Press Release

Boston, MA, January 14, 2000 – North Atlantic Publishing Systems today announced the successful installation of NPS at two leading publishers, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. and Houghton Mifflin Co. These two installations, both completed in December 1999, capped off an extremely successful year for the NPS product, one in which many prominent magazine and book publishers adopted NPS for demanding editorial workflows.

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. installed a 30-seat NPS 2000 system in mid-December, acting as the Beta site for North Atlantic’s re-architechted NPS. HarperCollins is currently preparing to implement NPS 2000 on two pilot projects, which will involve all 30 users. NPS 2000 will be unveiled to the public at Seybold Boston 2000 February 9-11 and North Atlantic will begin installing it at additional customer sites in late February.

Houghton Mifflin Co. installed a 50-seat NPS system the first week in December and is already using the system in production.

Additional new customers for NPS during 1999 include the following:

• Pearson Education, which installed an early version of NPS in 1998, installed two new systems in 1999. The first was a 40-seat system installed in Needham, Massachusetts in early July. This system is now in full production and is integrated with a previously installed NPS system located in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. An additional 75-seat NPS system was installed in late July at the Pearson Learning Division in Parsippany, New Jersey. This system is being used to produce elementary school textbooks.

• Texas Monthly installed a complete NPS system in late April and is currently using the system to produce both Texas Monthly and Texas Monthly Biz.

• Boy Scouts of America chose to replace their existing QPS system with NPS and installed an NPS system in August at their headquarters in Irving, Texas. Once the conversion is complete, the NPS system will be used by the Magazine Division to produce two monthly editions of Boys’ Life, as well as Scouting magazine, published six times per year.

• Bentley College, a business school located in Waltham, Massachusetts, installed an NPS system for its Publications and Communications Department in November. Currently in use on a pilot project, the system will eventually encompass the entire publications group and their on-campus clients for production of a wide variety of publications including catalogs, newsletters, and brochures.

• Cahners, which already has a large number of magazines using NPS and HNJ Engine, installed the HNJ Engine module at several more magazines in the Summer of ‘99, including TWICE and School Library Journal, both located in New York.

NPS 2000 provides workflow management for publishers seeking a high level of efficiency and compatibility among users throughout the publishing production cycle. With this system, users get the flexibility to choose the platforms and applications they want, with NPS providing the integrated environment to work efficiently together online.

Major elements of NPS’s appeal include cross-platform support for both Windows^® and Macintosh^®; the ability to choose favorite applications such as MS-Word^®, QuarkXPress^®, and PhotoShop^®; the familiarity and flexibility of a Netscape^® or Explorer^® web-browser interface; and the application-independent architecture which liberates users to integrate new applications, such as Adobe InDesign^® or any other application of their choosing.

Through its separately-purchasable modules, NPS 2000 provides:

• Editorial workflow for file management, including check-out and check-in, and file routing by production stage, function or user-to-user.
• Scheduling for editorial, layout, and other production stages, allowing automatic tracking of what’s due and what’s behind schedule. (Scheduling Module)
• Enhanced composition capabilities with Word and XPress. On the Word side: line counts, copyfit info, and layout preview. On the XPress side: automatic text revision from Word documents, batch import of text and art, and batch export of revised text back to Word documents. (HNJ Engine Module)
• Client-server architecture with NT or UNIX servers and Explorer or Netscape browser clients.
• TCP/IP support for LAN and WAN clients, and HTTP support for remote users.
• Cross-platform support for Windows and Macintosh clients.

North Atlantic Publishing Systems develops, markets, and supports software products for pre-press publishing. Its philosophy is to provide custom publishing systems built from standard components. NAPS Publishing System and HNJ Engine are North Atlantic's latest products. They were developed in response to input from thousands of existing users of North Atlantic products, including Workflow Administrator, CopyBridge and CopyFlow. For more information about North Atlantic Publishing Systems and its products, visit the company's web site at http://www.napsys.com.

Alice Fackre

North Atlantic Publishing Systems, Inc.

(978) 371-8989

alice@napsys.com

© North Atlantic Publishing Systems, Inc. 1997. All rights reserved.