Plumtree Software Inc. announced Monday a new portal offering specifically designed for human resources departments.
The new portal, known as the Plumtree Portal Solution for Employee Services, provides an online resource center of content, services and systems for a companys employees and retirees and their spouses, providing access to human resources information and other employee services such as paid time-off requests and approval, training registration and scheduling, job postings and applications, conference room scheduling, and employee surveys.
It can be used to create a searchable Web directory of HR policies and procedures.
Plumtree also announced Monday new Gadget Suites for HR applications developed by SAP AG and PeopleSoft Inc. The Gadget Suites provide integration between those HR apps and the Plumtree portal.
In addition to those Gadget suites, the employee services solution set includes Plumtrees flagship portal platform, Plumtree Collaboration Server, Plumtree Studio Server and the Plumtree Framework for Microsoft Excel. Its Plumtrees first line-of-business offering.
“A corporate portal is a natural resource center for employee services,” said Plumtree CEO John Kunze in a statement. Kunze said “dozens” of Plumtree customers already use the San Francisco-based companys software to automate business processes, integrate HR systems and benefits services, and build taxonomies for organizing policies and procedures.
“This solution is lowering the cost and accelerating the time to value of an employee services portal,” Kunze said.
Companies that are still shying away from using portals for collaboration and document sharing may find what theyre looking for in Availl Inc.s Availl 2.0, also announced Monday.
Dubbed by company executives as the “anti-portal,” Availl 2.0 uses the companys FastMirror technology to mirror files on a users hard drive. Changes made to files in a designated folder on one users hard drive are automatically mirrored to the same files on other users drives. Only the changes are mirrored though, which reduces bandwidth requirements from downloading files from portals or sending e-mail attachments by 95 percent, said Availl officials in Chelmsford, Mass.
When connected to the Internet, group members automatically and transparently receive the latest version of a document or file. All file types are supported, and administrators can control the permission level of group members for read/write or read-only capability.
Availl 2.0 is available now. Pricing starts at $2,495 and includes both the server software and simultaneous end-user licenses.