To collaborate and to serve

Plumtree Software has released a new product that allows users of its corporate portal to share documents, schedule tasks and participate in discussions. The company claims the Collaboration Server is the first product of its kind designed from the outset for the portal environment.

Plumtree explains that Collaboration Server is a separate application, with its own database for storing project information and a separate administrative experience for managing projects. Collaboration Server projects can span portal deployments, combining users, documents and tasks from multiple portals.

Collaboration Server delivers documents, deadlines, announcements and conversation threads to the portal as Gadget Web Services, graphical Web services that can be embedded in a corporate portal. Collaboration Server's administrative experience for managing projects is accessible from the portal and allows a user to navigate easily between projects and portal pages. Each project in Collaboration Server is associated with a Plumtree Portal Community, and each object within a project is searchable, so portal users can quickly locate information within a project. Collaboration Server also includes a set of personalized Gadget Web Services for portal users to track their involvement in multiple projects.

Features of the Plumtree Collaboration Server include:

• calendars, with the ability to assign tasks and milestones;

• document sharing, with version control, change notification, workflow and check-in and check-out for editing;

• task lists with deadlines and dependencies; and

• threaded discussions with e-mail alerts when new threads are added.

In conjunction with Collaboration Server, Plumtree has also released two other new products designed to support interactive workspaces: Plumtree Studio Server, a graphical environment for creating graphical Web services, and the Plumtree Gadget Framework for Microsoft Excel, which publishes Excel charts and tables in the portal.