SUNNYVALE, Calif. - May 17, 2004 - Interwoven Inc. (Nasdaq: IWOV), the world's next-generation enterprise content management (ECM) company, today announced that the Commissions on Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Schools of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), the largest accrediting body of public and private educational institutions in the United States recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, is using Interwoven TeamSite to create, manage, and deploy the content that underpins the SACS web portal initiative. A key component of this initiative is the upcoming deployment of Worksite for collaboration and management of intellectual property.

Founded in 1895, SACS serves more than 13,000 public and private educational institutions from pre-kindergarten through the university level in eleven states of the Southeastern U.S., Latin America, and overseas. The primary mission of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is the improvement of education in the southern United States and other geographical areas by recognizing and encouraging institutional quality through accreditation. The Commissions on Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Schools of SACS accredit public and private elementary, middle, secondary, special purpose, and vocational-technical schools that enroll approximately nine million students.

"We are a geographically dispersed organization, and one of the key reasons we chose Interwoven for our enterprise content management platform was its scalable, open architecture and its foundation on open standards," said Albert Mayo, Associate Executive Director for Information Technology of SACS. "With the introduction of Interwoven, we turned our old website model upside down by taking an ad hoc content management system that was once centrally controlled and truly put the power of content ownership into the hands of the state and regional offices. Because of TeamSite's easy-to-use interface and simple templates we've been able to increase usage and streamline work processes, gaining new internal efficiencies and improved satisfaction of our constituents. We look forward to the benefits of integrating WorkSite into our system."

Ease-of-Use, Collaboration Critical to SACS' Success
Before implementing Interwoven, SACS relied on the individual efforts of content contributors for more than a dozen disparate sites. Because of the varying levels of control, both in terms of cross-border brand identity and uniform content, a decentralized infrastructure was not serving the SACS organization, or its constituents, very well. The sites were populated with static HTML pages that were inconsistent, ad hoc, and generally out of date. SACS was looking for a content management system that was easy to use and scalable, and in 2002 selected Interwoven for the first phase of its ECM implementation. One work area was established for use per regional and state office, and a tailored workflow was created for the practitioners within each of these offices.

Recently live on Interwoven TeamSite Content Server software version 6.0, SACS has already experienced a return on investment from the implementation, including cost avoidance by being able to merge support staff among the various state offices. Constituents have also benefited from improved customer service, quality, timely content, and uniform look and feel among state sites. Representatives from all SACS state and regional offices were initially trained on TeamSite in May 2003, which was so well received that it promoted the start of an annual "technology workshop," with Interwoven TeamSite at its core.

With the recent additional purchase and deployment of Interwoven WorkSite Server software, SACS will focus on a higher level of content sharing and collaboration. Project teams across state and regional lines will use WorkSite via what SACS calls "virtual war rooms," where members collaborate on documents, manage discussion threads, and use the software as a common repository of information and project team deliverables. As they work through the process of developing new accreditation standards and school improvement materials, SACS staff will be able to collaborate with school improvement practitioners - thus expanding cross-functional participation and taking full advantage of the collaboration and content sharing capabilities of WorkSite.

"It is rewarding to see organizations such as SACS embracing technologies like Interwoven, that have a positive impact on the educational community as a whole," said Kevin Hayden, vice president of corporate marketing at Interwoven. "Customers like SACS are seeing the value of partnering with Interwoven as their single vendor to empower and integrate their dispersed organizations with our enterprise content management platform."

Future Plans with Interwoven
Once all of the member states and regions are fully migrated to the new enterprise content management system, which is targeted for the end of 2004, SACS intends to expand its usage of Interwoven to the organization's intranet. Ultimately, SACS envisions creating multiple extranets on which various combinations of members can collaborate with outside bodies on information and intellectual property important to the accreditation process.

SACS is a nonprofit, voluntary, nongovernmental association, and is dedicated to the beliefs that all schools can improve regardless of past achievements and that improvement of schools can be accomplished best by helping them to establish an ongoing school improvement process.