“We’re excited about our relationship with Microsoft, allowing us to provide eCriteria’s new feature-set to our growing customer base, many of whom expressed a strong interest in these capabilities. We are also proud to align our product with Microsoft’s innovative foundation for the evolving world of XML Web services,” says Dan D. Gutierrez, eCriteria’s founder and CEO.

“Microsoft is pleased to be working with eCriteria to deliver a comprehensive solution to customers,” said Ilya Bukshteyn, group program manager for the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft Corp. “The combination of eCriteria and the .NET Framework will provide an exciting new solution to meet the needs of our mutual customers.”

Requirements for using the eCriteria interface are a current version of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, the SOAP Toolkit 2.0 SP2, and the download and installation of an Excel add-in (eCriteria.xla, 221K) available at no charge from the eCriteria Website. The interface back to the eCriteria facility is made possible through a proprietary server-side XML Web service written in the C# programming language

Small businesses, corporate departments, and other organizations are welcome to visit eCriteria to sign-up for a free 30-day trial account in order to try out eCriteria. The company website is found at: www.eCriteria.net. There are three types of eCriteria membership: Standard (free), Premium ($19.95 per month), and Enterprise ($39.95 per month).

eCriteria defines a new genre of application service provider (ASP) called a Database Service Provider (DSP), providing a facility for quick, easy, and cost-effective publishing of “shrink-wrap” Web databases. eCriteria requires no programming or knowledge of databases. Using the Web Database Publishing Wizard, Data Authors may create their own live Web databases in 15 minutes or less. The site is located at www.eCriteria.net.

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