Captaris Wishes Happy 160th Birthday to the Fax Machine; Supporting over a Billion Documents Each Business Day, Captaris Fax Server Technology Improves Workflow and Saves Time.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 27, 2003

DID YOU KNOW? Today marks the 160th birthday of the fax machine.

Captaris, Inc. (Nasdaq:CAPA), a leading provider of business information delivery solutions, celebrates the anniversary by announcing three customers who use fax as part of their critical business systems. These customers and tens of thousands more have replaced stand-alone fax machines with fax server technology, integrating fax into their IT systems and business processes. With fax servers, users can send and receive documents directly from the desktop as well as automating delivery of documents from back office applications. Fax servers can reduce document delivery costs by up to 90 percent(1) and improve productivity through improved workflow. They also ensure secure, reliable transactions and produce legally valid documents.

Sun Life Financial, Barnes and Noble and Dunlop Tire have all found significant cost savings by integrating RightFax, the world's leading fax server, into their business processes. Additionally, Captaris MediaLinq services provide outsourced fax and email solutions that send more than a million documents each business day, helping companies automate their business communications workflows and improve operational efficiencies.

On June 30, 2000, Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN bill). Many hoped that the act, which authorized so-called digital signatures as legally valid forms of authentication, would dramatically increase confidence in the Internet replacing paper-based transactions -- cutting costs and improving business processes. However, technical considerations and concerns about online privacy, security, fraud and the legality of electronic documents have discouraged adoption of this new technology. This explains why fax continues to be in such wide use today, across industries and across the globe.

Some of the tens of thousands of customers who use Captaris fax technology every day include:

Sun Life Financial

Sun Life Financial is a leading international financial services organization providing a diverse range of wealth accumulation and protection products and services to individuals and corporate customers. Sun Life Financial's business requires employees to work with critical documents related to the financial condition of their customers. Faxing is an essential form of communication for Sun Life Financial employees -- customers regularly fax stock trades and mutual fund orders to Sun Life Financial, as well as a variety of other important information.

"Our research showed RightFax to be the market leader in fax server and e-document delivery technology," said Sam Aidonidis, systems developer at Sun Life Financial. The company has been using RightFax technology for approximately five years and its installation has grown from one RightFax fax server to five servers in all: two RightFax Business Servers and three RightFax Enterprise Servers.

Barnes and Noble

Barnes & Noble operates 500 bookstores and 508 B. Dalton bookstores in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The company offers more than 175,000 book titles from more than 27,000 publishers. Along with the comprehensive in-store selection, each store can fill customers' special orders from more than one million books in print. To maintain the massive supply of books to fulfill orders placed by patrons at the physical stores and on the barnesandnoble.com Web site, the distribution center must continually communicate with publishing houses.

"We place orders with many different publishing houses on a daily basis," said Ed Villalobos, Applications Development Manager for Barnes & Noble. To place these orders, purchase orders must be sent to the publishing houses, and fax is the communication method of choice for this task.

"My first responsibility when I joined Barnes & Noble was to eliminate the tremendous amount of time and effort it took to fax out our POs," Villalobos continued. "I knew that faxing problems such as tracking unsent faxes and wrong fax numbers would go away with a fax server." The company chose RightFax as the fax solution for the distribution center. "I worked with RightFax products for many years before coming to Barnes & Noble, and I feel that each upgrade has shown great advancements," added Villalobos. "I chose RightFax for many reasons -- it permits integration with other application platforms, is easy to use, lets us choose our own hardware and has outstanding administrative capabilities. Our business relies on our ability to communicate, and we rely on RightFax."

Dunlop Tire

Dunlop Tire Corporation is a full-line tire supplier dedicated to the manufacturing and marketing of the world's finest and most technologically advanced passenger, performance, light truck, medium truck, and motorcycle tires. The company wanted to update its purchase order processes from a manual procedure to a more automated solution that would integrate with its Oracle ERP purchasing application.

"Manually mailing or faxing purchase orders was very time consuming," says Steve Vannier, senior business analyst at Dunlop Tire. "By the time they had printed the orders, stuffed them in envelopes, and put postage on the envelopes, our buyers would spend a tenth of each day just mailing these POs."

The production fax solution powered by RightFax, offered a cost-effective product that would scale to fit Dunlop's needs. By fax-enabling Dunlop's Oracle ERP Purchasing application, Dunlop could more easily manage their mission-critical purchase order process. Dunlop associates across the company's three locations use production fax to send faxes from Oracle just as easily as they print. The Microsoft NT-based production fax solution has the ability to process more than 1,000 faxes each day.

Implementing their production fax solution has resulted in significant time and cost savings, reduction in the time and expense needed to deliver mission-critical documents as well as a seamless integration with Oracle applications. According to Vannier, "Now, our associates can spend more time on value-added, revenue-generating functions rather than on clerical work," he says. "And, because the system is so dependable and scalable, it's a solution that will continue to serve our purchase order needs even as the company changes."

History of Fax

-- The patent was granted to Alexander Bain on May 27, 1843. This

was 33 years before the patent for the telephone.

-- The first commercial fax service was opened between Paris and

Lyon in 1865 and they were called pantelegraphes.

-- Faxes really came into their own in 1906 when they found their

first major use: to transmit photos for newspapers.

-- By the mid-1980s faxes were ubiquitous in offices and in many

homes.

How Fax Technology Works

The way that a fax machine works is very simple. The page to be sent is divided into strips. Each line is then broken up into black and white segments, which can then be sent like the dots and dashes of Morse Code and put together at the other end. Digital fax machines have only changed this principle slightly. Pages are now divided into tiny squares called Pels, each of which can be either black or white.

Fax server technology captures inbound faxes, converts them into an electronic image, and routes them to appropriate recipient's desktop or email, where they can for annotated, archived or forwarded. Outbound faxes are sent directly from applications by capturing the print stream, converting it into an electronic image and sending it as a fax automatically and unattended from the server.

About Captaris, Inc.

Captaris is a leading provider of business information delivery solutions that integrate and automate the flow of messages, data and documents. Captaris produces a suite of proven products and services, in partnership with leading enterprise software companies, delivered through a global distribution network. Captaris has over 100,000 systems installed worldwide, with more than 90 of the Fortune 100 companies using the company's award-winning products and services to reduce costs and increase the performance of critical business information investments.

Captaris is headquartered in Bellevue, WA, and has main offices in Tucson, AZ, Portland, OR, and San Francisco, CA. In addition, Captaris has sales and support offices in Holland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and Dubai. The company was founded in 1982 and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol CAPA. For more information, please visit www.captaris.com.

Captaris products RightFax, CallXpress, MediaLinq and Infinite are trademarks of Captaris. All other company, brand and product names are the property and/or trademarks of their respective owners.

(1) Source: Davidson Consulting