(Rochester, Minnesota – June 17, 2004) -- Metafile is announcing the introduction of its MF.net Portlet for IBM WebSphere . This module integrates its MetaViewer Enterprise electronic report management (ERM) system with the popular application server. MF.net Portlet can be used to provide users of portals and other applications based on WebSphere with access to any computer-generated printstream, report or scanned paper document through MetaViewer Enterprise. The integration of the document management application within the WebSphere portal dramatically reduces both development and administration costs. The application supports full text and field level searching, page and document level security, hit highlighting, and emailing of documents and pages. “MF.net Portlet provides our users with the information they need in seconds from within the comfortable and secure environment of our WebSphere portal,” said Leo Ghazarian, Information Technology Operations Manager for ASICS America Corporation, Irvine, California. MF.net Portlet is provided as an out-of-the-box application that can be used immediately as well as a set of tools and components that make it easy to customize for specific requirements. The application uses Java-based distributed processing and Java RMI based components, allowing for use of diverse operating system environments. MF.net can utilize existing website security and database information to automatically add users and deliver personalized secure content to thousands of users. The software can provide dramatic time savings to users of WebSphere portals by providing them with immediate access to documents and reports that they would otherwise have to spend time searching for through filing cabinets or microfilm. The full text search means that users can simply type in whatever information they have, such as the customer number, customer name or transaction amount, and call up the document in seconds. Customer service can be improved by offering faster response to customer inquiries. Users can redirect the time they used to spend looking for documents to more creative and proactive tasks such as building relationships with customers. The manpower and storage space required for filing paper documents can also be reduced. ASICS America selected the MF.net Portlet and MetaViewer Enterprise because its customer service representatives were spending too much valuable time searching for documents, particularly bills of lading. They had recently designed and implemented a WebSphere portal that provided a web-based interface to a wide range of applications so Ghazarian wanted to find an imaging system that would integrate with it. “MetaViewer Enterprise was the only software package we could find that met our requirements,” he said. “MetaViewer co-exists well with the WebSphere environment and also provides an extraordinary level of integration with the AS/400.” Ghazarian’s team integrated MetaViewer with the portal using Java servlets hosted on the WebSphere site. The WebSphere site then connects to the MF.net module of MetaViewer Enterprise. “Providing access to the documents through the portal simplifies administration by making use of the existing application infrastructure,” Ghazarian said. “It also makes things easier for users by building on applications they were already familiar with.