Epicentric Announces Complete Portal Solution for Educational Institutions; Epicentric Education Edition Addresses Complexities of IT Environment within Colleges and Universities

Business Wire, Sept 17, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 17, 2002

Epicentric Inc., the leading provider of Business Portal solutions, today unveiled a solution specifically designed to answer the portal needs of academic institutions. A successful portal deployment delivers myriad benefits to colleges and universities by automating processes, increasing operational efficiency, and providing an excellent vehicle for interaction with all constituents, including students, faculty and alumni.

Drawing on Epicentric's proven success in this arena, with customers including the University of Wisconsin, Old Dominion University and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Board of Higher Education, the Epicentric Education Edition is uniquely able to harness and manage the multitude of resources within higher education IT systems, and deliver them in a targeted manner to diverse constituencies, such as staff, alumni and prospective students, in addition to their two main audiences of faculty and students.

A Proven E-Education Solution

"It is critical for the success of every educational institution to be able to effectively connect with their student community," said Robert L. Fenning, vice president, administration and finance, Old Dominion University. "We believe that a portal that acts as a central point of access, delivering essential material in a highly personalized manner will inevitably improve student relations, heighten internal efficiencies and ultimately improve the way we do business."

Epicentric Education Edition answers all the strategic requirements of an academic institution seeking to successfully deploy a portal that reduces IT expenditure, increases operational efficiency and enhances relationships with all their constituents, including:

    --  Process Web-ification

        Academic institutions have a legacy of form-based,
        paper-intensive processes, as well as complex business and
        student back-office systems, that must be moved on-line.
        Rather than relying on overtaxed IT staff to accomplish this
        monumental task, Epicentric Foundation Builder, packaged with
        the Epicentric Education Edition, provides a simple visual
        environment for creating portal-ready applications and
        connectors to back-end systems without coding.

    --  Efficient Portal Deployment and Management

        Epicentric Education Edition makes it easy and efficient to
        create targeted portals for students, faculty and alumni, that
        are all managed and deployed from a central location, thus
        reducing hardware, software and maintenance costs.
        Out-of-the-box functionality means initial portal construction
        is fast and simple, which lowers development costs. Reusable
        components also decrease development costs by enabling the
        sharing and reuse of components across portal initiatives for
        different audiences across the college or university
        community.

    --  Delegated Administration

        With any Web initiative, IT and process bottlenecks can be an
        issue. The Epicentric Enterprise Edition offers delegated site
        administration capabilities to empower non-technical users
        from different audiences to build portals, as well as control
        content, users and site updates, using templates and wizards.
        In this way, users can easily manage and maintain sites,
        without relying on limited IT resources. For example,
        professors and TAs can easily post current course work and
        related material; student organizations can deploy and manage
        their own sites; faculty can collaborate with other academic
        institutions on project sites they create; and alumni can
        build interest group portals to interact with their peers.

    --  Targeted Functionality, Relevant Content

        Portal initiatives are most successful when they offer a
        variety of relevant, targeted content and functionality to
        appropriate audiences within the campus community. Epicentric
        Education Edition provides Rules-based Content Personalization
        for sophisticated content targeting, thus significantly
        enhancing the richness of an institution's relationships with
        diverse groups across the campus community. Additionally,
        Epicentric Education Edition gives end-users the flexibility
        to personalize their portal experience, and to create a more
        effective online medium, resulting in accelerated user
        acceptance and consequently increased operational efficiency.

    --  Leverage Existing Investments, Protect Future Ones

        The large size of most academic institutions, combined with
        years of ad hoc technology investment and a history of "home
        grown" initiatives, has resulted in a complex combination of
        legacy technologies: platforms, hardware, home-grown and
        off-the-shelf applications. For a portal solution, this means
        compliance with open standards and the ability to run on a
        variety of platforms is critical. Ease of integration with
        legacy applications is also of paramount importance.
        Epicentric Education Edition leverages open standards to
        provide platform flexibility, and delivers out-of of-the-box
        connectors to integrate portal technologies, as well as both
        user and business applications.