Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) Leverages Microsoft(R) SharePoint(TM)

Market Wire, November, 2006

Octant is proud to announce its Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) (EPMS) integration with Microsoft Windows® SharePoint(TM) Portal Server and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint(TM) Services. Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM), a web-based proposal management system , enables internal and remote team members to create, manage, and generate powerful proposals by leveraging the existing investments of Microsoft SharePoint(TM) in the corporate and mid-market enterprise.

Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) and Microsoft® SharePoint(TM) Solves Proposal Management Needs for American Institutes for Research

Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite helps customers reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the complete business development and proposal process. American Institutes for Research (AIR) is one of the largest behavioral and social science research organizations in the world. AIR's mission is to ensure improvements occur in education, health and the workplace, while supporting and encouraging practitioners and organizations to adopt appropriate research-based practices. The AIR mission is based on the foundation of ensuring that public understanding and policymakers are informed by sound research. With that mission comes the need to manage an incredible amount of proposal-based information.

Terri Horn, Director of the Proposal Resource Center at AIR, states, "The Enterprise Proposal Management Suite provided us a flexible platform to build our dedicated and centralized Proposal Resource Center that supports the proposal management needs of our entire company. The system allows us to use our specific proposal management best practices. We especially appreciate the web-based nature of the system that allows staff in our offices across the country to easily collaborate on proposal preparation."

Proposal Managers and Business Development teams are the ultimate business benefactors of this strategic relationship. This solution delivers the deep support of Microsoft SharePoint(TM) technologies within corporate IT groups, while Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) manages the processes, resources, and intellectual property associated with proposal management and business development.

Terri Horn further affirms, "We love the integrated dashboard report system that permits anyone in the firm to see what solicitations are under consideration, as well as what proposals are under preparation and their disposition. This helps one program team to know what others are doing and promotes collaboration across the firm."

Octant's choice to extend its system into the SharePoint(TM) Server family helps customers rapidly implement a new generation of proposal management and proposal generator applications, which have the capability to dramatically improve proposal win rates while lowering costs. "This solution has great application for professional services firms and member based organizations. Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) tackles one of the biggest challenges these entities face -- the ability to harness intellectual property of winning proposals across teams for repeatable success," said Christine Zmuda, Solution and Services Partner Manager at Microsoft.

Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) and Microsoft® SharePoint(TM) -- More than Collaborative Document Management

"One of the largest misconceptions in the proposal management and business development industries is that traditional document management software packages can solve proposal management collaboration and version control needs . Document management is only about 5% of the solution and without our additional software, these document storage locations will also fail to be a truly effective system," said Scot Johnson, interim CEO of Octant. "We expect that our customers will be able to leverage their current investments and standardizations to see immediate operational efficiency, platform dependability and accepted reliability."

"Designing our Enterprise Proposal Management Suite to take advantage of Microsoft SharePoint(TM) was an obvious strategic advantage to both Octant and Microsoft," said Lynda Benjamin, Octant's VP of Product Marketing and Management. "The powerful combination of Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite(TM) and the Microsoft SharePoint(TM) platform provides an easy to use, practical tool, designed specifically for proposal management needs ."

Enterprise Proposal Management Suite is ideally suited for businesses of all sizes. It supports one of the most common goals and objectives businesses and enterprises are placing into practice today: the standardization of an integrated portal management and document management platform.

To keep up to date with the latest Octant's Enterprise Proposal Management Suite please visit: http:// www.octantsoftware.com .

About Octant

Octant, a wholly owned subsidiary of i3solutions, was born out of the need to help organizations respond quickly and intelligently to customer requests. As such, Octant has created a suite of tools to connect the right people with the right information at the right time, to help organizations of any size become more agile, more responsive and more effective.