Industry-Leading Digital Asset Management Solution Combines Collaboration And Lifecycle Management To Capture And Extend Business Processes SAN FRANCISCO, CA--Sep 9, 2002 -- Artesia Technologies, the leader in enterprise digital asset management, today unveiled at Seybold Seminars San Francisco the latest version of its award-winning digital asset management solution. Artesia's TEAMS, version 4.4, boasts groundbreaking enhancements for collaboration and workflow designed to redefine the very definition of an asset through the inclusion of new information capturing the entire lifecycle of the asset. This unique approach, which integrates together as XML-based metadata an asset's physical and business attributes with its production elements and history, reinforces TEAMS' long-term role as the centralized hub governing the production, use and distribution of digital assets throughout the enterprise -- regardless of format type, distribution channel or access device. "We have worked closely with our global customer base to better understand and identify their business practices so that we can further extend their investment in DAM through new workflow processes and collaborative standards that drive cost out of the organization," said Scott Bowen, president and COO of Artesia Technologies. "Our resulting release includes over 150 new features that encode these best practices and assure that every TEAMS user will reap the rewards that digital asset management promises. As these enhancements incorporate the input of users across every industry segment, we're confident that they will serve to enhance TEAMS' well-justified reputation as the premier digital asset management solution." The core features of TEAMS 4.4 are newly integrated Asset-centric workflow capabilities that significantly enhance the collaborative aspects of Artesia's robust and proven enterprise architecture for managing digital assets. This unique approach includes the ability to immediately determine where an asset has been used throughout its history, who has participated in its usage, review or licensing, and the nature of these projects or processes that have utilized the asset in one form or another. Through this process, organizations are able to eliminate the need for the separate, proprietary workflow tools associated with each production processes and replace them with a single platform that can properly track and manage digital assets across all applications while easily interfacing with all common authoring platforms and media formats. "AOL Time Warner Book Group is extremely pleased with the direction and concept of asset-centric workflow Artesia has taken DAM," said Lawrence Feldman, VP and CIO at AOL Time Warner Book Group. "This unique approach to workflow appears to solve some longstanding and difficult problems that other workflow solutions simply had no easy answer to. It also adds needed value to our installation of TEAMS for both creators and users of content." By embedding many aspects of workflow within the asset itself, where it resides alongside other attributes governing format, rights and permissions, and other business information, TEAMS 4.4 can ensure that this information is readily available and actionable not only to the specific user, but to their co-workers and those responsible for the overall production of programming and materials throughout the organization. What further distinguishes TEAMS' enhanced approach to workflow is its balanced focus on each level of the organization with unique workspace features available that encompass the needs of the individual users, workgroup and enterprise. Through their implementation, these features further extend the benefits of digital asset management by automatically capturing additional information regarding asset history and usage so that it may be made immediately available to all users. As such, it not only benefits the organization by streamlining existing workflows, but by also enabling organizations to gain a richer understanding of their digital assets in order to facilitate further usage in the future and across ancillary channels. "By adding workflow to TEAMS, Artesia is erasing much of the perceived distinction between asset-management and content-management systems," said Mark Walter, senior analyst for the Seybold Consulting Group. "Artesia's asset-centric approach is a novel and very interesting direction that will differentiate it from many production-oriented systems at the same time that it puts Artesia head-to-head with several vendors of enterprise-level content-management systems." Artesia Technologies will be demonstrating the new Asset-Centric Workflow features and capabilities of TEAMS 4.4 at Seybold San Francisco 2002 Conference and Exposition, September 10-12, in booth # 1125.