McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group's CAP Upgrades Software; Releases CAP Studio Version 2.0 at NeoCon 2001 Trade Show.

Business & Technology Editors

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 18, 2001

New Version Provides Powerful New Functionality and More Flexibility,

Increasing Productivity of Interior Designers,

Furniture Dealers, and Facility Managers

CAP, the leading design and specification software company dedicated to the contract office furniture industry and part of The McGraw-Hill Companies' (NYSE: MHP) Construction Information Group, today announced the debut of CAP Studio 2.0, an upgrade to its popular design and specification software, at the international contract furniture industry trade show, NeoCon 2001.

CAP Studio Version 2.0 provides powerful new functionality and more flexibility to help increase the productivity of interior designers, furniture dealers, and facility managers. Some of the important, new features include Custom Catalogs, Block Replace, Customer Proposal and Enhanced Pricing Capability.

"CAP has a long history of serving the contract furniture design and specification market," said Steve Rogal, general manager of CAP. "We are fortunate to have a large, passionate installed base of customers who provided extensive input into our new software. We have incorporated their feedback and requests into Studio 2.0 to help take them to the next level."

Custom Catalogs are a unique and powerful feature provided to help designers on large or repetitive projects. To capture furniture specifications for re-use, the Custom Catalog is defined by the user and may contain fully or partially specified products or groups of products and is an excellent mechanism for implementing and maintaining corporate furniture standard programs. Custom Catalogs can be accessed from within both the drawing and worksheet in CAP Studio 2.0.

"Custom Catalogs are a very pervasive tool which may change the way designers think about, create, and use furniture standards. We feel it will definitely help increase the productivity of CAP users," said Dave Gombert, manager of CAP Software Development.

"In the real world, short timeframes on design projects, last minute specification changes, and part substitutions are the norm, not the exception," commented Alison Roan, a former designer and now CAP trainer. "But Studio 2.0 simplifies tremendously the process of replacing blocks in an AutoCAD drawing with a new Block Replace function." This dynamic, new feature allows global changes to products in a drawing to save time and reduce cost. In addition, a new Explorer capability in Designer provides access to complete manufacturer catalog content within a drawing, and a new Block Preview Window provides a view of the 2D or 3D symbol. Users may simply "drag and drop" the symbol into the drawing.

To assist and improve administrative tasks, the Worksheet in CAP Studio 2.0 has undergone a major revision incorporating many new features and functionality. A Customer Proposal can be quickly created using Cover Page Editor with stored templates for clients and a management tool for contact information. "Users can easily put together complete, high-quality proposals that include Enhanced Discounting and Bottom-Line Price Adjustments," stated Gombert. Also the worksheet in Studio 2.0 will fully support a new Undo/Redo Function similar to popular document-based Windows applications.

"CAP Studio has become a strategic part of the design workflow at Goodmans," according to Steve Miller, chief information officer at Goodmans Office Furnishings. "From what we have seen of Studio 2.0, we are anxious to take advantage of the many, new productivity features that it offers our dealership."

CAP Studio 1.0 was introduced in 1998 and is the industry standard for design and specification. CAP Studio 2.0 builds upon the original version of the software and is based on extensive research with designers, dealers, and contract furniture manufacturers. "We are very excited to bring Studio 2.0 to market, because over the past year and a half CAP has worked closely with key customers to understand their needs and then design and incorporate the functionality, features and enhancements they have requested and validated," Gombert stated.

CAP Studio is a comprehensive program that includes two base applications, CAP Designer and CAP Worksheet. CAP Designer is an AutoCAD-based application for drawing and furniture layout that automatically performs a takeoff in CAP Worksheet. CAP Worksheet is a powerful spreadsheet program that manages specification and administrative tasks.

About CAP:

CAP is the leading supplier of proprietary software, information development, training, AutoCAD software, and other technology serving the contract furnishing industry. CAP distributes electronic catalogs and CAD libraries for more than 40 leading furniture manufacturers. CAP was founded in 1978 and was the first supplier of technology designed specifically to serve design and specification of contract furniture. CAP created "SIF", the Standard Interface Format, which is now the industry standard for manufacturer catalog file structure. Today CAP is an active member of the OFDA Technology Committee, which is working to replace SIF with a new data standard based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). CAP is a business unit of the McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group. For more information on CAP go to www.cap-online.com or call 1 (800) 227 - 0038.

About The McGraw-Hill Companies

Founded in 1888, The McGraw-Hill Companies is a global information services provider meeting worldwide needs in financial services, education and business-to-business information through leading brands such as Standard & Poor's, BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill Education. The Corporation has more than 300 offices in 33 countries. Sales in 2000 were $4.3 billion. Additional information is available at http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.