News | December 11, 2000

Best Buy chooses Plumtree Corporate Portal platform

Best Buy and corporate portal software maker Plumtree Software, recently announced that Best Buy has chosen the Plumtree Corporate Portal as the platform for Best Buy's 4,000 corporate employees to access the information and services most important to their work. Best Buy intends to extend the Plumtree Corporate Portal enterprise-wide to all 60,000 associates when the portal is made available at retail store locations.

The portal, known as TagZone, will act as the focal point for bringing together resources from major repositories available to Best Buy.

Consolidating Best Buy's distributed information resources in a portal framework promises to help increase the return-on-investment for a wide range of existing Best Buy systems, helping create a single point of access for all employees, and a centralized administration for information technology engineers.

"TagZone is focused on distributing the right information to the right people at the right time," said Best Buy director of knowledge management Allen Meyer. "By collecting information from our internal and external partners, Best Buy employees will be capable of sharing knowledge to help them work more efficiently and effectively."

The TagZone Portal will integrate views of Best Buy applications and relevant Internet services as Plumtree Portal Gadgets, modular portal components that embed in a portal page key information and services from enterprise applications and Internet sites -- such as sales leads, industry news, or e-mail messages. To support the deployment, Plumtree offers hundreds of ready-made gadget plug-ins and a suite of hosted gadgets available through the Plumtree Portal Network. TagZone's gadgets will represent a wide variety of corporate services. Some examples include:

  • Best Practices and lessons learned
  • Microstrategy sales reports from a data warehouse
  • Calendar and electronic mail from Microsoft Exchange databases
  • Industry news from the Microsoft Network
  • A skills-based enterprise people-finder from Oblix
  • Database reports from Microsoft Access

Edited by John Griffiths