Microsoft Announcements at Fall Internet World 98 Show Commitment to Web Leadership

NEW YORK, October 7, 1998 — This week at Fall Internet World 98, Microsoft highlighted plans to make the Internet an even more reliable and useful tool. Microsoft showed its continuing commitment to customers by promoting an Internet privacy campaign, outlining different Web-centric options within the Office 2000 family of suites, and co-hosting a workshop on intranets. Developers will benefit from Microsoft’s new version of Visual J++, a development system for Java, and the company’s plans to use the open WebDAV standard in future products.

At noon on Wednesday, Microsoft along with TRUSTe and seven other leading Internet companies will announce a major online educational campaign to address Internet privacy, called “The Privacy Partnership.” TRUSTe, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building consumer trust in the Internet, heads the coalition, which includes America Online Inc., Excite Inc., Infoseek Corp., Lycos Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Snap Online! and Netscape Communications Corp.

Also on Wednesday, Microsoft outlined different packaging offerings within the Office 2000 family, including a new high-end suite called Office 2000 Premium that will include the FrontPage 2000 Web site creation and management tool and the PhotoDraw 2000 business graphics software. Also, the company unveiled a new Web site to help customers choose the right suite for their needs.

Microsoft will team up with Compaq Computer Corp. to host Site Server workshops at Fall Internet World 98, October 7-9. Each 30-minute, hands-on session teaches attendees how Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0 can be used to create robust intranet sites using features such as Web publishing, search and information delivery. There will be 28 sessions that are expected to reach almost 1,000 attendees. These workshops follow on the heels of the popular Intranet University sessions held at the 1998 Spring N+I conference.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced many of its future products will use an open specification that provides interoperability between server-based documents. WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) allows people to read and write documents over the Web regardless of their authoring tools, platforms, or types of Web servers. The WebDAV specification is a set of extensions to HTTP 1.1 developed in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that includes vendors and universities. Future Microsoft products that will utilize WebDAV include Internet Explorer, Office, FrontPage, the Windows NT Server operating system and the BackOffice family.

Finally, on Tuesday Microsoft gave developers an improved tool for building and deploying high-performance distributed solutions for Windows and the Web based on Java. Visual J++ 6.0 is offered in Standard and Professional editions at $109 and $549 respectively ($219 for the Professional Edition upgrade) or as part of the Visual Studio 6.0 development system. Additional information on Visual J++ 6.0 can be found on the Microsoft Visual J++ Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/visualj/ .

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