BackWeb Delivers ProactivePortal Server™

New Solution Powers Portals with Required Next-Generation Portal Capabilities: Offline Access and Proactive™ Notification

Santa Clara, CA, September 5, 2001 — BackWeb Technologies (Nasdaq: BWEB), the leading provider of ProactivePortal™ technologies for the enterprise, today introduced the BackWeb® ProactivePortal Server, the first enterprise solution that expands the reach of any enterprise portal by satisfying the emerging requirements for offline access and Proactive notifications. BackWeb's announcement, made at Intermedia's Enterprise Web and Corporate Portal Show in Santa Clara, California, follows the company's June entry into the portal market.

As an enterprise-class solution, the BackWeb ProactivePortal Server can be integrated with any portal and Web based content to deliver two must-have capabilities: offline access and Proactive notification. BackWeb's offline portal technology allows the user to access critical content while disconnected from the Internet—yet with the same personalized user experience offline as online. This is especially critical for millions of remote users for whom offline access to critical content is a ‘must have' to reaching business goals. Industry analysts pinpoint that in many cases the core users of enterprise portals, mobile executives, business managers, sales and field personnel, are often forced to work in offline or disconnected environments.

"We believe [portal] users will demand consistent disconnected portal facilities within the next 12 months. In these situations, it will be better to deliver a robust set of aggregated information and services within an offline, proactive portal framework than to wait for wireless infrastructure to abound," said META Group analyst David Yockelson. "Moreover, the ability to disseminate critical content in both attached and disconnected environments—consider e-learning, sales updates, and critical customer information available during plane flights—will eventually become a staple for implementations."

In addition to offline access, BackWeb's ProactivePortal Server offers Proactive notification, which delivers time-sensitive content to specific users via attention grabbing Flashes, multimedia animations on the desktop that attract the users' attention without interfering with the active applications.

Bringing Information to the User
Key features of the BackWeb ProactivePortal Server include:

• Highly scalable subscription management capabilities that support deep end-user personalization allowing users to specifically choose which critical content they want delivered offline and via Proactive notification.
• A consistent user interface that delivers the same user experience both offline and online.
• Polite® content delivery – the ability to deliver massive data over thin and fat networks to multiple users without impacting network performance.
• Reliable closed-loop reporting that tracks the delivery and interaction with critical content on a per user basis
• Open architecture that connects BackWeb technology to any enterprise portal, Intranet or Web based content, enabling customers to preserve their existing investments
  

Maximizing Portal ROI
"As deployments of enterprise portals grow aggressively, companies are realizing that passive ‘publish and pray' nature of portals significantly challenges their return on investment," said Gwen Spertell, COO for BackWeb Technologies. "The BackWeb ProactivePortal Server was designed to bring BackWeb's highly scalable delivery & notification capabilities to the enterprise portal market, with ease of integration as the main priority. Thus allowing companies to increase usage of their portals, both offline and online, as well as maximizing the ROI on their portal investments."

Pricing and Availability
The BackWeb ProactivePortal Server is available immediately and will be priced to scale with the number of users. Please call (800) 863-0100 for more information.