Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management Deploys Plumtree Corporate Portal for Students, Faculty and Staff

Corporate portal market-leader Plumtree Software today announced that The Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University is deploying the Plumtree Corporate Portal to more than 2,750 students, faculty and staff. The portal will eventually be deployed to Graziadio alumni as part of a major initiative to create an ongoing learning platform that connects all members of The Graziadio School community through a single, simple Web destination. Using the Plumtree- powered GraziadioNet, students and faculty can access personalized course material, self-tests, grading, discussion groups and event listings. Theportal will improve students’ ability to conduct research and help faculty to schedule classes and distribute coursework, as well as allow students and faculty to collaborate with and receive feedback from one another.

“At The Graziadio School, we wanted to find a new way to manage our knowledge capital,” said Charla Griffy-Brown, director of the Center for Innovative Business Resources at The Graziadio School. “We looked for a platform that could capture, categorize and share the Graziadio School’s wealth of information in a single, simple solution, and we found it with Plumtree. We believe we are pioneering the new digital age of business education with GraziadioNet. We chose Plumtree as our corporate portal because we wanted to provide our students with a technology-rich learning environment using real-world management technology.”

Plumtree Chosen for Content Management, Communities and Collaboration

As The Graziadio School expanded to seven locations across California, the school’s existing technology infrastructure could not meet the growing needs of the distributed staff and faculty. The school needed a scalable infrastructure for managing and distributing a wide variety of content. The Graziadio School chose Plumtree to help categorize and index existing content and capture new content from relevant Internet sources in Plumtree’s Document Directory.

Communities were also an important feature to The Graziadio School because they provide specific groups and departments a secure environment for collaboration through threaded discussions and sharing documents. The Graziadio School uses a community to deliver information to faculty and to offer those faculty a secure environment for administrative activities.

What’s in GraziadioNet?

To assemble a complete view of GraziadioNet, students and faculty can choose Plumtree Gadget Web Services, plug-in components that deliver key services from enterprise applications and Internet sites to the business desktop, for embedding discussion groups, newsfeeds, and collaboration tools in one personalized page. Now, students, faculty, and staff have a single, simple Web destination for:

• communities for faculty, student groups and alumni to collaborate;

• grading through Pepperdine University’s mainframe system;

• discussion groups;

• eRooms, which serve as the classroom information management tool and electronic classroom facility;

• announcements and alerts regarding courses and campus activity;

• access to learning resources from The Graziadio School and the Internet;

• a schedule of events;

• course information; and

• live feeds for weather, traffic, and stock information.

By deploying the Plumtree Corporate Portal, The Graziadio School will significantly cut costs by reducing the manual course scheduling that previously existed. Now, the majority of scheduling can be done through the portal, saving time and money.

“Educational institutions around the world are recognizing the value of the Plumtree Corporate Portal to both enhance the learning process for students and the organizational processes for administration,” said Plumtree CEO John Kunze. “From administrative work such as course scheduling, to collaborative learning done through eRooms, Plumtree is helping The Graziadio School of Business and Management to run more efficiently and serve its students and alumni better.”

About Plumtree Software

Plumtree Software is creating a simple, personalized Web portal to the information and applications that businesses use every day. Plumtree’s extensible portal platform organizes links to different types of corporate documents in a Web directory, and assembles application and Internet services from different systems in a personalized Web page. Plumtree embeds services from other systems in its portal platform using plug-in components called Plumtree Gadget Web services, which can be developed in a wide variety of programming environments, on a broad range of platforms. Hundreds of Gadget Web services have been developed by Plumtree and its partners, integrating into the portal application services and content from such vendors as Business Objects, Documentum, eRoom Technology, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Siebel Systems and others. Plumtree’s strategy is to build a network of portal technology and deployment expertise that is unmatched in the industry. Plumtree has more than 60 systems integrators, including Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Compaq Computer and Computer Sciences Corporation, and over 250 customers, including Ford Motor Company and Procter & Gamble. To learn more about Plumtree, visit www.plumtree.com, or see a demonstration at www.corporateportal.com.