19-May-2004

Agent 2.1 Progress

Support for multiple news servers is progressing well. We have completed the major internal components such as the database and communications modules. Now, we are finishing up the changes to Agent's user interface. Agent's support for multiple news servers will be the most innovative and flexible of any newsreader.

Virtual Newsfeeds

You can combine several news servers into a "virtual newsfeed". Agent refers to this virtual newsfeed as a "Domain". For example, your "Usenet Domain" might combine messages from your ISP, a free Usenet service, and a premium Usenet service such as Agent Premium Newsgroups (APN).

Access Plans

In each news Domain, you control the utilization of servers by defining an "Access Plan". An Access Plan defines the server sequence for reading and posting. You can define more than one Access Plan. For example, you might:

• Define a "Text" plan that reads and posts only to your premium service.
• Define a "Binary" plan that saves you money by looking for messages on several free servers before utilizing your premium service.
• Define a "Second Binary" plan that checks a different sequence of servers.

You can also restrict your Access Plan to only retrieve headers and bodies from the first server that contains that group. This is ideal when you are virtualizing several Usenet servers in order to get a more complete set of groups.

Similar to Agent's existing Group Properties, you define a default Access Plan which can be overridden on a per group basis.

Private Newsgroups

You can easily configure additional news servers to download private newsgroups hosted by corporations, social groups, and other organizations to provide product support and community-related messaging.

Setup Wizards

We know this is a lot of functionality, so we'll make it as easy as possible by providing setup wizards that guide you through the process of adding or changing news servers.

Agent Road Map Update

Delivery of Agent 2.1 will be later than we originally anticipated. This is due to the follow-on builds we released to assure that Agent 2.0 was of the highest quality. Our current plan is to release Agent 2.1 in Q3, 2004, with initial beta test planned for June, 2004. We will provide additional updates as we achieve these milestones.

Regards,

The Forté Team