The Government News Information System (GNIS) was developed to handle all press releases by the Hong Kong Government. GNIS supported Chinese characters, fax server and text retrieval, news feed and news broadcast. The system had hundreds of users including remote users and news subscribers from the media. The second phase of this project involved scanning newspapers and storing them in a high-performance fault-tolerant system. The system helped automate issuance of press releases and monitoring of news information. GNIS had intelligent retrieval features for all issued and received press releases and news.