For Immediate Release

Groove Networks And CASAHL Technology Announce Strategic Relationship;
Companies’ Data-Bridge Solution Enters Beta

Leading providers of virtual office and data integration software address the needs of IT organizations and end users alike

BEVERLY, MA – July 26, 2004 — Groove Networks Inc. and CASAHL Technology today announced a strategic relationship focused on helping companies extend the value of their investments in existing systems. The solution, which goes into beta testing later this week, helps organizations cost-effectively address the needs of mobile employees and cross-company teams who need to securely update and share data from enterprise applications and databases even when working offline or across company boundaries.

Groove Networks is a leading provider of secure virtual office software that allows teams of people to work together over a network as if they were in the same location; CASAHL is a leading provider of collaborative application data exchange software. As part of the strategic relationship, CASAHL is developing a Groove "connector" for Groove Virtual Office v3.0 forms. The connector gives IT organizations and users a secure, low-cost, minimal IT overhead solution for retrieving, working with and updating structured data from existing databases and systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

"The Groove connector will give us a fast, low cost, easy way of mapping data directly between Groove forms and our back-end data warehouse systems," said Doug LeVigne, vice president of logistics, Siemens Medical Solutions, which currently uses Groove software for its high-speed logistics process improvement project. "We enhance our applications every quarter to support our changing business needs, so the ability to quickly build and deploy data transports is critical to our success. From my perspective, this is the marriage of an industry leader in data integration with the industry leader in collaboration software that supports today’s mobile, cross-company project teams."

Groove Virtual Office developers can currently integrate Groove forms with other back-end data sources using development tools. Using the CASAHL Groove connector, non-developers will be able to follow a wizard-like template allowing them to map and automatically synchronize a company name field in a Notes database, for example, with a similar field in a Groove form.

The new capability addresses a wide range of needs that affect today’s decentralized organizations. With information technology budget cuts in recent years, corporate IT departments have been tasked to do more with less, and to get greater value from their existing system investments. At the same time, user demands for solutions that support mobile and remote workers have increased, as has the need for applications that can extend beyond traditional company boundaries to embrace suppliers, business partners, channels and customers. IT organizations, feeling the strain of budget and personnel cutbacks have been unable to respond to the demand, while users have been reluctant to learn more complex enterprise systems. The CASAHL Groove connector addresses the needs of both.

"Groove and CASAHL are collaborative application pioneers that share a compelling collaboration vision and a focus on making it easy for people to connect with information and other people in order to jointly work on projects, processes, and documents," said Peter O’Kelly, a Burton Group analyst. "The companies also share a strong commitment to enabling users and application developers to use their preferred tools and work styles when collaborating in workspaces. By working together, Groove and CASAHL will make it easier for organizations to integrate, extend, and migrate collaborative applications, creating new collaboration opportunities that seamlessly but securely cross organizational boundaries, and increase the value of widely-deployed communication and collaboration systems such as IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft SharePoint."

CASAHL Technology has established itself as the leading independent supplier of secure and scalable collaborative application middleware solutions by helping companies integrate collaboration applications with databases or enterprise applications, extend applications to accommodate new user requirements, and migrate applications to new platforms. The Groove connector will be similar to other CASAHL ecKnowledge® connectors that are cited for their ease of use since they minimize the need for low-level programming by providing a template-based approach for exchanging data between systems. This approach reduces development costs and makes it possible for non-programmers to rapidly build and manage solutions.

In addition to moving structured data from DB2, Oracle and SQL Server databases to and from Groove forms, the Groove connector will support access and updates to semi-structured data from collaborative applications such as Lotus Notes/Domino, Exchange public folders, Microsoft SharePoint and InfoPath.