PlaceWare Offers Businesses Safe, Simple, and Integrated Web Conferencing For Communications and Collaboration; New Release of PlaceWare(TM) Conference Center Web Conference Service Secures Meeting Content With New Encryption at All Levels of Service; Simplifies Meeting Scheduling, Administration, and Recording; and Integrates Through New Enhancements, Giving One-Click Access to PlaceWare Through Microsoft Outlook(R) and Windows Messenger(TM).

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- PlaceWare, Inc., the leader in Internet-based business communications, conferencing and collaboration, today announced an upgrade to PlaceWare Conference Center. This latest PlaceWare service release delivers unrivalled security, simplicity, and integration within PlaceWare's proven, high-performance, rock-solid hosted architecture. PlaceWare's Conference Center assures that business meetings conducted over the web and the telephone will be safer than ever from prying eyes. PlaceWare's upgrade enhances its existing eight layers of content security by adding essential access and content encryption at every PlaceWare service level, for every PlaceWare customer. No other web conferencing company offers a safer, higher-performance solution for communication internally and external to the enterprise. No other web conferencing company offers more solid service-level guarantees, scalability, and web-based remote access.

SECURITY

"Security in web conferencing is not an afterthought, it needs to be built in," said Matt Cain, senior vice president, web and collaboration strategies, META Group. "Purchasers should not have to add technology to increase the security of their software and services. Increasingly, enterprises are making it clear to vendors that they are demanding safer products -- by refusing to buy products and services that are not safe."

PlaceWare's security upgrade avoids compromises in usability or performance. Content is protected uniquely with robust encryption of uploaded content. No other web conferencing vendor provides separate encryption keys for every slide, preventing hackers from easily accessing information at the browser level. By encrypting stored content, PlaceWare has added a 9th layer of security to its already leading security architecture. PlaceWare is making some of the basic benefits of SSL (secure-socket-layer) encryption affordable and part of its standard service offering. PlaceWare is also offering a Platinum-level service that delivers an even fuller suite of SSL technologies to deliver the ultimate in security. PlaceWare's focus on delivering unbeatable STARSS -- security, technology, availability, reliability, scalability, and support -- derives from natural underlying architectural advantages of PlaceWare's hosted-service model, and proven client-server approach, a clear difference from competitive web conference architectures.

The 9 layers of PlaceWare security include: content encryption, data authentication, a separate data network, application-level countermeasures, application authentication, system-level security, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and filtering routers.

PlaceWare Conference Center also introduces simplifications of the scheduling, administration, search, storage and recording/playback of meetings and meeting content, especially for enterprise usage, management and deployments.

SIMPLICITY