e-Learning Leaders Team to Offer Robust Knowledge Management System; WBT Integrates Centra and NETg into New Release of TopClass, the Industry's Most Scalable Knowledge Platform

Business Wire, Sept 19, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 19, 2000

WBT, a leading provider of B2B knowledge management solutions, today announced it had released its enhanced TopClass to new customers around the world.

TopClass provides employees, customers, and partners of Global 2000 companies with a powerful e-Learning infrastructure, enabling them to enhance traditional classroom training with personalized web delivery and to substantially increase "Enterprise-Wide" performance by shortening the time to proficiency. TopClass users receive the benefits of sophisticated technology adapted to on-demand personalized training with proven scalability for enterprise e-Learning applications.

TopClass is the only object-oriented e-Learning solution to offer streamlined enterprise implementation and management that centralizes the content as Learning Objects and enables easy update of current information across hundreds or thousands of courses instantly.

Command Plug-In Architecture for Seamless Integration of Third-Party Software

TopClass 4 offers the first of its kind Command Plug-In (CPI) open architecture to accommodate automatic seamless integration of third-party software and services without the need to recompile. The CPI architecture in TopClass 4 now supports synchronous collaboration, content integration, and dynamic reporting.

"The CPI architecture effectively opens up TopClass to complementary e-Learning software and services," said Peter Zotto, CEO of WBT Systems. "The CPI architecture sends a clear message to the industry that WBT is serious about its open architecture and industry standards like AICC, SCORM, and IEEE."

"For live interactive discussions, TopClass has included seamless integration with the powerful and easy to use Centra Live, e-Learning and business collaboration application," said Alan May, Director of Partner Programs at Centra Software. "Seamless integration creates a user-friendly environment for the customer with no separate login required to access the Centra virtual classroom environment."

"TopClass offers the ability to load NETg's extensive library of content directly," said Nige Howarth, Vice President, Global Marketing for NETg. "Tracking, course progress, and test results data are also integrated with TopClass, providing for comprehensive reporting capabilities. NETg is one of the world's leading e-Learning providers with over 40,000 NETg Learning Objects or NLOs."

For other custom content creation and updating, Microsoft Office 2000 PowerPoint and Word files can be easily dragged and dropped directly into TopClass.

Lastly, the TopClass CPI architecture offers a new comprehensive reporting interface, allowing reports to be sourced to and from TopClass. Support is presently available for Oracle Reporting, allowing users the ability to build their own custom Oracle reports to function with TopClass.

TopClass Strengthens Ease of Use, Localization, and Performance

TopClass now offers the ability to specify Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which provide complete control over user interface elements, making personalization easy and quick. Editing within TopClass has also become faster and easier with dual modes of previewing and editing. Editing and previewing can be accomplished remotely off-line, making for an effective timesaving mobile tool. Once connected online, the previewed edits are uploaded to the server, saved, and ready to go live.

TopClass is the most popular international e-Learning system available today due to its object-oriented architecture, support for multiple icon sets, and full resourcing of language strings, which allows for the ability to localize the user interface for any language. TopClass is available in 11 languages and comes pre-localized in English, French and German.

WBT is committed to continually improving the performance of TopClass and has undertaken a serious investment in characterizing performance of every release. TopClass 4 delivers a 400% increase in the average throughput of student and instructor transactions as well as the number of concurrent users.

About WBT

WBT's TopClass family of products powers the creation and delivery of e-Learning and knowledge management systems. The company has the largest customer base of any B2B e-Learning management solution with over 600 sites and 3 million users worldwide. Organizations like Nokia (BUE:NOKA.BA), Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW), ST Microelectronics (NYSE:STM), Credit Suisse, Belgacom, and PricewaterhouseCoopers use TopClass. With headquarters in Massachusetts, the company has major offices in San Francisco and Dublin, Ireland. For more information, visit our web site at www.wbtsystems.com.

TopClass is a trademark of WBT.