DEARBORN, Mich - Ford Motor Company today announced a strategic alliance with Plumtree Software, the founder and leader of the corporate portal market, to deliver an enterprise-wide corporate portal solution to more than 200,000 employees worldwide. Ford's deployment of the software is part of an initiative to transform hub.ford.com, with 300,000 Web pages the largest commercial intranet in the world, into a comprehensive, dynamic view of Ford's business. Ford is replacing the existing hub.ford.com with a personalized portal that delivers a broad array of information and tools to employees and management. The portal will also enable Ford to integrate key functionality from in-house applications and facilitate role-based use of information by various functional groups within the company.  

The multitier architecture of the Plumtree Corporate Portal will enable hub.ford.com to deliver dynamic, personalized content to Ford employees under peak loads estimated by Ford at 10,000 hits per minute, or 167 hits per second.

"Hub.ford.com is the center of information and a key enabler of core business processes at Ford," said Jim Yost, CIO and Ford Motor Company vice president. "The new Ford Enterprise Portal will dramatically improve information management and access at Ford, increasing corporate awareness of our strategies, key messages and brands. Moreover, it will provide quick and easy access to key business sites and tools, ultimately increasing employee productivity. The Plumtree Corporate Portal was selected for this mission-critical initiative because it best maps to Ford's vision of a comprehensive, enterprise-wide portal to enable strategic content management." 

Functional Communities Enable Collaboration Between Employees Following the initial rollout of the corporate portal, Ford plans to expand the functionality of hub.ford.com by integrating communities, or sub-portals. Functional communities within Ford, such as purchasing, manufacturing and marketing, will develop gadgets tailored to the needs of employees within each functional area. The sub-portals will provide a collaboration platform that allows users in functional groups to access the information and services most relevant to their work¾facilitating project management, increasing knowledge sharing and strengthening relationships between employees across organizational boundaries. Moreover, Ford will use the portal to create and control new intranet sites. As managers register their sites, personalized data will be captured and delivered to the correct location within the portal. Personalized user profiles will ensure that the correct MyPage, intranet sites and gadgets are displayed for each user.  

What's in Hub.ford.com? Company and Industry News, Stock Status, Employee Listing and Contact Information, Local Weather  

Hub.ford.com integrates services from Ford intranet sites and the Internet as Plumtree Portal Gadgets™. Similar in appearance to the sports scoreboard or stock portfolio of a consumer portal, Plumtree Portal Gadgets are plug-in components that embed views of enterprise applications and interactive Internet services in a personalized portal page. Ford employees choose from a menu of gadgets to build a personalized view of the Ford business. Hub.ford.com's gadgets offer a wide variety of corporate services, including: 

XML feeds to real-time Ford and industry news sources:

• A current listing of the Ford Motor Company stock;
• A searchable directory of more than 300,000 Web pages, allowing employees access to Ford and job related information;
• Access to benefit and retirement information, employee vehicle programs and managers toolbox;
• Access to healthcare-management information;
• An up-to-date listing of Ford employees and their contact information; and
• Local weather status according to individual users' locations.

Additional Benefits: Advanced Search, Single Point of Access The taxonomy and filtering available in the Plumtree Corporate Portal will allow Ford to offer employees enhanced search capabilities. Employees will be able to initiate advanced searches of the more than one million documents stored worldwide. Advanced search capabilities will process highly targeted search requests and deliver streamlined, relevant results, increasing employee efficiency.  

Ford employees will benefit from the simplicity of Plumtree's single point of access, which integrates with Ford's existing LDAP security directory of more than 150,000 users, verifying each user's name and password to create a secure user account automatically. Upon login to hub.ford.com, each user will see key intranet sites and application content relevant to his or her work at Ford. In addition, the sign-on profile will register each user's geographical location so that the portal can display corresponding regional information, such as weather.  

(June 12, 2000)