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Inso Corporation Acquires MediaBank
From Bitstream Inc.

BOSTON, August 28, 1998 — Inso Corporation (Nasdaq: INSO) today announced that it has acquired the MediaBank media asset management system and related technologies from Bitstream Inc. for $12 million in cash. MediaBank enables workgroup productivity, workflow and content management associated with a wide-range of media elements including text, documents, images, movies, graphics, sounds and fonts used in the publishing process for corporations, publishers and digital service providers around the world.

The acquisition will complement Inso’s award-winning electronic publishing platform and will subsequently become a component of the industry’s most comprehensive media-independent publishing solution. This solidifies Inso’s position as a single-source supplier for enterprise content management and publishing systems for any media type, including Internet/intranet, print, compact disk (CD) and digital videodisk (DVD).

With the acquisition of MediaBank by Inso, approximately 30 employees of Bitstream’s Archetype Applications Division will join Inso at its headquarters in Boston. Sue Robertson, Vice President and General Manager of Bitstream’s Archetype Applications Division, will join Inso as Vice President and General Manager of Media Asset Management Solutions.

Inso and Bitstream have also entered into a related technology licensing agreement, under which Bitstream will license Inso its forthcoming PageFlex client/server software application. PageFlex enables the design and production of customized and personalized documents for one-to-one information publishing. Additionally, Inso has acquired InterSEP OPI (Open Prepress Interface) server, an image replacement technology used to accelerate the handling of high-resolution images in publishing workgroups.

Steven R. Vana-Paxhia, Inso’s President and Chief Executive Officer, said, "We are pleased to acquire MediaBank and to welcome 30 new employees to the Inso team. Together they bring new strength to our sales, marketing and development organizations. MediaBank enables Inso to offer an even broader range of solutions for our corporate and commercial publishing customers. In addition, the MediaBank value added reseller network will give Inso a new distribution channel, enabling us to extend our reach into the graphics communications market. We believe that the combination of MediaBank’s media asset management and prepress capabilities with Inso’s robust Web content management and electronic publishing capabilities, will significantly contribute to Inso’s continued technical leadership in media-independent publishing solutions."

"We are very excited about joining forces with Inso," said Sue Robertson, Vice President and General Manager, Archetype Applications Division. "The shared vision of cross-media, custom information publishing that is realized by combining technologies gives us a unique and unbeatable edge. MediaBank and DynaBase will create a truly comprehensive solution for our customers publishing needs."

The acquisition will be accounted for as a purchase. The transaction includes certain technology under research and development, which will be written off with a one-time charge, estimated between $8 million and $9 million, to Inso’s consolidated 1998 third quarter earnings. The MediaBank and InterSEP businesses had revenues of approximately $4 million in 1997.

Inso Corporation is a leading global provider of electronic publishing and content management tools for critical business information. With Inso’s Enterprise Publishing Platform, organizations gain an integrated system for managing, distributing, publishing, and continually updating their intellectual property. Inso’s award-winning technology enables large corporations to exchange and publish all types of information, from the simplest memo to the most complex multimedia document. For more information, visit the Inso Web site at http://www.inso.com.

Inso Investor Contact:
Betty J. Savage
Vice President and CFO
Tel.: (617) 753-6539
E-mail: bsavage@inso.com

Inso Press Contact:
Paul Lamoureux
Media Relations Manager
Tel.: (617) 753-6854
E-mail: plamoureux@inso.com

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