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Landover, MD (April 11, 2000) – ITtoolbox announced today that it is using L-Soft international's LISTSERV® technology to power Open IT Exchange (OpenITx). This new Internet community hub lets IT professionals collaborate more easily and work more efficiently through highly focused global e-mail communities covering the entire spectrum of IT disciplines, products and job specialties.
After researching a number of list hosting alternatives, ITtoolbox selected LISTSERV because its features best matched the objective of OpenITx – to provide a simple, reliable and efficient means for IT professionals to rapidly share valuable information.
According to Dan Morrison, CEO and President of ITtoolbox, many people have not yet realized the significant benefits the collaborative nature of the Internet will bring to the professional community.
"E-mail lists are particularly effective because they facilitate timely communication using part of any professional's standard tool-set; their e-mail application. Now professionals are able to work faster and smarter by leveraging the collective experience of a worldwide audience that can help them address their unique challenges in near real-time at no charge" he said.
In planning a comprehensive community that would be deployed to unite the entire knowledge-starved IT industry in an open, collaborative environment, ITtoolbox needed to identify an e-mail list management package that was easy to use, reliable, efficient, and affordable. It also needed to integrate neatly into ITtoolbox portals and eventually into OpenITx. They judged LISTSERV the best technology for meeting their criteria. Additionally, ITtoolbox found LISTSERV's simple yet powerful archive searching facilities impressive.
"Providing simple and flexible archive searches that let our users locate specific information quickly is extremely important to us if we are going to succeed in providing a knowledge base of best practices." added Morrison.
With over 100 lists and plans to eventually host over 10,000 IT-specific communities, scalability was a critical issue that LISTSERV could also effectively address.
"From everything we've seen, LISTSERV remains a very scalable, capable package," Morrison said. "We were also quite impressed with their customer list. Taking into consideration their accomplishments to date and the number and size of customers relying on their technology, we felt confident that their product would remain a leader for the foreseeable future - which was also important to us."
Eric Thomas, L-Soft founder and CEO added: "LISTSERV was developed in 1986 to bridge the gap between an increasing demand for simple yet powerful group e-mail communication functions and the limited capabilities of the 'mail exploder' products that were being used at the time. Mailing list technology has improved significantly since then, but the success of discussion lists remains based on a very simple formula: communicating with people through the online channel that requires the least amount of learning or additional effort on their part - e-mail."
With over 14 years of experience in this industry, L-Soft is the premier provider of e-mail list solutions used on the Internet and private intranets. Meeting the growing demand for scalable e-mail communication solutions, L-Soft's innovative, Web-enabled technology offers an extensive portfolio of products and services for non-technical and expert users alike. Solutions range from high-performance software to custom list hosting services, providing large to small-scale alternatives for e-mail newsletters, discussion groups, or direct e-mail marketing campaigns. Launched in 1986, LISTSERV® delivers 30 million messages on an average weekday to the subscribers of over 150,000 public LISTSERV lists worldwide.
Officially launched on March 21, 2000 by ITtoolbox, Open IT Exchange builds on the momentum of the Open Source movement by providing the world's first comprehensive "communities hub" exclusively for the IT industry. Through a freely accessible knowledge infrastructure and the connection of IT and business professionals worldwide, OpentITx provides the same knowledge resources, previously the exclusive and proprietary domain of the largest IT companies, to anyone in the world.
Located at www.openitx.com, OpenITx lets IT professionals collaborate quickly and informally - coming together just long enough to help each other move forward. Faced with a tough purchasing or technical question? Ask your colleagues around the world and get more than just one answer, usually in an hour or two.
OpenITx is an extensive global network of collaborative e-mail communities covering the entire length and breadth of IT disciplines, products and job specialties - potentially growing to over 10,000 IT specialties, from Enterprise software purchasing advice to Web development and e-Commerce; from games programming to hardware development.
Extending the spirit of the Open Source movement to all of information technology, ITtoolbox is using the Internet to dramatically change the way the $1 trillion knowledge-based IT market obtains information, makes decisions and accomplishes tasks. Recognizing the collaborative and open nature of the Internet, ITtoolbox empowers all IT and business professionals to undermine the exclusive knowledge monopoly traditionally held by larger IT companies thus creating a superior free knowledge resource collectively enhanced by its users.
ITtoolbox currently maintains ten Yahoo-like portals focusing on specific vertical IT segments. Operating since July 1998, the ITtoolbox network has established world leadership in vertical communities for the $200+ billion Enterprise Applications market. Individual portals cover Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), E-Business, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Data Warehousing, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Baan.
ITtoolbox's newest service, Open IT Exchange (OpenITx), represents the first resource capable of resolving the skill and knowledge challenges faced by the IT industry. OpenITx mail list communities facilitate global collaboration on focused topics and store the results in a searchable on-line database. The derivative is a community-based ad hoc information resource capable of significantly reducing the learning curve for IT products and improving decision-making results.
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