18-February-2005

Expanded Beta Trials

You will soon begin to see Usenet messages posted with Agent 3.0.

Up until now, beta testing has been performed by the Agent Design Board. Based on their feedback, we have made many significant changes to improve reliability and usability. As development draws to a close, we are expanding the beta trial to include additional testers from the Agent Beta Team.

Why Agent 3.0?

Powerful new features make this version far more than just a simple upgrade. Based upon the Agent 2.0 architecture, which we spent over a year developing, Agent 3.0 offers:

Desks - a new user interface for organizing news and email folders:

• Create desks to organize news and email folders by media type or genre.
• Create desks to easily perform multiple operations like getting headers in all your favorite groups via a single command.
• The same folder can appear in multiple desktops. There are many possibilities.

Multiple Servers and Connections - a unique way to manage all your Usenet accounts:

• Organize servers into Access Plans that control how servers download and post messages to newsgroups.
• Use the Newsgroup Directory to quickly locate groups across multiple servers and organize them into folders and desks.
• Maximize throughput by letting Agent automatically optimize the number of server connections to use.

Task Manager - take full control of Agent's online activities:

• Mark and unmark messages while Agent is retrieving bodies for that group.
• Stop, Pause, Reorder, and Resume tasks from the new Task Manager window.
• Walk away from Agent knowing that all online operations will continue processing while you are gone.

Agent 3.0 Upgrade Policy

Agent 3.0 has taken over one year to develop. The new user interface and automation architecture sets the stage for all future Agent releases and new Agent applications currently under development.

Agent 3.0 will be provided as a free upgrade to all registered Agent 2.0 users.

The extensive beta testing we are currently going through will ensure Agent's legendary quality. We appreciate your patience. We know it will be worth the wait.

Regards,

The Forté Team