Plateau Talent Gateway Harnesses the Power of Social Media/Networking to Deliver Business Value New Offering Provides a Broad Set of Collaboration Tools that Allow Customers to Maximize their Talent Management Investments and Initiatives

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Arlington, VA - Thursday, September 3, 2009 -- Plateau Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-class SaaS solutions for talent management, announced the availability of Plateau Talent Gateway, the industry's first comprehensive set of flexible, portable web-based communication, social, and knowledge-sharing tools that customers can utilize to make talent management more accessible and available across the enterprise. By embedding the most current and relevant social networking, portal, content, and Web 2.0 tools and making them available to users directly from within the product, Plateau Talent Gateway allows organizations to drive workforce productivity and innovation, facilitate information-sharing and employee collaboration and extend formal, informal and just-in-time learning initiatives across the enterprise.

"Plateau Talent Gateway is a natural extension of our current product set and validates Plateau's commitment to delivering thoughtful and practical solutions that allow our customers to extract maximum value from their existing talent management assets," said Paul Sparta, Chairman and CEO of Plateau Systems. "Social networking technologies are significantly impacting the way people interact in the workplace, from creating online communities and sharing knowledge, to locating subject matter experts. With the Talent Gateway, we have introduced a solution that allows customers to easily transform those powerful tools into solutions that address real workforce issues like employee on-boarding, job transitioning, project collaboration, and informal learning. By making it possible for customers to harness the power of social networking in the workplace, we are increasing the value of their talent management investments."

Tangible Benefits
Delivered as part of Plateau's core Talent Management Suite, Plateau Talent Gateway provides a rich set of collaboration and social networking tools that customers can utilize to realize a number of direct benefits, including:

• Increased innovation - Plateau Talent Gateway provides a venue where employees and partners can find experts, share knowledge and connect on key topics. Dedicated sites can be easily created and configured to serve virtually any purpose - from employee on-boarding to new product launches and project team creation. All sites can all be configured, personalized and managed by end-users.
• Improved productivity - Forrester Research estimates that: "Formal learning works for 20% of learning needs, while informal learning handles the other 80%."1 Recognizing that the majority of learning occurs outside of formal learning programs, Plateau Talent Gateway provides an environment where user-driven content can be shared, enhanced, commented on and rated, with the goal of increasing workforce efficiency and productivity. Users can quickly post questions, documents, best practices, and easily locate experts and information to make them more productive. This comprehensive informal learning functionality complements and extends the powerful formal learning capabilities found in the Plateau Talent Management Suite.
• Greater collaboration and knowledge transfer - With the economy slowing the hiring rate at many companies, employers are being required to do more with less and are having to cross-train employees to take on expanded responsibilities. Plateau Talent Gateway provides access to extensive collaboration and social networking tools that can be used to facilitate job transitioning and project collaboration. Its end-user driven environment is designed to capture all forms of best practices, facilitate discussion forums, create online communities and locate experts.

"When looking for a system to support social learning - or any other corporate community - it is important to select a system that can support an evolving strategy. With its underlying portal technology, open architecture, and generous set of out-of-the-box portlets and web services, Plateau's new Talent Gateway is the very definition of flexibility," said Josh Bersin, CEO and president of Bersin & Associates. "Plateau customers now have the option to build a true learning and talent portal - a friendly, one-stop face for their learning and talent platform. Or, they can bring learning and talent processes to any other platform in the organization's infrastructure - closer to where work happens."

Standards-based Portlets
End-users can quickly and easily organize the Plateau Talent Gateway by utilizing more than 80 drag-and-drop communication tools including blogs, message boards, wikis, discussion groups, digital asset libraries, document libraries, and RSS feeds made available through configurable portlets.

Plateau Talent Gateway is built to the JSR 268 specification, which allows users to deploy the portlets in the Plateau Talent Gateway and in any other Java-based portal that supports this standard. They can also embed JSR 268-compliant portals in the Talent Gateway. This standards-based approach simplifies development and promotes asset reuse, underscoring Plateau's commitment to delivering flexible and open solutions that expedite time to market and reduce maintenance costs.

Availability
Plateau Talent Gateway is generally available and will be showcased at Plateau's annual Insights user conference later this month in San Francisco. September. Additional information on the features available in Plateau Talent Gateway is available at www.plateau.com/talentgateway.

¹ Forrester Research, "Get Serious About Informal Learning," by Claire Schooley, April 22, 2009