Exostar Launches ForumPass 5
HERNDON, VA, January 10, 2012 ─ Exostar, whose cloud-based solutions enable secure, cost-effective business-to-business collaboration, today announced the general availability of ForumPass 5, the newest version of the company’s multi-enterprise project collaboration service offering built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. ForumPass 5 operates within Exostar’s Community Cloud, a connect-once environment anchored by Exostar’s Identity Hub that brings companies and their customers, partners, and suppliers together. ForumPass 5 is a complete, enterprise-class solution, incorporating the Community Cloud and its identity management technology, true multi-tenancy, and native SharePoint 2010 functionality.
“Our programs demand secure collaboration capabilities with the instant-on, instant-off agility of a utility," said Malcolm Carrie, Head of Strategy and Architecture in the Office of the CIO at BAE Systems. “That’s precisely what we received with ForumPass 4. But delivering the security we required meant sacrificing some of SharePoint's standard functionality because of limitations in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. With ForumPass 5, we no longer have to make that choice.”
Enhanced security features in ForumPass 5 include:
- More Credentialing Options – ForumPass 5 supports additional types of credentials for two-factor authentication, including hardware tokens to support the medium hardware level of assurance using public key infrastructure certificates.
- Claims-Aware Application – ForumPass 5 accepts incoming attributes-based claims associated with individuals and leverages those claims to determine access control rules and permissions to project sites and information – improving security, adding flexibility, and reducing administrative burden.
- Stronger Encryption – Previous versions of ForumPass offered encryption for documents at-rest only at the highest tiers of security. With ForumPass 5, all documents are encrypted at-rest, regardless of the security tier selected for the project.
- Data Protection beyond ForumPass – ForumPass 5 was designed with Digital Rights Management (DRM) in mind, paving the way for customers to request a DRM service option to be applied to all of their documents.
ForumPass 5 improves the user experience thanks to new capabilities such as:
- Microsoft Office Integration – ForumPass 5’s desktop integration means users now can access and edit documents directly from the desktop, rather than downloading and working locally.
- Microsoft Outlook Integration – With ForumPass 5, Outlook and ForumPass calendars can be integrated, allowing users to view all of their commitments from a single location and streamlining the scheduling process.
- Enterprise Customization – ForumPass 5 empowers customer site administrators to tailor user interface design, forms, and workflow processes to best reflect their operating environments via integrations with SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, and Visio.
- More Powerful Search – Metadata management and content tagging in ForumPass 5 expand what content is searchable and search filtering options. A new refinement panel helps narrow search results so users can find the right information faster.
- Social Networking Business Tools – ForumPass 5 includes features that encourage social networking interaction for enhanced business productivity, including people search, expertise tracking, community affiliation, and content ratings/tagging.
“We carefully analyzed the marketplace to understand today’s most urgent B2B collaboration needs,” said Vijay Takanti, Exostar’s Vice President of Security and Collaboration Solutions. “The message we heard was loud and clear. Customers want the latest functionality supported by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and the stringent security standards for which Exostar is known. That’s precisely what ForumPass 5 delivers: a highly-secure, cloud-based, enterprise-class complete collaboration service offering.”
About Exostar
Exostar powers secure business-to-business information sharing, collaboration and business process integration throughout the value chain. Exostar supports the complex trading needs of many of the world's largest companies in aerospace and defense, life sciences, and other industries. Exostar’s cloud-based identity assurance products and business applications reduce risk, improve agility and strengthen trading partner relationships and profitability for over 70,000 companies worldwide, including BAE Systems, Bell Helicopter, The Boeing Company, Computer Sciences Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corp., Newport News Shipbuilding, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Co. and Rolls-Royce. For more information, please visit www.exostar.com.
Media Contact:
Alan Gilbert
Exostar
(703) 793-7735 (o)
(703) 624-4675 (m)
Alan.Gilbert@exostar.com