NCompass Labs

» see ncompasslabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The web I learned on in 1998 was already split into pages that worked anywhere and pages that wanted Internet Explorer and said so. ActiveX was the reason for most of that second category. It was a Microsoft control model that ran in a Microsoft browser. Sitting in Netscape, you got a blank rectangle where the thing was supposed to be.

NCompass Labs was founded in Vancouver in 1996 by Gerri Sinclair with two colleagues from the ExCITE Center, Kerem Karatal and Kristof Roomp, out of a multimedia research group at Simon Fraser University, and its first product was the fix for that blank rectangle. ScriptActive was a Netscape Navigator plugin that hosted ActiveX controls, and it was built in cooperation with Microsoft. A companion plugin called DocActive put Microsoft Office documents inside Netscape, and Microsoft liked that one enough to license it and ship it as part of the Office 97 Document Viewer.

Browser plugins were not where the money was. In 1997 the company changed direction entirely and released a Windows content management product called ActiveEnterprise, later renamed NCompass Resolution. Version 4.0 shipped in March 2001 with the Associated Press and the Royal Canadian Mint on its customer list, along with Microsoft itself. Weeks later, Microsoft bought the company.

~ the record ~

~ the deal ~

The press release went out from Redmond on 30 April 2001 under a headline about extending the .NET Enterprise Server family. Paul Flessner, who ran that division, said web content management was critical to any e-business initiative. Sinclair, as president and CEO, said she was extremely pleased to formalize a long-standing relationship, which was accurate in a way that press-release language rarely is, given that Microsoft had been shipping her company's code for four years.

Terms were not in the release. Wikipedia and MarketWatch put the price at $36 million; the Vancouver Sun reported it at closer to $55 million at the time. Nobody involved has ever confirmed either number in public.

~ what happened to the product ~

The same release promised a rebranded version: Microsoft Content Management Server 2001, due that fall, with continued support for anyone who bought Resolution 4.0 in the gap. MCMS 2002 followed, and nothing came after it. What the product did ended up inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server instead. Mainstream support ran out on 14 April 2009 and extended support on 8 April 2014.

~ the redirect ~

Ask a browser for ncompasslabs.com today and it sends you to microsoft.com/cmserver. That address does not serve a page either. The last version the Internet Archive holds of it is headed "The Future of Content Management Server 2002", a transition notice telling customers where to go next, captured in February 2008 and unreachable since.

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