Tugdual Grall, Directeur Technique d’eXo, sera présent à Lille pour un petit-déjeuner organisé par notre partenaire Capgemini. L’evénement aura lieu le jeudi 26 janvier à 8h00, Maison Petrowski, 9 rue à Fiens, Lille (à proximité de la Gare Lille Flandres).
Tugdual présentera eXo Platform (la plateforme d’expérience utilisateur), nouvelle génération de solution Intranet/Extranet totalement intégrée, sociale et conçue pour le cloud.
Agenda :
Introduction
UXP (User Experience Platform) : le socle des Intranets/Extranets nouvelle génération
Les nouveaux enjeux/besoins autour de xNet : communautaire, social, adaptable en fonction du métier
Le positionnement et l’offre eXo Platform
Démonstration
Cas clients
Le portail dans les nuages : différentes approches pour différents besoins
Répondre plus rapidement aux besoins métiers : eXo Cloud IDE
Déployer rapidement et à moindre coût un intranet communautaire d’entreprise : eXo Cloud Workspace
Déployer dans un cloud privé et public : eXo Platform
The following post is by Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo.
Enterprise Social Gets Serious
First, Chatter. Now Jive goes public. All this is great news, validating the idea that the enterprise benefits from social networks as much as we do in our private lives. People have become accustomed to interacting on Facebook; they want enterprise-class tools that enable them to share content and interact with co-workers just as easily.
What’s Missing?
This is all new for the enterprise, so IT has questions: What about security for the “real” world? What about integration with existing infrastructure assets? What about cost of ownership? Ultimately, organizations need an approach to evolving a social intranet that takes into consideration user needs, security and flexibility. IT teams need to be able to evaluate on a small scale and broaden the adoption on demand. They need an easy on-ramp and an easy path to enterprise-wide adoption.
All of these needs, in turn, point towards the value of an Open Source solution. Security? Vendor independence? Rapid innovation? Open Source solutions are already proven in these regards. But more than that: the Open Source movement understands social better than anyone. That’s the way Open Source development works.
What’s New: An Open Source Alternative
The need for enterprise-class Open Source social business software prompted eXo to develop eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition. Released to customers last Sunday, eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition already delivers features that rival Jive — but with greater flexibility and control, and an easier on-ramp to adoption.
So, we’re pleased that the IPO for Jive has gone so well. The response from the market clearly validates the work that Jive, eXo and others have been doing to develop social business software. It also highlights the need for alternatives that support a variety of enterprise needs — and we’re very happy to be part of that community.
To learn more about eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition, or to download the software, please visit http://budurl.com/uyn3.
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Benjamin Mestrallet is founder and CEO of eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company. He oversees the Company’s growth, marketing and sales strategy from its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. For more information on eXo, please visit http://exoplatform.com. For additional perspectives, please visit and subscribe to eXo RSS blog feeds at http://blog.exoplatform.org/. Follow eXo on Twitter at @exoplatform.
Readers are welcome to publish the above blog in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Commons license.
At eXo, I’m in charge of developing our mobile applications. With the upcoming release of eXo Platform 3.5, these applications will play a significant role in improving the user experience, allowing you to access your documents, apps and enterprise social network from anywhere and at anytime.
We’ve been working on amazing new applications for iOS and Android. With a new set of features and an amazingly simple interface, we want to make mobile usage of eXo Platform 3.5 fun and amazingly easy.
In this post, I’ll explain our choice of building native apps rather than web apps, then give you a quick tour of the exciting new features.
Why Native Apps?
iOS and Android now offer a mobile browser experience almost identical to what we are used to on a desktop browser. The number of people browsing the web from a mobile device has more than tripled since 2009 (and will continue to increase). Because of this, many websites and web services have developed strategies to provide information and services to their mobile users.
There are plenty of ways to accomplish this objective. One can simply tweak an existing web service, use adaptive layouts, build a dedicated mobile web application or build a native mobile application.
Each solution has pros and cons. For us, the most important factor in our decision was the ability to deliver a great user experience. Implementing a mobile strategy is not as simple as replicating features, content and services from the desktop version of eXo Platform 3.5. It involves thinking about how users will want to use these features from their mobile devices. It requires a real effort to prioritize and deliver the most important and relevant content to users. Finally, the size of the screen and resolution also has an impact on the content you can deliver.
We recognized that the mobile user experience would ultimately be very different than that of the desktop app, and determined that the complexity of building dedicated web applications versus native applications would be quite similar.
From an engineering point of view, the decision was therefore open. From a user point of view, we all agreed that we preferred using native applications and that motivated our final decision.
As native applications provide the best user experience by taking full advantages of OS-specific and device-specific features and controls, we decided it was the best approach to provide a flawless experience for our users. And last but not least, native apps offer better speed and performance and and helped us build lightweight apps with minimal bandwidth usage.
Rethink Mobile User Experience
To design simple and engaging apps, we looked at our favorite mobile apps, worked a lot on navigation concepts and focused on integration with the different OS.
iPhone Application:
Our iPhone application is built around a central menu listing all available features. You can easily navigate into a feature, go back to the menu and switch to another one. We used components that people are already familiar with such as modal views, camera integration and action pop-ups, thereby making the navigation very intuitive.
iPad Application:
We love the iPad for its ease of use and beautiful apps. We particularly liked the Twitter iPad application and wanted to organize features in a similar way. We used a pattern of stack views to allow you to jump into each navigation level of the application, while keeping the menu on the left side of the screen. Finally, the application is orientation-aware with the content view adapting to portrait or landscape mode.
Android Application:
We also leveraged Android’s native navigation and actions patterns. As an Android user, you’re already familiar with:
Action bar
Back actions
Dashboard
Option menu
Finally, we took the time to tweak our layouts, spacing, font sizes, font colors and many other details to provide a clean and simple UI for all apps.
Increase Your Productivity
Let’s now get into the heart of the applications and check out the different features.
Access your news feed: The mobile applications give you easy access to your social intranet news feed. You can receive messages from other users and update your status. The news feed also provides notifications about wiki page updates, new forum posts, new events in your calendar or new documents added to the repository. This helps you keep track of all recent and relevant activity, and lets you comment on this activity as needed.
Upload pictures: share important images on-the-go with your mobile device and upload them instantly to your news feed. The scanner of the future?
Access your documents from everywhere: No matter where your business takes you, you’ll always have access to your document repository. You’ll also be able upload pictures, organize your documents, comment or vote.
Instant access to your gadgets: Extend your mobile functionalities by accessing any app deployed in your gadget dashboard. This opens endless possibilities as you can easily build a new gadget on the desktop version of eXo Platform 3.5, deploy it to a dashboard, and instantly access it from your mobile app.
Your intranet, available anywhere, anytime!
As we started using our mobile apps internally with our social intranet, we witnessed a whole new level of user engagement. People are sharing content, wiki pages, information, pictures, and commenting and liking posts. From the statistics we gathered, we noticed that mobile users connect to the intranet more often then they did before.
We’ve built a strong foundation for our mobile apps and we believe you’ll love them. We’ll continue adding improvements to make them even better.
Stay tuned for more updates and cool new mobile features!
Salon : Rencontre Internationale des Responsables Intranet
Dates : les 15 et 16 Novembre 2011
Lieu : Salons Hoche, Paris 8e
Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer notre présence au salon Rencontre Internationale des Responsables de l’Intranet pour partager avec vous nos Success Stories et répondre à vos besoins autour des outils collaboratifs et Intranet sociaux d’entreprise. Ce sera aussi l’occasion de dévoiler une partie des nouveautés à venir avec notre toute dernière version eXo Platform: 3.5 qui sera annoncée très prochainement. Venez rencontrer les équipes eXo.
eXo Platform provides a set of services to extend portal-based applications with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities. Document Management (DMS) features make it easy to catalog and organize enterprise content, while Workflows allow you to automate and manage your human-to-computer interactions. Quickly build dynamic, content-rich websites with powerful web content management (WCM) services.
For the forthcoming eXo Platform 3.5 release, we focused mainly on User Experience improvements that make it faster and more efficient to work with content. To this end, we’ve added more than 100 new features – I’ll focus on a few that I consider most important in this post.
We’ve added more than 100 new features in this new release but I will focus on just a few of these in this post.
New Features for a Better User Experience
Inline editing
Last year, in eXo Platform 3.0, we released a new way to edit and publish content in the context of a website. This was a major step forward in term of usability but also a great improvement in term of product reliability.
eXo Platform 3.5 will offer an improved in-line editing experience. With this new feature, you can edit a specific individual content item then submit it. That’s all. For simple edits, bypassing the redirection to the Content Editor (which is useful for more complex edits) means faster content updates:
Double-click on the text you wish to change; edit, save and you’re done.
What would be the advantage of in-line editing if you still needed to go to the Content Editor to push your changes live? We therefore added a new action to allow content publication from the front-end. It’s fully dynamic and relies on the existing content publication workflow. Only users with publisher rights will see the publish button while making in-line edits to content.
Content Explorer Refinements
When more complex document management tasks are involved, the Content Explorer is an indispensable tool.
Thanks to feedback from our customers, we made three major improvements to redefine the content creation and editing dialogs.
The new “Create Content” presentation displays a landing page with the existing Content Types. You first choose your content type; later you can go back to the landing page to modify it.
Many designers and web developers are using larger, higher-resolution displays, so we added a “Full screen” option that fills the entire browser with the Content. We also wanted to keep the Content Edition dialog as a small window to guarantee retro-compatibility with smaller displays.
In the Rich Text editor, you can link content items, pages and external links. We added a dedicated button for images, allowing you to preview images before inserting them in your article.
Improvements for Site Admins
While eXo Platform 3.5 can easily be used as an out-of-the-box solution, it’s also highly customizable and can be configured to fit different requirements.
Content By Query
When using eXo Platform 3.5 with an administrator profile, you will see a new application called “Content By Query”. If you are familiar with eXo Platform 3.0, you already know we can build a page using lists of content, coupled with Category navigation for example. But if you wanted to show all the content in a particular folder with a special property, it wasn’t possible. With the new “Content By Query”, you can write a query using the JCR SQL syntax and eXo Platform 3.5 takes care of the rest. The system retrieves the content and shows the published versions, while managing the caching mechanism to improve the loading time. In terms of UI, we used the same display mechanism than for the existing “Content List” portlet, thus allowing you to re-use existing templates.
SEO
One of the major new features for webmasters is SEO integration. We created a very simple interface to add SEO properties on each page or content item. It will automatically generate the SEO markup in the rendered HTML page, as well as a sitemap and robots.txt file.
Using a simple color code, you can see at-a-glance whether or not you need to add SEO properties. Red means you’re missing SEO properties entirely, Orange indicates they are incomplete, while Green means you’re all set.
On-page SEO: you can set page descriptions, attach keyword tags, and also specify if you want this page to be part of the sitemap or its robots metadata.
In-content SEO: If you’re on a Content page, you can assign descriptions and keywords.
Finally, because SEO data is so valuable, we decided to use it in the search engine. Therefore, if it matches the keyword entered in the Search Panel, your page will now display in the results.
New Set of Services
CMIS Support by Default
Our own CMIS implementation is now fully supported and integrated in eXo Platform 3.5. We’ve added new features as well, like the capability to browse the content repository using CMIS through the drives hierarchy defined in eXo Platform 3.5.
Enterprise Social Activity Streams
With eXo Platform 3.5, your Content-related activity can be published right into your social intranet’s activity streams. Users can see real-time updates when content is uploaded, edited or published. This increases transparency and makes it easier to follow your team’s work – one of the many benefits of the social intranet.
Last but Definitely Not Least: Performance
Naturally, every major new release means significant work to improve performance. Personally, I see this as a never-ending pursuit that is essential to to improving any product. Last year, we focused mainly on pure website performance; how fast we can process a page and how many website pages we can deliver per second.
For this release, we focused on two major areas:
Intranet performance and experience. This is a totally different job than pure website performance, since page generation and content visibility are by far more dynamic. To improve this type of performance, we now have a new cache for the authenticated site. It’s based on the generated markup, like the one on the front-end we released last year (not on Content nodes, as it was in the past). The administrator can specify the visibility of Content on the page, and we dynamically switch from a content-based cache to a more efficient markup-based cache. We estimate that this new markup cache could be used in more than 80% of your content presentation.
Large content datasets. Bigger datasets present some unique challenges, mostly in terms of memory consumption and time required for a front-end search. We made some changes to leverage this limitation and push the limit to millions of content in your Content Repository. The cache is more intelligent too; it caches only the content you can see, which reduces memory consumption. We also take advantage of the new features provided by JCR 1.14 to make faster queries than ever before.
Conclusion
I am very happy and proud about this release. I hope we achieved to provide a better User Experience, but also a faster and more efficient Platform for you to work with.
I am really proud of our work on eXo Platform 3.5. I believe we’re delivering on our vision of a better user experience, while also giving you a faster and more efficient platform to work with.
Here’s a short video to show you some of the features presented in this blog post. Stay tuned on twitter (@bpaillereau) for more updates.
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