Preface by Bernd Schnell

General Manager and Manager Sales / Marketing Portunity GmbH Germany

Dear customer, prospect, administrator, editor, webmaster, content manager...

The salutation in this preface already reveals some of the wide applications of our product "Portalsuite". I would like to cater to these applications and the market of Content Management Systems in this preface.

Presentations on the internet are continually getting more voluminous and complex. Information, i. e.: content, gains more and more in importance, since current, high-quality information is the only way to convince. Now many companies – and even many more in the future – have to deal with the difficulty that updating their internet and intranet pages gets more bulky and the resulting costs rise. Various evaluations show that an increasing volume of information leads to a disproportion of efforts, as long as accepted customs in web publishing are kept: only 10 per cent of the resources can be spent on project management but 90 per cent are incurred by maintenance and continuous updates.

Content Management promises relief from this problem. The Portalsuite is a software solution which administers contents on the internet, intranet and extranet effectively and simplifies working with that media. Automation and Usability - both catchwords, which became our primary premise in developing the new Portalsuite.

With this professional and deliberate product we are providing a tool you can work with efficiently and shall reach optimal results in doing so.

Applications are immense. Alone for the field of traditional Content Management Systems the Gartner-Group prognoses a sales volume over 10 billion Euro for the year 2003.

With the new Portalsuite version and its possibilities of object-oriented programming we are breaking new ground - for there are no limits anymore. Thanks to its modular structures and its new pricing concept, the Portalsuite is as well designed for the mass market as for - due to the implemented technical options - the market of cutting edge applications and highest demands. Therewith we are pushing forward into a market that was so far dominated by just a fistful of companies worldwide. Of course they asserted high prices - in case of large-scale projects up to sums with 6 or even 7 figures - in this pure monopoly. With the Portalsuite 2002 this money-grubbing becomes a thing of the past.

We reckon that classical web design gets ousted over the next years by this "New Generation of Publishing". The potential covers many markets, from one-man business to affiliated groups operating on multinational level. Also the variety of applications can’t be overrated. The scopes of the internet and the extranet shall be quoted here as keywords. Reliable evaluations anticipate an immense market potential for the next years also for this fields, primarily generated from medium-sized companies.

As my business partner Björn Rücker already put: A new generation of Content Management Software "Made in Europe". Europe’s countries are growing together more and more, the Portalsuite was designed multilingual from the outset. Therewith we secure future market potential for you and for us, since many companies work transboundary already nowadays. First prosperities in the Netherlands show that we are just on the right path.

I am looking forward to our co-operation and to the exciting times ahead. And I wish a lot of success for you and for us with the "New Generation-Portalsuite".

Radevormwald, 10 January 2002

Bernd Schnell, General Manager, Manager Sales / Marketing Portunity GmbH Germany