"That means we opened eight stores that weekend. It gives you an idea of how fast we're moving as a company," says Tom Tracey, IS manager-intranet and the chief IS officer for the Framingham, Mass., company's enterprise information portal.

"Frankly, we needed an information system that can move as fast as we do," he says. "That's why we built this portal."

The portal, launched in February, is used by 3,000 executives, knowledge workers, and store managers. Within the year, as many as 10,000 of the $9 billion office-supply chain's 46,000 employees will use it as the interface to business processes and applications, he says. Country-specific portals are being planned for the Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

Staples is using Corporate Portal from Plumtree Software. Tracey wouldn't comment on the cost of the implementation, but he says increased productivity and effectiveness, lower cost of information delivery, and improved internal communication will result in a quick return on the company's investment.

"We want to help people get their applications and information more quickly," Tracey says. "What if we save each member of the management team 20 minutes a day? Can you imagine how much more productive we'd be?"

Tracey says the portal is used by executive management, contracts, procurement, sales and marketing, human resources, and managers of all U.S. retail stores, as well as for internal business by Staples' three business-to-business Web sites. It offers E-mail, scheduling, headlines on the competition, new-product information, internal news, job postings, newsletters, and even a ticker that displays Staples' stock price.

For higher-level employees, the portal displays sales and marketing information. It's also used for procurement. The API for the company's Ariba Inc. financial application is about to be integrated into the portal so expenses can be done from the portal's browser interface instead of the application interface, Tracey says.

The contracts division uses the portal to track customer contracts for Staples' business-to-business sites. Sales and marketing uses it to manage large accounts. The human-resources page lets new employees access welcome information and the employee policy manual. And store managers can use the portal to report sales and to print out specification sheets.

Tracey says an important feature of the portal is Plumtree's "gadgets," which let users add or remove content on their start pages.

"Our portal is a one-stop shop," Tracey says. "Our users are deciding what they want on the portal, and we're finding a way to get it there. That way, they won't have to use anything else."

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