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Open Text Corporation's FirstClass division announced the release of FirstClass(R) 8.0, a major evolution of the company's award-winning suite of integrated communication and messaging capabilities. The release includes both the FirstClass Business Edition and the FirstClass Education Edition, which is tailored to meet the requirements of FirstClass' large education customer base around the world.
FirstClass 8.0 provides a wealth of new features created in response to changing customer requirements, including advances in system security and manageability, in performance and scalability, and in collaboration and customization capabilities. In addition, the release continues FirstClass' industry-leading support for a wide range of computing platforms to provide customers with flexibility and choice as they deploy FirstClass in diverse computing environments.
Open Text's vision for Enterprise Content Management is focused on leadership in collaboration and content management software. Customers moving to FirstClass 8.0 are gaining tremendous benefits from this drive by Open Text as illustrated by the broad suite of enhancements built into the latest version of FirstClass.
The School District of Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, one of the largest school districts in the United States, has been using FirstClass as the foundation for its internal and external communications. "Over the years, FirstClass has become an essential element in our communications between teachers and administrators across the district, and with the larger community of students and parents," said Superintendent Earl Lennard. The district has been using FirstClass 8.0 for some time and will be introducing a wide range of new features such as IM, Web publishing and directory services. "These features will provide a wealth of new tools that will greatly enhance our teacher-to-teacher, teacher-to-student and teacher-to-parent communications," added Lennard.
"Our customers continue to tell us they value FirstClass most for its highly integrated communications features, its broad range of supported systems, and its very low operational costs," said John Myers, Vice President and General Manager of the FirstClass Division of Open Text. "With FirstClass 8.0, we've extended our leadership in these areas over traditional, expensive and feature-limited groupware solutions."
FirstClass 8.0: New Features
Instant Messaging and Presence Management: New IM capabilities provide secure, real-time communication between users. FirstClass IM supports a rich array of media types including text, images, voice and attachments as well as transcript saving and forwarding. Enhanced presence management in FirstClass 8.0 indicates online status for every user automatically, turning e-mail messages, collaborative postings, calendar events, and contact entries into context-sensitive "buddy lists" with no user effort required.
FirstClass Directory Services: The new FirstClass Directory Services (FCDS) module facilitates the integration of FirstClass into corporate meta-directory environments including LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory. FCDS enables bi-directional user administration between FirstClass and meta-directories, as well as providing access to FirstClass directories from end-user client applications. FCDS also provides single sign-in support through external authentication.
Security enhancements: New security improvements in FirstClass 8.0 continue to keep FirstClass at the forefront of trusted and safe computing. Features include always-on CAST-128 encryption between the client and server, as well as additional support for user authentication and automated detection and prevention of denial-of-service attacks. E-mail security improvements include S/MIME support for secure server-to-server e-mail transmission and integration with third-party virus scanning engines. FirstClass 8.0 also adds expanded spam management capabilities.
FirstClass Explorer: The new FirstClass Explorer provides the full benefits of the FirstClass client as an ActiveX plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Users may take advantage of the rich FirstClass client experience, including performance and security, right inside their Web browser. The simple, single-click, Web-based install characteristic of ActiveX frees administrators and users from the time-consuming task of installing and maintaining software on end-user machines.
Support for Multiple Computing Platforms: FirstClass 8.0 will be available on a wide variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows (95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP versions), Apple Macintosh (OS 8, OS 9 and OS X versions), HTML/Web, and Linux. This cross-platform support gives customers greater flexibility in deploying FirstClass.
Increased Scalability: With many larger FirstClass sites approaching or exceeding 100,000 users on a single server, FirstClass 8.0 includes a number of performance optimizations, tuning enhancements and system statistics for increased performance and even higher reliability. This extends the tremendous operational cost advantage of FirstClass and enables even larger online communities to scale efficiently on a single server.
FirstClass 8.0 is available for free to all customers who are members of the FirstClass Support and Maintenance Program. For more information on FirstClass, go to: www.firstclass.com
10.08.2004, Open Text Corp.
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