West Enterprises, Inc. is a small software development and consulting firm. Its principal, Robert (Rob) West, has been in the digitizer software business since 1987. He started out in the main frame software development business and, before becoming independent, was V.P. of Engineering for Kurta Corporation. Kurta was a leading digitizer company that helped to pioneer "pen" technology that is used in CAD/CAM, graphic arts, and handwriting applications.

In 1997, A. T. Cross (the Cross Pen and Pencil people) was preparing to announce their first computer pen and tablet. They asked Rob to develop some easy to use software that would allow signing a Word document. Rob developed what they later announced as All-Write for Word 97 that allowed writing on a Word document just as smoothly and finely as you would with pen on paper. This would allow the Cross customer to receive a Word document, mark it up or sign it, and email it back to the originator without having to print it.

At the same time, Rob saw that most users would want to be able to mark up or sign other documents as well. He reasoned that many people would like to mark up a spreadsheet, a contract, or a presentation, for example. So, he developed a complete markup or annotation system that was bundled with the Cross tablet and called All-Write. This product allowed marking up any Windows based document.

Ever since the beginning in 1987, based on feedback from Cross and its customers, Rob has been extending the products and improving them.

Cross is no longer in the computer pen business so West Enterprises is offering these two seasoned and improved products directly to the public under the names E-Write and E-Write for Word.

In addition to these retail software products, West Enterprises is open to customizing these products to fit individual companies needs. In deed, many of the improvements have grown out of special requests made by large customers. For example, the document security capability was added to fulfill a requirement of the U.S. Army. Another example is the ability to markup and view an Autocad drawing (effectively creating a free AutoCAD viewer) was added at the request of Perkins and Will, a verly large architectural engineering firm.

Our mission is to provide software that makes it easy to mark up and sign electronic documents. As we move more and more to electronic documents, the need to be able to easily communicate our thoughts in writing, both typed and hand written, becomes more necessary.