Rational Software Announces Support for Microsoft Office 2000; Rational Tools Will Accelerate Development of Office 2000 Applications.

NEW ORLEANS, March 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Rational Software Corporation (Nasdaq: RATL) today at the Microsoft Office 2000 Deployment Conference announces support for Microsoft Office 2000. Rational Rose 98i, the world's leading visual modeling tool, provides integration with Office 2000 to facilitate the development of customized applications that extend the functionality of Microsoft's Office 2000 suite. In addition, future versions of Rational's integrated family of development tools will provide enhanced Office 2000 support to accelerate the development of applications that leverage Office 2000 functionality for maximum business benefit.

Microsoft Office 2000 includes enhanced productivity tools and components for developers building custom applications that employ Office 2000 components. The Office 2000 Developer edition includes tools for Visual Studio developers building Office 2000 integrations, including Component Object Model (COM) add-in templates as well as sample code for automating Office applications. The product also includes data access tools that enable developers to easily integrate enterprise data directly into Microsoft Office applications to facilitate more accurate and timely access to corporate information.

Rational Rose 98i accelerates the development of Office 2000 applications. Through the use of the industry standard Unified Modeling Language (UML), Rational Rose enables developers to visualize Office 2000 objects, including their interfaces, interdependencies and extensions. Developers can build their application model based on these objects and automatically generate code for Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Java development. Rational Rose also makes it possible to reverse engineer legacy applications written in Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Java, which can be enhanced to take advantage of the functionality provided in Office 2000.

"Rational Rose's support for visualizing the Office 2000 architecture will allow developers to take full advantage of the Office development platform," said Chris Gibbons, Microsoft's general manager of Office marketing. "Visual modeling provides the developer with a better understanding of Office components and their interdependencies, freeing the developer from manually examining object code, and allowing them to focus on how best to use Office components to build applications quickly and reduce overall development time."

About Rational Rose

Rational Rose 98i provides Unified Modeling Language (UML) -- based modeling for designing component-based applications. The UML, pioneered by Rational and officially adopted as a standard by the Object Management Group (OMG), is the industry-standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of a software system. COM, ActiveX and JavaBean components can be reverse engineered to derive interfaces and determine the inter-relationships of all components within a model. Rose 98i Enterprise provides the capability to mix and match multiple languages, such as C++, Visual Basic, and Java, within the same model.

About Microsoft Office 2000

The Microsoft Office 2000 line includes five different suite options, offering a set of tools tailored for each type of Office customer. Office 2000 Premium is the most comprehensive of the suites and includes the FrontPage 2000 Web site creation and management tool, PhotoDraw 2000 business graphics software, Word 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, the Outlook 2000 messaging and collaboration client, the PowerPoint 2000 presentation graphics program, Microsoft Access 2000, Publisher 2000, Microsoft Small Business Tools and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 browser software (IU1).

About Rational

Rational Software Corporation (Nasdaq: RATL) is the market leader in ensuring the success of customers who depend on their ability to develop and deploy software for technical, embedded, Web, e-commerce, and enterprise information systems. Rational had revenues of $311 million for its fiscal year that ended in March 1998, and employs over 2,000 people worldwide. Rational's comprehensive solution addresses the major challenges faced by customers developing the mission-critical software applications that they depend on. Rational's solution substantially improves the effectiveness and productivity of software development teams, enabling them to reduce development time and improve quality. For more information, visit Rational at www.rational.com.

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