BEAS Bea Systems (MM)

BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction Release Designed to Drive New Modes of Collaboration, Improved Productivity and Participation SAN JOSE, Calif., April 8, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BEA Systems today announced the major release of its BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction suite of products, including new versions of BEA AquaLogic(R) Interaction, BEA AquaLogic(R) Interaction Collaboration and BEA AquaLogic(R) Analytics. As more and more enterprises seek to enhance existing portal deployments and stale intranets with Web 2.0 capabilities, these new releases are designed to help companies deliver innovative new workplace strategies via BEA's cross-platform web suite. With the new BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction release, customers can create richer, more interactive profile pages, deliver infinitely customizable user experiences and multi-channel interfaces, leverage full RSS capabilities, and enable dynamic human networks to create social applications that enhance worker productivity, group collaboration and community innovation. For more information on how BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction products can be leveraged for enterprise social computing, please visit http://www.bea.com/alui. The March of Dimes, the leading nonprofit organization for pregnancy and baby health, selected BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction as an organization-wide framework for its employees, partners and end-users to create and share information in the pursuit of improving the health of newborns and infants. "Today, we are embracing new innovations in portal, collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies to help us achieve our mission of improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality," said Paul Tominsky, director of enterprise portal/knowledge management at March of Dimes. "By empowering our employees, volunteers, educators, outreach workers and advocates with greater control and flexibility over how information in our organization is used and shared through our portal platform, we hope to achieve a more active user community, and improved collaboration and sharing of enterprise knowledge through the deployment of BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction." American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the nation's leading nonprofit health organization providing diabetes research, information and advocacy. It selected BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction to help provide a readily accessible, cross-functional platform for capturing, finding and sharing information and services through the Web that staff and volunteers need to do their job and fulfill the ADA mission. "ADA initially deployed its portal, MyADA, to 900 staff nationwide in 2006. After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, we were ready to begin adopting these principles in the enterprise," said Rob Cork, director, internal and volunteer communications at American Diabetes Association. "Portals tend to be the leading vehicles for the implementation of Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing because of their rich user interface and interactive capabilities. We are in our initial planning stages and will use BEA AquaLogic(R) User Interaction as the starting point for our foray into MyADA 2.0 for our staff and volunteers." BEA AquaLogic Interaction 6.5 Debuts The new release of BEA AquaLogic(R) Interaction 6.5 delivers the industry's first full-fledged social computing platform, with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business -- project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems -- that are often shared inefficiently through email. The release also introduces improved usability designed to empower knowledge workers to more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a highly flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools. New features include: -- Social profile pages: energized end-user profile pages, with new features that are designed to allow users to communicate their status and enable social networking and activity-sharing; -- ActivityService(TM) and new extensibility points for harvesting user interactions: a new REST-based API designed to allow systems to publish activity updates to a centralized service that can render those updates in end-user profile pages; -- Comprehensive RSS production and consumption: a comprehensive notification and subscription service that supports RSS generation to track new activity on common objects, as well as immediate or summary email updates. Additionally, the release features an RSS crawler, to import content into the search index and knowledge management framework via RSS; -- Additional usability improvements: these include human readable URLs, one-click page creation and edit menus, simplified wizard menus and more; -- Infrastructure improvements: these include support for .Net Framework 2.0 and IBM DB2 Portals and Collaboration: A New Way to Work Together Portals continue to be an effective vehicle for increasing employee productivity and collaboration, and companies naturally turn to portals to enhance external collaboration between partners and customers. BEA AquaLogic(R) Interaction Collaboration 4.5 can help employees, customers and partners work together via the Web easily and efficiently. Users can share and manage documents and project information, engage in online discussions, and coordinate through notifications and synchronized calendars. BEA AquaLogic(R) Interaction Collaboration 4.5 extends these capabilities with enhanced notification options, deeper Microsoft Office integration, enhanced metadata support and general infrastructure enhancements. New features include: -- Enhanced notifications: a centralized notification and subscription service designed to extend email notification by allowing users to generate secure, personal RSS feeds, tracking activity on projects, documents, discussions and task lists; -- Improved MS Office integration: the release features a new Microsoft Office Ribbon plug-in, which allows editing and managing project documents directly from within Microsoft Office applications; -- User interface improvements: with support for drag-and-drop design of project overview pages and new modules for images and announcements; Making Metrics and Usage Real-Time An analytics tool for monitoring portal, Web application and enterprise mashups is critical in helping to maximize return on investment. BEA AquaLogic(R) Analytics 2.1 is designed to allow customers to determine how effectively people are using content, applications and information to collaborate and complete business tasks together using their deployed Web applications, portals and enterprise mashups. New features include: -- Collector clustering and failover: supports clustering of any number of usage activity collectors, and built-in fault-tolerance; -- Remote query API: a SOAP-based export API that developers can use to extract data from the Analytics collector and visualize that data in third-party tools; -- Improved global filters: provide more granular activity reporting; "Over the years, our portal customers have seen many benefits from using BEA's portal technology, including increased employee productivity and efficiency, reduced support and service costs, increased customer loyalty, consolidation of IT infrastructure, and lower operational costs via reduction in paper-based or manual processes," said Mark Carges, executive vice president at BEA Systems. "Now with innovative new social computing and Web 2.0 capabilities added to our portal platform, portals are once again being considered a leading vehicle for new modes of enterprise collaboration, productivity and participation." About BEA BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to transform their business by building a Liquid Enterprise(TM) can be found at http://www.bea.com/. DATASOURCE: BEA Systems, Inc. CONTACT: Marissa Lee of BEA Systems, Inc., +1-415-402-7146, Web site: http://www.bea.com/

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