Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP Adopts North Plains Systems' Enterprise Digital Asset Management Solution

SEYBOLD SEMINARS (Booth #1333), SAN FRANCISCO, CA - SEPTEMBER 10, 2002 - North Plains Systems, Inc., the innovator in Enterprise Digital Asset Management (E-DAM) solutions, today announced that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) has deployed North Plains Systems' TeleScope™ Enterprise asset management solution in three of its four main offices to date. As one of North Plains Systems' first TeleScope Enterprise customers and an end user in the architecture industry, SOM will use the enterprise technology to track the use and reuse of digital assets and eventually CAD files across disparate departments including marketing.

Each SOM office had its own system for storing, retrieving, and distributing the digital assets consisting of images, QuarkXPress documents and PowerPoint presentations. These assets represent the rich history of SOM's prestigious architectural achievements that are used to assist the firm in securing new multi-billion or million dollar contracts. These valuable assets existed in several forms, mostly on servers, but many of the photos were 35mm slides stored in drawers while others were being stored on CDs or other off line media on shelves.

"As the world's premier architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill requires a solution that allows them to share their massive resource of assets across a large geographical spectrum, yet maintain their intellectual property and project consistency," said Hassan Kotob, president and CEO of North Plains Systems. "TeleScope Enterprise was an obvious solution, with our proven E-DAM technology that allows firms of this size to manage workflow throughout the organization all while maintaining precious metadata for best practice analysis - increasing efficiency."

North Plains Systems' E-DAM solution enables SOM to use and deploy assets throughout its organization, all the while tracking their best practice usage. Various departments no longer have to replicate an asset management repository, and the diminished cost of ownership becomes the pay off. The flexibility of TeleScope's architecture gives SOM the enterprise-class solution they need to unify disparate technologies. Built on open standards and distributed architecture, TeleScope Enterprise offers a robust and open API that allows third party technologies and legacy systems to seamlessly integrate with the TeleScope environment. TeleScope supports hundreds of file formats ranging from graphics and text, to audio and video.

About Skidmore, Owing & Merrill LLP
Founded in 1936, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP has undertaken more than 10,000 architecture, engineering, interiors, urban design, and planning projects in more than 50 countries. Throughout its history, SOM has been recognized with more than 800 awards for quality and innovation, 125 of which have been received in the past 10 years. In 1996, SOM received the American Institute of Architects' Firm Award, recognizing the distinguished design work of the firm as a whole. As the first winner of this award when it was established in 1961, SOM is the only firm to have received this prestigious honor twice. The firm currently has offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Sao Paolo.

About North Plains Systems, Inc.
Founded in 1994, North Plains Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of digital asset management solutions. Its pioneering technology, focus, and vision have been recognized through out the content management industry, including analyst Frost & Sullivan, with their 2005 Company of the Year award. Today, over 400 customers benefit from North Plains' expertise in delivering industry defining solutions for multi-channel publishing, broadcast automation, video enhanced learning, marketing automation and collaboration and brand management. Customers include Boeing, Feld Entertainment, Harcourt, HarperCollins Publishers, International Monetary Fund, Ogilvy and Mather, Publicis Groupe, Relizon, Thomson Learning, Viacom and Warner Bros. For further information please visit the North Plains website.