Publishing Powerhouse Demands Enterprise-Class Asset Management Across the Board SEYBOLD SEMINARS, SAN FRANCISCO, CA- September 9, 2002 - North Plains Systems Corp., the innovator in Enterprise Digital Asset Management (E-DAM) solutions, today announced that HarperCollins Publishers has adopted North Plains Systems' TeleScope Enterprise as its cross-organization asset management solution. North Plains Systems’ TeleScope will enable HarperCollins to track the use and reuse of each digital asset with a single enterprise deployment across multiple departments and divisions of the company. TeleScope’s ability to track the life of an asset will allow HarperCollins to learn just how each asset is used, capitalizing on the use of their content across all departments, and help to identify new cost saving opportunities. A key factor in their adoption of Telescope was its native development on the Macintosh. “We are impressed with how Telescope works from within Macintosh software programs, and how it supports the features our creative group needs to help extend digital asset management throughout our organization” said Laurie Rippon, Sr.VP, Creative Director for HarperCollins. “We believe Telescope will help simplify the process of incorporating digital asset management practices into the workflow of our designers and drive the efficient sharing of content between creators and reusers, saving time and cost for both groups,” Rippon added. Rick Schwartz, HarperCollins CIO said, “We envision providing marketing and sales personnel with access to electronic image or text assets that they are now recreating at substantial cost. Getting content into key reusers hands quickly, here and in our international operations, will help drive sales in new ways.” “HarperCollins recognized the power of TeleScope’s distributed architecture and the benefits of sharing and creating opportunities across an international publishing organization,” said Hassan Kotob, president and CEO of North Plains Systems. “We pride ourselves on the delivery of true enterprise-class solutions that increase the opportunities for growth and new lines of business for even the largest companies in the world. Today’s business is about profits and existence and we help clients do both through the advantages of E-DAM.” HarperCollins plans to expand its efforts from workgroup departmental systems already in place to a true Enterprise Digital Asset Management (E-DAM) solution. Through the installation and deployment of TeleScope Enterprise, HarperCollins will maximize their profit potential by not having to recreate products, and by decreasing time to market and associated costs. North Plains Systems’ E-DAM solution enables HarperCollins to use and deploy assets to their partners, all while tracking their best practice usage all the way through to actual sales. Different departments will no longer have to replicate an asset management repository. Through consolidating existing repositories of content, and then making a central system available to all who need it, HarperCollins aims to get a wide payback across many areas of their business. “We see clearly how this solution will revolutionize the way we do business in the publishing industry,” continued Schwartz. “We don’t want to be one more publishing company with a collection of digital asset management technologies, with each department having a completely separate and incompatible solution. HarperCollins needed one cost-effective solution that could scale the enterprise and each department and its various workgroups. We did a lot of research in this space, and we wanted a system that will be stable, extensible, and scalable for our company, in the short and long term.” The infinite flexibility of TeleScope's architecture combined with its industry-leading XML components gives HarperCollins the enterprise-class solution they needed to unify disparate technologies, address all existing file and metadata formats as well as address new, future formats. TeleScope provides the tools they need to meet the challenges of business in the digital age. TeleScope enables production staff, vendors, licensees, partners, and consumers the ability to extract components of existing documents and dynamically generate new media assets from re-purposed ones, for a wide variety of electronic and wireless delivery methods. Built on open standards and distributed architecture, TeleScope Enterprise offers a robust and open API that allows third party technologies and legacy systems to seamlessly integrate with the TeleScope environment. TeleScope supports over 300 file formats ranging from graphics and text, to audio and video. About HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers is one of the world's leading English-language publishers with headquarters in New York. The house of Mark Twain, The Bronte sisters, Thackeray, Dickens, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Margaret Wise Brown, HarperCollins was founded in New York City in 1817 by the brothers James and John Harper. In 1987, Harper & Row was acquired by News Corporation. The worldwide book group, which was formed following News Corporation's acquisition of the British publisher William Collins in January 1990, has publishing groups in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia/New Zealand. About North Plains Systems Corp. North Plains Systems Corp. is the innovator in enterprise-class asset management solutions. Introduced in 1994, North Plains Systems' core technology TeleScope, serves more than 400 clients worldwide. These clients report faster than average results from innovations such as asset-activity tracking, custom plug-ins, uncompromised native Mac and PC clients, a full-featured Web client and a patent-pending distributed architecture. With its open API and support of industry standards (CORBA, JAVA and XML), TeleScope is the only true scalable and proven enterprise-class asset management solution. North Plains Systems also offers complete integration services to customize TeleScope to the business practices and workflow of an organization.