Europe's Largest Public Education Portal Goes Live on the Plumtree Corporate Portal 5.0 to Over 46,000 Teachers and Students

Europe's Largest Public Education Portal Goes Live on the Plumtree Corporate
Portal 5.0 to Over 46,000 Teachers and Students
New Version of mySchool! e-Learning Portal Empowers Local Schools to Build Over
2,800 Classroom and Subject Applications Within One Enterprise Web Framework 


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 7  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Enterprise Web leader Plumtree
Software  today announced that the Luxemburg Ministry of Education has upgraded
its mySchool portal, believed to be Europe's largest e-learning portal, to the
Plumtree Corporate Portal 5.0, Content Server 5.0 and Collaboration Server 3.0.
The Luxemburg Ministry of Education is launching a national campaign to
encourage pupils to utilize the portal, now called New Generation mySchool,
through a publicity drive, newsletters, advertisements and a weekly primetime
television program dedicated to the New Generation mySchool!

Originally launched in 2002, mySchool! enables online communities of pupils,
teachers and education providers across Luxembourg to search, communicate,
collaborate and create content online, in an environment which is both intuitive
and secure. For over a year, the Plumtree-powered portal has delivered content,
tools and a collaborative learning environment to 36,000 primary and secondary
school pupils and 10,000 teachers across the country. The deployment also allows
pupils to access resources via the portal remotely, helping ensure that disabled
children and those with learning difficulties who are not able to attend school
have the opportunity to obtain an integrated education.

Today's announcement of New Generation mySchool! builds on this initiative,
providing a range of new features made possible the Plumtree Corporate Portal
5.0 and the Plumtree Enterprise Web technologies including:

  1) Decentralized and flexible management of content and users
     Using Application Spaces, new in 5.0, mySchool administrators manage
     applications in separate domains, each with a separate audience and a
     separate set of administrators. This separation gives them the ability
     to distribute administrative access to individual sections of the
     portal, reducing management burden on the Ministry while maintaining
     portal-wide security. Individual schools now have the administrative
     power to create their own local view and content for the mySchool!
     portal.
  2) More personalized views of mySchool!
     An enhanced personalization engine in the Plumtree Corporate Portal 5.0

     determines which applications each user sees, the scheme that controls
     his or her navigation and the branding of the start page. As a result,
     different types of users from different communities get a completely
     different experiences of the mySchool! portal based on the applications

     relevant to them.
  3) Ability to build subportals for schools and classrooms
     Using the subportal functionality of 5.0, administrators can build
     separate applications that each have their own security, branding and
     functionality, yet can all be managed through one central console. Thus

     school portals, classroom portals and subject portals can effectively
     function as separate portals- built and personalized by schools and
     teachers, but upgraded and grown by the Luxembourg Ministry of
     Education through one unified framework.



The Luxembourg Ministry of Education estimates that up to 80 sub-portal
communities will be established within each school representing classes, subject
areas and interest groups creating a total of 2,800 sub-portal communities
across mySchool! Luxembourg.

Local Content Management

Designated mySchool! content maintainers at each school will be responsible for
the management of these local communities and applications. Using Plumtree's
Content Server, content maintainers without Web programming skills can create,
validate and publish content across their local mySchool! portals in a
controlled, consistent way. The Ministry of Education has also developed a light
version of Content Server, Smart Content Server, to enable pupils to intuitively
create and publish content locally.

Daniel Weiler, project manager at mySchool!, welcomes New Generation mySchool
since 5.0 reduces the management burden on the Ministry by allowing it to
distribute administrative responsibilities while keeping each school's content
secure.

"Today, schools will be able to create their own localized versions of
mySchool!, and Plumtree's Corporate Portal 5.0 will also support the creation of
mySchool! communities within individual schools," said Weiler. "The creation of
personalized and localized content is vital to ensuring that pupils regard the
mySchool! portal as a principal source of relevant information, advice and tools
to support their education."

mySchool! is part of the wider European Schoolnet initiative -- the
international partnership of 23 European Ministries of Education to promote
e-learning. The European Union specifies that by the end of 2003, all pupils
should be digitally literate by the time they leave school. Plumtree's portal
framework has been central to meeting this requirement.

Charlie Abrahams, Plumtree's European Managing Director, described the mySchool!
roll out as a marvelous showcase for the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite.

"The figures speak for themselves -- 2,800 e-learning communities spread across
the country managed locally, but based on a single, open platform. MySchool! is
as rigorous and demanding as any traditional corporate application and
represents a tremendous example of portal technology being used to its full
potential."

About Plumtree Software

Plumtree Software is the Enterprise Web leader. Plumtree's mission is to create
a comprehensive Web environment for employees, customers and partners across the
enterprise to interact with different systems and work together. Plumtree's
Enterprise Web solution consists of integration products for bringing resources
from traditional systems together on the Web, shared services such as
collaboration, content management and search for building new Web applications,
and a portal platform for delivering these Web applications to broad audiences.
Plumtree's independence and its Web Services Architecture allow this solution to
span rival platforms and systems, helping maximize customers' return on their
existing technology investments. With offices in more than a dozen countries,
Plumtree has licensed over 550 customers, including Boeing, Ford Motor Company,
Procter & Gamble and the U.S. Navy.

NOTE:  Plumtree is a registered trademark of Plumtree Software, Inc. and/or its
subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries. All other registered and
unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their
respective owners. 

DATASOURCE: Plumtree Software, Inc.



CONTACT:  Carilu Dietrich of Plumtree Software, Inc., [phone], or





Web site:  http://www.plumtree.com/ 

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