NCompass Labs was a

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

-based software company that developed NCompass Resolution, a web content management software package. The company was acquired in 2001 by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

for $36 million.

History

NCompass Labs was founded by

Gerri Sinclair Gerri Sinclair serves as the Innovation Commissioner for the Government of British Columbia. She was appointed in July 2020. Sinclair previously served as a Managing Director at Kensington Capital Partners and was the leader of the firm's Vancouv ...

, Kerem Karatal and Kristof Roomp in 1996, who were working at the ExCITE Center, a multimedia research group at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located ...

. The initial product of the company was a plug-in for hosting

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide We ...

controls in

Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in ...

named ScriptActive, which was developed in cooperation with Microsoft. The company also developed a plug-in named DocActive, which hosted Microsoft Office documents in Netscape, which was licensed to Microsoft and shipped as part of the

Microsoft Office 97 Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of Microsoft Office, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996. It succeeded Microsoft Office 95 and was replaced by Microsoft Office 2000 in 1999. A Mac OS equivalent, ...

Document Viewer. In 1997 the company changed direction releasing a Microsoft Windows-based content managed product named ActiveEnterprise. Later the name of the product was changed to NCompass Resolution. In 2001 Microsoft purchased the company for approximately $36 million, and re-released NCompass Resolution branded as Microsoft Content Management Server in 2002.

References

{{Reflist Companies based in Vancouver Software companies established in 1996 Defunct software companies of Canada