Individual Announces First! for Exchange; Customized news service is tailored exclusively for the Microsoft Exchange Server environment

Business Wire, April 2, 1996

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 2, 1996--Individual, Inc. (NASDAQ:INDV) announced today at Networld Interop a new customized news service designed specifically for the Microsoft Exchange Server. Called First! for Exchange, the service provides tailored news directly to a company's Microsoft Exchange Server every business day. The news, filtered daily from over 600 electronic sources worldwide, may be distributed to individual workgroups or to the enterprise using Microsoft Exchange servers and clients.

Designed to take full advantage of the native Microsoft Exchange Server environment, First! for Exchange consists of a daily database replication of pre-filtered news stories processed by Individual's proprietary knowledge processing system. Each database is delivered as a series of Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) e-mail messages over the Internet to the First! public folder on the Microsoft Exchange Server. Users may select several views to the news, such as date, topic, company, information source, and active discussion database.

To open a story, readers double click on the headline. The story then appears in full text inside the First! form. Easy to use navigation buttons are used to browse additional stories and topics. Another button inside the form is used to create or add to a discussion around any breaking news story. This enables readers to react to important news about competitors and customers in order to formulate creative responses as soon as the news becomes available.

First! for Exchange is scheduled to ship within two weeks of the shipment of Microsoft Exchange Server.

"Microsoft Exchange Server provides our customers with a powerful new messaging and groupware capability," said Yosi Amram, CEO of Individual. "The discussion database technology used in First! for Exchange is particularly exciting because it gives our customers a new way to leverage the power of information through a shared knowledge base that anyone in the enterprise can access."

"Our customers are using Microsoft Exchange to share and use all kinds of information," says Rob Shurtleff, general manager, Microsoft Exchange Server Connectivity at Microsoft Corp. "Individual's First! service expands the type of information customers can use to include intelligently filtered breaking news from multiple sources."

Microsoft Exchange Server is part of the Microsoft BackOffice family of products that offers a new generation of enterprise computing and information sharing. Microsoft Exchange Server is designed to reduce information overload by allowing users to organize and access information in ways that best suit their decision-making role or activity. It also enables group collaboration across functional, organizational and geographical boundaries and automates business processes.

Formed in 1989, Individual Inc. is a leading provider of customized news to business professionals worldwide. Through its proprietary knowledge processing system, Individual intelligently connects content publishers with subscribers. Its interactive, customized news services include First! for corporate workgroups and enterprises, HeadsUp and Physicians NewScan for single subscribers, and NewsPage (http://www.newspage.com) and BookWire (http://www.bookwire.com) on the World-Wide Web. The company received the Breakout Company of the Year award by the Information Industry Association for 1995. Individual has established alliances with many prominent industry leaders including Gartner Group, Lotus, Knight-Ridder, Microsoft Corp., NETCOM On-Line Communication Services, and Netscape Communications Corp. The company is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices in Burlingame, Calif., New York City, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom. -0-

Certain of the above statements are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially as a result of a variety of factors, including competitive developments, and risk factors listed from time to time in the Company's SEC reports.

Microsoft and BackOffice are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. First!, HeadsUp, iNews, NewsPage and BookWire are trademarks of Individual, Inc.

CONTACT: Paul Pinella

Individual, Inc.

617/273-6000 ext. 409

paul@individual.com

Web: http://www.individual.com

or

Beth Winkowski

WTM, Inc.

508/649-7189

bwinkowski@aol.com