Yahoo! Tweaks its Corporate Offerings

Nearly lost in the hectic shuffle of a significant deal between Yahoo! Inc.
and Sony Corp.
, was the announcement that the portal giant Tuesday
upgraded its corporate portal
solution.

While most industry watchers or investors were perking up to Yahoo!’s and
Sony’s co-branded content and communications tools agreement, the popular
portal and media company also quietly integrated enterprise applications,
enhanced management of user groups and deepened adoption of open standards
for its chief intranet solution, Corporate Yahoo!.

The software is called PortalBuilder 3.0. and it is geared to run behind
the corporate firewall to allow IT departments to deploy portals that
aggregate corporate resources within a flexible interface. As is the design
of most intranet solutions, this standardization on a content delivery
platform, Yahoo! hopes, will yield increased productivity and reduced costs
throughout the enterprise that uses it.

“With just over a year in deployment, Corporate Yahoo! has enjoyed
tremendous success in bringing enterprise portal solutions to Global 2000
companies and state governments,” said John Willcutts, vice president and
general manager of Corporate Yahoo!. “PortalBuilder 3.0 offers important new
features and flexibility, and builds on our commitment to deliver
personalized, collaborative portal solutions that are easy to deploy and
easier to administer.”

To ensure up-to-the-minute data is presented across enterprises, Corporate
Yahoo! incorporates real-time software from TIBCO Software Inc., but Yahoo! also inked recent deals with infrastructure provider
Interwoven Inc. to integrate content and Northern Light Technology Inc.,
which will offer its online business library of over 7,000 full-text sources
as well as a search service to locate relevant sources.

Available now, Yahoo! PortalBuilder 3.0’s new features include:

• Simplified integration – to Aggregate data from enterprise applications
  using pre-built PortalPacks, allowing integration between PortalBuilder 3.0
  Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel
  
• Content Distribution Using Roles and Groups — delegates administration
  rights to managers and shifts control
  of specific portal functions from the IT department to the portal users
  within an administrative framework

• Internationalization — full support for double-byte encoding allows
  portal content created in multiple languages and character sets to be
  presented on a single portal page. Administrators may also target portal
  content and presentation to
  users in specific locations or languages

• Further Open Standards Adopted to Eliminate Single Vendor Risk — as it
  is J2EE-compliant, PortalBuilder 3.0’s Java servlet architecture runs on
  platforms developed by BEA WebLogic, JRun and iPlanet. Also runs on Sun
  Solaris, HP/UX, Microsoft Windows NT, and Microsoft Windows 2000

Corporate Yahoo! is used by such major corporations as McDonald’s, Bayer AG
and Honeywell. Pricing for the application is based on the number of users.