Iowa City, Iowa - October 24, 2008 - MetaCommunications, a leading software developer of collaborative workflow and productivity solutions, announced today that it will be previewing its new Workgroups 2009 software suite and a customer community web portal named MetaCommunities at Graph Expo 2009, booth 4556, October 26-29.  

Workgroups 2009, to ship in November 2008, is the latest release of MetaCommunications' flagship product, and incorporates major enhancements including a cross platform development environment, improved reporting tools, integration with Mac OS X Leopard, and hundreds of new features.

Graph Expo will mark the debut of MetaCommunities, the new community website for customers, developers, and partners of MetaCommunications. “MetaCommunities is a central portal for uniting customers, and facilitating dialogue with our internal support, professional services, and development resources. In addition MetaCommunities includes a rich library of contributed reports, solutions, integrations, and plug-ins for MetaCommunications products that may be downloaded free of charge,” said Robert Long, Executive Vice President of MetaCommunications.

Workgroups 2009
The Workgroups 2009 suite is a tightly integrated process and productivity management suite for creative, publishing, and prepress. Workgroups 2009 is comprised of four modules, and is designed to be open and modular so that users can adopt the modules of the suite that meet their initial needs and retain the ability to easily expand the solution later.

Workgroups 2009 consists of four core components:

- Job Manager, a powerful suite of financial management tools that enable users to accurately create estimates and quotes, monitor job costs, quickly generate on-demand reporting and invoices, and share information with industry leading accounting systems.

- Virtual Ticket, a configurable project and workflow solution that brings together all the components of your work in a centralized location, including project briefs, job tickets, schedules, customer information, associated document files, and more.

- Approval Manager, an approval management workflow tool for managing, tracking, and scheduling any proof review process within and across marketing, creative and production environments.

- Digital Storage Manager, a powerful storage management solution designed to integrate a workgroup's file management into the overall creative and production workflow. The solution associates files with projects, archives & retrieves files, and enables users to quickly find digital files for creative or production processes.

MetaCommunities

The new MetaCommunities website provides developers, administrators, partners and users alike with the ability to share professional and peer developed resources and to participate in an active community of user and developer-oriented discussions.

- Solutions Library, a central library of downloadable solutions that easily plug in to Workgroups to dramatically extend functionality without programming a solution from the ground up.

- Snippet Repository, a repository of reusable code snippets illustrating techniques for implementing new features and functionality.  Code Snippets can be copied and pasted directly to the Workgroups development environment, or downloaded and installed in Workgroups to provide working examples of code techniques.

- Forums, community discussions allow developers, administrators, and users of Workgroups products to learn from each other, discuss implementation and development techniques, and interact with MetaCommunications in a community-oriented setting.