Critical Path Adds Enhanced Mobility, New Applications and Greater Integration to Communications Platform.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2002

Customizable Wireless Access, Unparalleled Breadth of

Messaging Applications and New XML Interfaces Will Benefit

Carriers, Service Providers, and Enterprises

Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq:CPTH), a global leader in digital communications software and services, today announced that it has extended the Critical Path(TM) Communications Platform with broader support for mobile access; new integrated, customizable applications; and greater flexibility in integrating 3rd party applications. Building upon the company's experience in powering messaging for over 190 carriers and service providers around the world, the new technology is now available for telecommunications customers (see related announcement) in the form of enhanced solutions for Mobile Messaging, Personal Information Management (PIM), and Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) Enhancements. It is also being incorporated into new versions of the company's hosted messaging and licensed messaging software for enterprises.

The Critical Path Communications Platform enables customers to more rapidly -- and profitably -- deploy new messaging solutions and incrementally add services as their business grows. The open, highly scalable technology helps customers cut costs by taking greater advantage of existing hardware, leveraging in-house and 3rd party communications applications, using less storage space, and consuming fewer IT resources.

With a modular, standards-based design, the platform provides customizable services and applications whose easy integration with current and future environments protects customers' investments. The software takes advantage of the latest approaches in identity management to provide centralized administration of user information, allowing such data to be tied into provisioning systems and leveraged across other mission-critical applications. This further reduces costs of operations, improves security and lets classes of services be tailored to the needs of each group of users.

"The Critical Path Communications Platform is all about creating synergies among different services," said XJ Wang, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "Critical Path's modular architecture provides the flexibility to leverage messaging and non-messaging functions, such as Presence to deliver highly customized, differentiated communications services to mass market and business users."

Critical Path's technology lets consumers and business users be truly mobile, accessing their most important data from anywhere at any time. The platform provides a single, integrated infrastructure that both carriers and large enterprises can use to deliver messaging more easily and more cost effectively. Key new capabilities include:

-- Consistent, easy-to-use email, instant messaging, address books, calendars, task lists, and file storage.

-- Access from wireless devices, Web browsers, desktop clients such as Microsoft(R) Outlook(R), and voice systems.

-- Automatic generation of alerts based on user-specified events with dynamic routing and delivery via SMS, WAP Push, email, or instant message (over AOL(R), Yahoo!(R), MSN(R), or Critical Path Instant Messaging).

-- Calendar with group scheduling, availability lookup, and secure calendar sharing.

-- Extensible address books that can be integrated with any application -- including 3rd party products -- and provide sophisticated organizing and secure sharing of contacts.

-- Online file storage with support for both private access and secure sharing, enabling enterprise collaboration as well as rich applications such as MMS Photo Albums.

-- Secure instant messaging with presence detection, encryption, and support for the latest industry standards.

-- Synchronization of address books, calendars, and tasks with Microsoft Office(R) and Palm(R) handheld devices.

-- New XML interfaces enabling 3rd party information-delivery applications to automatically send and receive wireless messages over SMS and WAP Push.

-- Common personalization and user preferences storage across the platform can now be leveraged by 3rd party applications.

Critical Path's integrated messaging applications work together to share data, deliver an improved user experience, and provide intelligent processing of messages. For example, a meeting in someone's calendar could automatically trigger an alert that is dynamically routed to the user via email, wireless, or instant message, depending upon the time of day. After reading the alert, the user could easily send instant messages to co-workers listed in his or her personal address book -- the same one used by other Critical Path messaging applications. Having all of these capabilities integrated and available from one vendor significantly reduces complexity of deployments, simplifies on-going support, and drives lower total cost of ownership.

Messaging Builds on Identity Management, Improving Security and Savings

Critical Path's messaging applications take advantage of the latest in identity management infrastructure, allowing class of service data, single sign-on passwords, personalized user preferences and other user information to be stored in a centralized directory for efficient use and administration. To handle the loads required by carriers, Critical Path's directory services have been specifically optimized for handling tens of millions of entries. This makes it easy for levels of services and branding to be customized to the needs of particular groups of users, for new services to be added later, and for user information to be integrated with 3rd party applications, databases and reporting systems. In addition, Critical Path's meta-directory services can ease deployment and reduce costs by enabling simpler setup and customization of email accounts, faster and more reliable disabling of old accounts, and more efficient sharing of user profile data across multiple mission-critical systems and applications.

See Related Announcement on New Solutions for Carriers

Details of new carrier and service provider solutions incorporating the enhanced Critical Path Communications Platform are available in a separate release titled "Critical Path Expands Messaging Solutions For Carriers to Target Both Consumers and Enterprises."

About Critical Path, Inc.

Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq:CPTH) is a global leader in digital communications software and services. The company provides messaging solutions -- from wireless, secure and unified messaging to basic email and personal information management -- as well as identity management solutions that simplify user profile management and strengthen information security. The standards-based Critical Path Communications Platform, built to perform reliably at the scale of public networks, delivers the industry's lowest total cost of ownership for messaging solutions and lays a solid foundation for next-generation communications services. Solutions are available on a hosted or licensed basis. Critical Path's customers include more than 700 enterprises, 190 carriers and service providers, eight national postal authorities and 35 government agencies. Critical Path is headquartered in San Francisco. More information can be found at www.criticalpath.net.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains forward-looking statements by the Company and its executives regarding the performance, security, scalability and interoperability of our product and service offerings, the ability of our customers to achieve cost savings in the provision of services, industry trends, market and customer requirements, the ability of our products and services to meet the business needs of our customers, the market for products and services like ours and the performance of our senior management in achieving strategic goals. The words and expressions "look forward to," "will," "expect," "plan," "believe," "seek," "strive for," "anticipate," hope," "estimate" and similar expressions are intended to identify the Company's forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks include, but are not limited to, our evolving business strategy and the emerging and changing nature of the market for our products and services, our ability to deliver on our sales objectives, the ability of our technology and our competitors' technologies to address customer demands, changes in economic and market conditions, unplanned system interruptions and capacity constraints, software and service design defects. These and other risks and uncertainties are described in more detail in the Company's filings with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov) made from time to time, including Critical Path's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2001, and the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 30, June 30, and September 30, 2002, all as may be amended from time to time.

Note to Editors: Critical Path and the Critical Path logo are the trademarks of Critical Path, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their holders.