substantial benefit to any enterprise portal environment and recommends that portal customers design portals to support online, wireless and offline use from the outset.

While many portal platforms have the capability to support wireless access via laptops and PDA devices, none of the portal platforms on the market currently enable offline access (for example, when the user is out of coverage). The report concludes that, in many cases, it is equally, if not more important to give employees access to the full, rich portal experience on their laptops, especially when they are not connected and working remotely.

"As large enterprises migrate to enterprise portals to consolidate critical content and business applications, many companies experience lower than expected success rates and return on investment," said David Marshak, senior vice president and principal consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group. "This is particularly true when the initiative targets critical mobile sales and field service employees that are key to the success of the business. In this scenario, it's our opinion that providing offline portal capabilities is not merely an added feature or a nice-to-have, it's core to the success of the portal initiative itself."

Vendor spotlight: BackWeb Technologies
Although several vendors currently offer solutions that enable offline access to portals, the report spotlights BackWeb Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: BWEB) as a key vendor in this space with impressive advanced technology. In March 2003, BackWeb Technologies introduced Version 3 of its ProactivePortal Server offering. Version 3 helps companies maximize the value of their portal investments by enabling mobile professionals to not only access their portal offline, but also update critical portal data while they are disconnected from the network.

"Of the solutions we've seen, BackWeb's ProactivePortal Server is very impressive in its advanced synchronization techniques and its ability to maintain the online and offline user experience," said Marshak. "BackWeb is addressing a key problem in portal adoption and leveraging the aggregation and customization work that has already been done in portal deployments. Overall, we would recommend looking at BackWeb ProactivePortal Server today to anyone implementing a strategic portal—particularly workspace portals that need to be used by mobile users."

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 is designed to deliver increased value to customers through the introduction of offline data entry, a two-way synchronization capability that enables end users to fill and submit web-based forms while disconnected from the network. Once the user reconnects online, the forms are synchronized up to the BackWeb ProactivePortal Server and applied through the portal to the underlying applications. This key innovation helps ensure 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.

For parties interested in learning more about techniques, including offline access, to refine portal strategies, portal expert David Marshak will conduct a two-day, hands-on Executive Strategy Session on May 21-22, 2003. For more information, visit: http://www.psgroup.com/workshops/PortalESS.html.

About Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.
The Patricia Seybold Group (http://www.psgroup.com) is the customer-centric executive's first choice for strategic insight, technology guidance, and business best practices. Founded in 1978 and based in Boston, Massachusetts, the firm offers business and technology consulting, strategic research, and executive guidance.

The CEO and founder, Patricia Seybold, is the best-selling author of Customers.com, which reveals a common formula to all successful e-business initiatives: "make it easy for customers to do business with you." Patricia Seybold's latest book, The Customer Revolution, explains how to measure and monitor the Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) (SM) in near real-time and how to link QCE(SM) to a company's fundamental source of value, its customers.

For more information about this report, "The Web Services Freight Train," or the Patricia Seybold Group please contact Ronni Marshak at rmarshak@psgroup.com or (617) 742-5200 x3108.