CoVia Introduces `Vortal' -- Vertical Community Portal Solution; CoVia Vortal Makes Vertically Oriented, Personalized Portals Easy to Create and Customize.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 6, 2001

CoVia, the only enterprise information portal provider to enable the personalized, multi-tiered, collaborative business relationships that increase partner communication, sales effectiveness and customer loyalty, today announced the general availability of Vortal, the newest addition to CoVia's suite of next-generation enterprise portal solutions. CoVia Vortal enables companies to quickly create industry specific, personalized portals that can be entirely managed by non-technical users who can quickly produce, update and sustain fresh, relative content for any targeted community -- all without IT support. Supporting such features as self-registration and password protected access, Vortal enables any organization to add "MyOrganization"-like functionality to their publicly facing web sites in less than 30 days.

Drawing on technology that powers CoVia's flagship InfoPortal platform, Vortal leverages many of the innovative capabilities that have made InfoPortal the leader in Multi-tier Relationship Networks. Using iChannel content syndication and delivery technology, Vortal delivers organization and industry specific news content and information directly to targeted users desktops and enables them to customize their view to suit their particular objectives and interests. Organizations can intersperse company content with syndicated news feeds included with the Vortal application to produce a robust information destination for customers, prospects and partners. Since Vortal also uses many self-service technologies developed as part of the InfoPortal platform, managing and updating the site can be done by anyone capable of operating a web browser. No specific experience or knowledge of XML, HTML or other programming languages is required for day-to-day users to keep the site fresh and valuable. The result is low cost of ownership and more relevant and timely information delivered directly to customers.

"Vortal has made it much simpler for us to provide rich, vertically-focused content within IntuitAdvisor," said Steve Blundell, vice president, Professional Accountants Channel, Intuit Inc. "Now any accountant, whether they're using Intuit software products or not, can take advantage of this rich information resource, and of additional web based services from Intuit -- like intranets or the ability to create private client sites."

"IntuitAdvisor has been an outstanding example of Vortal's ability to enable businesses to deepen the relationships they already have with their existing communities," said Boyd Pearce, chief sales and marketing officer for CoVia. "Vortal also lets them securely and selectively leverage existing content and applications with unregistered online visitors, a powerful capability for the creation of new relationships."

CoVia Vortal, when combined with other applications in the CoVia BizOnline Solutions suite serves as a valuable demand generation tool and front-end that can be used to manage and enhance the entire customer relationship life cycle. User's personalized Vortal view can be migrated into a robust, online Private Client Site that helps reinforce your organization's relationship with them through the addition of additional InfoPortal features such as knowledge sharing, discussions and other collaboration technologies.

CoVia Vortal is built on a robust security model and its single sign-on feature provides users with convenient and seamless movement among multiple applications. Vortal is built on an open, extensible platform that allows easy integration of existing applications and content directly into the Vortal interface. Vortal's powerful search capabilities enable attribute and text searches, and allow users to get search results and highlights of search terms inside HTML and PDF content on the site.

Availability

CoVia Vortal is available now. For additional information, please visit www.covia.com.

About CoVia

CoVia is the market leader for next-generation enterprise portals, and its multi-tier network technology allows businesses to digitally replicate their own complex relationships on the Internet so that collaboration, communication, and transactions can be conducted more rapidly and more effectively.

CoVia provides complete solution sets for the entire spectrum of business portal applications encompassing employees, business units, suppliers, business partners, and customers. Using CoVia's multi-tier technology, companies can deploy commerce solutions that include their customer's customer, and other relationships not possible with any other solution. CoVia powers implementations by Intuit, ADP, American Airlines, SAP AG, Wells Fargo, First American Financial, and many more. For more information, please visit www.covia.com or call 650/428-1800.

Note to Editors: The recommended way of writing CoVia is all one word, with an uppercase C and V, all other letters lowercase. CoVia is a trademark of CoVia Technologies Inc.