b2bScene.com Launches Collaborative Marketplace for Biotech Industry

b2bScene.com partners with Base4 for biotechnology content expertise

Waterloo, Ontario - 2000-03-09 - b2bScene.com , a division of Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq: OTEX, TSE: OTC), today introduced the first collaborative commerce e-marketplace specifically for the biotech industry. b2bScene.com has partnered with Base4 Inc., a biotech and pharmaceutical informatics company and a member of the Open Text Affinity program, to provide specialized content and domain expertise for its biotechnology trading communities. Base4 and Open Text share a number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical customers including AstraZeneca and the Novartis agricultural Discovery Institute.

b2bScene.com now offers the only biotech e-marketplace to provide dynamic collaboration through a combination of e-business applications, content and hosted services. Base4's expertise in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and biomedical research domains expands the power of Open Text's next generation distributed crawler technology to deliver high-quality, relevant biotech content and bioresearch tools. Biotech customers can collaborate in specialized projects and extend their Intranet and Extranet applications to b2bScene.com's online trading communities.

The biotech e-marketplace is b2bScene.com's first industry marketplace offering, and the biotechnology community from b2bScene.com and Base4 is one of over 1,800 communities that b2bScene.com is developing with key partners. b2bScene.com's focused communities benefit from categorized content resources specific to their interests and markets, and specialized line of business applications tailored to each community's unique requirements.

By complementing the specialized content with PKI security from e-Certify Inc., b2bScene.com creates the ideal biotech research environment, allowing domain experts to conduct completely confidential research queries. Open Text's new distributed crawling technology also enables domain experts to securely control the crawling technology themselves, determining what sites are crawled, as well as how often and how deep the crawler scours the Web. The combination of domain crawling expertise and PKI security results in specialized content indices and highly-credible, confidential research.

With the new myLivelink interface, distributed crawling technology and b2bScene.com's marketplace services, Open Text and Base4 customers can extend their systems to access b2bScene.com biotechnology and pharmaceutical community resources.

"In an industry where secure, groundbreaking research is paramount, b2bScene.com is the first PKI-protected business-to-business site to place the crawler in the hands of biotech experts, resulting in the industry's most highly-credible, confidential Web content indices, "says Kirk Roberts, President, b2bScene.com. "Average crawling technology only crawls 25% of the Web, but Open Text's new distributed crawling technology enables domain experts to perform relevant searches that encompass the entire Web."

"The Internet provides many valuable resources to biotech researchers, but being able to find appropriate sites on a timely basis can often be very difficult because of the growing flood of irrelevant and inaccurate sites," says Martin Sumner-Smith, President & CEO of Base4. "Consumer-oriented search engines are inadequate. This new resource is just what the biotech industry has been looking for."

About Base4

Base4 is a pharmaceutical informatics company that develops and applies data and knowledge management tools to support research and development processes within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The PharMatrix product suite is rapidly gaining market acceptance as the pre-eminent, collaborative knowledge and project management solution for life science research. Base4's U.S. head office is located in San Diego, California, its Canadian head office is located in Mississauga, Ontario, and its European head office is located in Basel, Switzerland. Base4 has sales offices in Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Further information about the company can be found at http://base4.com and about PharMatrix can be found at http://pharmatrix.com.

About b2bScene.com

b2bScene.com, a division of Open Text, is the first cross-industry, collaborative commerce e-marketplace offering a collection of b2b services to small, medium and large organizations. In addition to buying and selling goods and services online, our e-marketplace promotes e-business interaction and collaboration between buyers and sellers, facilitating dialogue between parties, automating business processes and managing the wealth of information around each transaction. b2bScene.com leverages a variety of industry leading applications including Open Text's leading collaborative business applications to achieve dynamic interaction between an organization's employees, business partners and customers in both public and private trading communities.

About Open Text

Open Text has pioneered the development of innovative intranet, extranet and e-business applications. Since creating one of the first search engines to index the World Wide Web, the Company has remained at the forefront of Internet-based technologies. Today, Open Text solutions allow individuals, teams, organizations, and global trading communities to collaborate on projects, share ideas and accelerate innovation to the fastest possible speed. We call it HyperInnovation and it is already a major factor in the success of leading Global 2000 organizations. Open Text has become the largest supplier of collaborative, Web-based e-business applications for the enterprise, with over 3.5 million users in 31 countries, speaking 12 languages throughout the world. For more information, visit www.opentext.com.

For more information, please contact

Robert How
Marketing Manager
Base4 Inc.
905-677-0532 x252
rob@base4.com

Margaret E. Dobbin
Director, Industry Analyst Relations
Open Text Corporation
+1-519-888-7111 ext.2410
mdobbin@opentext.com

Mia Wedgbury
Senior Partner
High Road Communications
416-368-8348
mwedgbury@highroad.com