Microsoft Announces Office XP National Solutions Challenge Finalists

REDMOND, Wash. -- June 20, 2001 -- Companies Use Office XP Innovations Such as Smart Tags and XML Integration To Create Revolutionary New Custom Solutions

Microsoft Corp. today announced the finalists for the Microsoft® Office XP National Solutions Challenge, a contest in which companies developed innovative business solutions using the Office XP platform. The contest has been underway across the United States for the last three months. More than 150 companies participated and 19 finalists were selected for developing unique solutions that solve critical business problems. The winner of the contest will be announced at Microsoft Fusion 2001 and awarded a $20,000 prize.

"The overwhelming response to the contest demonstrates that developers and their customers recognize the business value of Office XP, and the finalists have created groundbreaking solutions using the innovations in Office XP, primarily smart tags and XML integration," said Peter Cray, director of U.S. Office Marketing at Microsoft. "It's exciting to see how developers have embraced these technologies to create some truly unique and impressive solutions."

Developers can quickly build business solutions by using the development tools in Office XP, which support common programming languages such as the award-winning Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) and leading technologies such as XML, while also taking advantage of the familiar user interface of Office. Sophisticated Office XP solutions can be built using leading-edge technology that is customizable and solves significant business problems. Examples of this technology are smart tags, which enable people to access information from the Web, enterprise data sources and other desktop applications, and XML integration. Office XP offers native support of XML as a file format in Excel and Access, which makes it much easier for people to extract data from Office XP documents into other XML-enabled applications using Internet standards.

The finalists created a wide range of custom Office XP solutions, ranging from sales force automation to customer relationship management to knowledge management, for a variety of industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, financial and legal. The solutions deliver exceptional value and enable companies to rapidly access information and create content, as well as easily capture and share business knowledge. The finalists for the Office XP National Solutions Challenge include the following:

Amadeus Consulting, a Microsoft Certified Partner, developed HIPAA-compliant solutions to revolutionize medical transcriptions; XML-enabled, Pocket PC applications; fault-tolerant, secure intranet portals; and an Office XP-enabled transcriptionist workbench for Ascriptus, Inc., a healthcare service provider. This technology will improve transcription accuracy, advance medical practices, and save doctors' valuable time and money.

Conchango's Office XP solution builds on a bank workflow solution designed to make editing research documents easier for editorial and production staff by using a keyword feature built with smart tags.

Genisys Consulting Inc. created the Genisys Advanced System for Sales Information and Service Tracking (GenASSIST) solution to enable its company to respond more quickly to business opportunities by automating the sales and fulfillment processes. With this solution, Genisys can capture client needs with greater accuracy, consistently share them with the appropriate business functions via the resulting workflow, and prepare an automated response to those needs in reduced time. To develop this solution, Genisys used Office XP, the Windows® 2000 Advanced Server operating system, Windows CE, SQL Server™ CE, Exchange 2000 and SharePoint™ Portal Server 2001.

Idea Integration Corp.'s solution will enable end users to readily access information regarding claims-related data in the healthcare industry. The solution facilitates access to member and provider information from multiple data sources to perform investigative research by using smart tags in Office XP. This solution provides a common and familiar interface for accessing published departmental information throughout the workplace with minimal effort.

Immedient Corp. created a versatile Office XP solution for National Oilwell Inc. that helps employees quickly generate proposals using Word 2002 running in a digital dashboard and XML technologies. National Oilwell is taking advantage of custom Office XP smart tags to rapidly link its employees with accurate information on materials, customers, vendors and equipment that resides in the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

IT Factory Inc. utilized Office XP to build a sales force automation (SFA) solution for VPNet Technologies Inc., an established leader in the virtual private networking industry. The company leveraged advanced new features in Office XP, such as smart tags and the Office XP workflow engine, to produce dramatic improvements in VPNet's sales force productivity. As a result, VPNet now manages contacts and conducts collaboration between inside and outside sales representatives and resellers in more than 25 countries.

Keylogix International Ltd. used the innovative features of Office XP, such as smart tags, XML support in Excel 2002, and digital signatures, to improve the time-consuming process of creating important documents such as proposals and reports. Using Keylogix product ActiveDocs and Microsoft Office XP technology, anyone with basic knowledge of a word processor can create automated documents and templates effortlessly.

Lockheed Martin Corp. Secure Enterprise Solutions' Office XP solution is a convenient and user-friendly process for allocating resources across an entire organization or company. Its features include ease-of-use benefits that simplify basic tasks, information sharing abilities for drawing relevant information from disparate applications, and a simplified resource request process.

Mark's Computer Based Solutions Inc. uses SpeechStudio Lexicon Builder for Office XP to create personalized vocabularies for doctors and lawyers, enabling extremely accurate speech recognition. To demonstrate the power of Office XP, SOAP Notes (an electronic medical records application developed in Access 2000 scalable to SQL Server) was upgraded with speech recognition, handwriting input, and two-way smart tags to give physicians complete access to their medical records from within Word 2002. Physicians can now update records without switching applications because two-way smart tags update the database directly from Word 2002.

Navigator Systems Inc. developed NeoCognia, an employee self-service portal built on Office XP technology. Navigator's NeoCognia portal helps employees quickly access, review and update human resources program information easily and securely. Navigator uses NeoCognia specifically to highlight how a Web-based application can save time and money by empowering individuals to manage their own 401k information- including account administration, investment allocation and "what if?" analysis of investment alternatives - online.

nFocus.com developed a cost- and time-saving solution for the Maricopa County Superior Court that provides a means of automating the jury instruction process for civil and criminal trials. The Jury Instruction Tool quickly pieces together the agreed-upon sections from the standard jury instructions in about one-fourth of the time previously needed by using custom smart tags for Office XP.

Plural Inc.'s solution is a CRM and customer care solution that enables a customer service representative to receive a request from a customer, research it and process it all within Office XP. The solution uses smart tags, real-time search, task panes, Web parts, XML worksheets, SharePoint Portal Server 2001, SQL Server 2000, Exchange 2000 and BizTalk™ Server 2000, leveraging the full Microsoft product line to reduce development and integration costs.

Quilogy Inc.'s Cincinnati office created Smart Contracts, which use smart tags, Word bookmarks, SQL Server 2000 and more, to automate Quilogy's contract process and enable staff to create contracts in about five minutes. In addition, transcription errors are avoided as information already stored in a database, such as company addresses, contact information, project specifics, and start and end dates, is automatically inserted.

Quilogy's Nashville office created a portal based on a design developed for a risk-management and insurance intermediary headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., and London. The portal is a customized Web-based document management system that allows access from within any Office XP application by simply clicking on smart tags. The system addresses linguistic differences as well as the difference between U.S. and international date formats.

Quilogy's Omaha office created a hospital portal solution to provide document management, policy and procedure access, collaboration, and customized digital dashboards for each department. In addition, wireless access from wireless devices enables health professionals to check patient records, view ailment libraries, and write and submit prescriptions in real time. The solution was built using Office XP, Office XP Developer, SharePoint Portal Server, SharePoint Team Services, SQL Server, Exchange 2000 and BizTalk, including Office XP features such as XML spreadsheets, smart tags, Web parts, and real-time data servers.

STAR Information Technology developed smart tags and Web parts that integrate Onyx with Office XP and SharePoint Portal Server. The smart tags and Web parts are used to view information about customer or individual addresses and demographic information, customer support cases, customer sales opportunities and service incidents. In addition to viewing the information, users with appropriate permissions can use "write" functionality to update the information. The solution uses Office XP smart tags, SharePoint Portal Server Web parts, IIS, SQL Server, COM+, SOAP and Onyx.

Stratis Group Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has evolved the client collaboration process using the Microsoft Office XP platform in creating a next- generation solution called client.net, which improves customer relationship management.

Tribridge worked with one of its clients, Communications Equity Associates (CEA) LLC, to apply Office XP technology to CEA's need for a global knowledge management solution. This solution consolidated the collective knowledge of 16 worldwide offices and significantly shortened the time associated with creating and delivering documents by making it easier to locate similar documents or projects.

V2Commerce Corp. created Outrigger, a Web site forms processing solution for nontechnical users that offers wizard-driven form setup and data retrieval directly into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access databases. V2Commerce developed smart tag recognizers for Outrigger that work with Office XP to assign actions, such as forwarding the submission to co-workers and launching Web pages, to incoming data. Because Office XP recognizes XSL and XML, Outrigger can offer preformatted layouts of submission data, such as a report in Word 2002 or a precalculated Excel 2002 spreadsheet.
More information about each solution can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/officexp/default.asp

About Office XP and Microsoft

Office XP provides a much smarter work experience for individuals, teams and organizations. Office XP makes productivity simple for individuals by helping them get the most out of Office and giving them tools they can rely on. Office XP enables collaboration for everyone by revolutionizing the way people work with others on documents and introducing SharePoint Team Services to manage projects and activities via the Web. Office XP also provides a flexible way to solve business needs by delivering rich business solutions and improved security and reliability tools businesses need to deploy and manage Office.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device.

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