Did this article say "assessing stage" of the game?

City Y2K Project Team Will Utilize Year 2000 Network Advisor(TM) to Assess Date Change Exposure

PITTSBURGH, July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Infoliant Corporation announced today that the City of Seattle, Washington, has joined the list of more than a dozen government organizations that have turned to Infoliant Corporation (www.infoliant.com) to help assess their exposure to Y2K problems with their desktop, network, midrange and enterprise systems. Infoliant has become the resource for the most up-to-date information on Y2K compliance of off-the- shelf hardware and software products. The Pittsburgh, PA, based company maintains an online database of software and hardware Y2K compliance information, including more than 36,000 enterprise, network and desktop products from hundreds of IT vendors.

During the past month, there has been an increasing interest in the Y2K progress of states and major cities nationwide. The City of Seattle is nearing completion of its Y2K remediation efforts, and by subscribing to Infoliant's Year 2000 Network Advisor knowledgebase and the Compliance Tracker notification service, the City of Seattle Year 2000 Project team will have greater assurances regarding the year 2000 readiness of the information technology products that Seattle employs across the city.

Infoliant has been gathering Y2K information since 1997, and continues to track daily changes in compliance status for its customers, freeing up valuable time for IT staff to focus on more strategic, mission-critical applications that require more time to understand and remediate the Y2K risks.

Ranging from local municipalities to large Federal departments, Infoliant's customers in the public sector vary in scope from legislative bodies to school boards, and rely on Infoliant's comprehensive and dynamic Y2K compliance resource for the most up-to-date remediation information.

Infoliant uses a dedicated research staff and proprietary agent technology to monitor the compliance status of products in its database and then publishes this information online for its subscribers who can download the information from Infoliant's website. Customers can also subscribe to Infoliant's Compliance Tracker service, which sends out automatic E-mail notifications when the Y2K status of a product in the customer's portfolio changes. A number of government agencies utilize Infoliant's Millennium Direct Edition, which creates a mirrored version of the online database on the customer's internal network, in either Lotus Domino or Microsoft Access formats.

Infoliant, Year 2000 Network Advisor, and Compliance Tracker are trademarks of Infoliant Corporation.

SOURCE: Infoliant Corporation

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), July 30, 1999

Answers

Thanks Dave, Next, the WORLD turns to Infoliant !!!!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), July 30, 1999.

I think you read it right, y2kdave. They're about done, yet one only has to look at Microsoft's site to see that patches have been issued for Y2k updates. From what I understand of the article, Infoliant simply keeps all the information on the latest updates and clients can access the database to see if their latest update is indeed the latest, greatest, and even get E-mail if a future update comes out that they need to apply. It sounds like a good deal to me. I took the cheap, prognastication method to updating my home P.C....meaning I'm holding out as long as possible in the hope that they'll finally have the latest greatest bundled into ONE download and I can get it all in one swoop. Companies with 100's or 1000's of P.C.'s aren't in a position to do this, yet they DO need information on updates that come out later than the ones they've applied. I can't even wait TOO much longer myself. Did you ever try to download tax forms on April 14th?

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 30, 1999.

Here's an article (from June 6, 1999) on the company and the founder Kevin Weaver:

Info liant compiles and sells Y2K compliance information on 36,000 products

exerpt:

Thus was born the idea for Infoliant. Customers pay the company for access to a Web site that tracks the compliance of tens of thousands of products, or they can set up a mirror site on their own network. They can also request to be notified if there is a change in a product's status.

Infoliant does not fix systems. (PC Solutions will do that.) "Our model is really more of a publisher," Weaver says. And a profitable one: Weaver says Infoliant, which has only 16 employees, is making money. From now until the end of the year, a subscription to its service is $15,000.

One of the more surprising aspects of this publishing venture, Weaver says, is how much the information changes. Each month, Infoliant issues a "Delta Report," placing products in one of several categories: "compliant," "non-compliant," "status pending," "vendor will not test," and so on.

Since it first began tracking this information in June 1997, Infoliant has noted more than 3,000 changes -- about a third of them "negative," from compliant to non-compliant.

This is not necessarily bad news, Weaver says. First, the percentage of "compliant" products Infoliant tracks has been increasing regularly, and now stands at about 70 percent.

Second, a lot of the "non-compliant" stuff is, well, pretty minor. Windows 95, for example, has moved from compliance to non-compliance several times, as Microsoft finds aspects of the program that may be problematic and fixes them.

"What they're finding today, they're not show-stoppers," Weaver says. "Whatever it is, it's not going to keep your PC from working. But if you want a totally clean Y2K system, you will want it."

As his New Year's Eve plans indicate, Weaver is not overly worried about the Y2K problem. The advent of the year 2000 may create a dilemma for his company, however. Doesn't the Y2K problem have to be solved by Y2K?

Actually, Weaver says, the problems will last well into the new year - after Jan. 1, he says, they will become even more urgent -- and there will be a need for Infoliant well into the year. In fact, about 70 percent of the company's 160-plus clients have subscribed to Infoliant's service through the end of next year.

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), July 30, 1999.