I’ve been really low blogging from some months, but it’s for a good reason, I was working hard on a new product: eXo Social.
eXo Social is based on 2 modules : eXo People and eXo Spaces. It’s developed to help collaboration with other people inside and outside the enterprise by leveraging the existing applications.
It is based on eXo Portal 2.5, and leverage the newly developed Dashboard that allows to easily integrate RSS feeds and thousands of existing applications. eXo Social is made of two modules:
eXo People brings Enterprise Social Networking to your work. It allows you to organize your workforce in an efficient way through a better understanding of your people skills. It also implement the OpenSocial standard that simplifies the development of social applications and allows to reuse the enterprise social graph inside your organization by any other application.
eXo Spaces adds communities to your work. It allows to easily regroup people by interests or projects. It leverages any existing application such as Portlets or Gadgets to enable a collaborative work.
You will be able to access to a sandbox for testing it. It’s a snapshot of the current development status. eXo Teams are still developing eXo Social but it will give you a nice idea about what is coming ! Be aware that this sandbox is erased every night (GMT time).
Access it soon !
The release is expected for January 2009. We will put in place an Early Access Program before the release to help you test the application for your enterprise. If you are interested to be part of it, please send me an email.
Paris, October 14th, 2008 - the price for the young manager of the year has been awarded to Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo Platform.
This price has been delivered by Pierre Aussure and his team specialized in the Executive Search, and have been validated by senior manager of many IT market leading companies like: Eric Boustouller (CEO, Microsoft France), Marie-Christine Levet (Iliad administrator), Christophe Parcot (CEO, Yahoo France), Mats Carduner (CEO, Google France), and Michel Lepert (CEO, Bull Western Europe).
Benjamin Mestrallet was competing with two other finalists: Carlos Diaz (Bluekiwi Software) and Emmanuel Gonon (Oslo Software).
At 29 years old, Benjamin Mestrallet is awarded for his management style, his entrepreneur spirit, his determination to make eXo Platform a reknown company and the firm belief he has in his products.
This award comes while eXo knows a major increase of its activities around the world. The company is in many countries outside Europe: South East Asia and recently in Africa, where there are many business opportunites. “Giving eXo Platform an international dimension was a real challenge we are about to win”, says Benjamin Mestrallet, “To my opinion, it is very important for the company’s development and for its recognition on a very competitive market, to be quickly present on future market where we can be in advance on major competitors”.
Benjamin Mestrallet founded eXo Platform in 2003, and has been the first to develop the concept of workspace virtualization that looks like common operationg systems like Windows or Mac, and available via any internet browser. Benjamin explains: “With this innovative concept, we were determined to propose an intuitive solution, where the user is in the center of the system, where he can quickly find his habits and where he can participate actively to the company’s life.” He adds: “We give a strong collaborative dimension to all our applications, because I am certain that the future of entreprises is standing on these points: strenghtening the links between collaborators and bringing all the tools needed to a good information use and diffusion.”
The incoming announcements are big, we will launch before the end of the year several new products as well as new versions of our flagship modules
For the new ones:
eXo Knowledge Suite 1.0 (eXo KS)
eXo Liveroom 1.0 (eXo LR)
eXo Web Content Management 1.0 (eXo WCM)
eXo Social 1.0
We already introduced all those products apart eXo Social, but be patient we have a HUGE show soon with Google…I guess it gives you a hint of the standard we used underneath…
For the existing products, we have new versions like:
eXo Portal 2.5
eXo WebOS 1.5
eXo ECM 2.2
eXo CS 1.1
I have just reviewed the last development for eXo ECM 2.2, and I was impressed by some of the features. Of course I knew we would make it (I ordered some of them) but I did not think it would be that quick and that nice!
I will not unveil all the cool stuffs today and only show one screenshot of the new “Cover Flow” view we have introduced in the eXo ECM File Explorer:
Gartner Analysts delivered their list of the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas” at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Orlando, that IT companies should watch over the next three years.
eXo Platform is standing as an innovator in many of these areas.
Analysts define strategic technologies as :
“A strategic technology is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years. Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”
Gartner’s Top 10 technologies :
Gartner Top 10 technologies
eXo Platform is already standing on some of these areas and is developing others :
1. Virtualization
Gartner: “Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.”
eXo Platform: During last years, eXo Platform developed a product called eXo WebOS wich is a virtualized desktop. This user oriented solution reproduce the environment of classic operating systems, where users can easily find their useful applications and organize their work space through desktop windows that can be maximized or minimized. Moreover, the JCR enables the storage virtualization.
2. Cloud Computing
Gartner: “Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. The key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.”
eXo Platform: The company is developping SAAS solutions of its products via amazon EC2 servers. This solution benefits to the users in the way that they pay as they use it. For eXo, it reduces the time to market.
4. Web-Oriented Architectures
Gartner: “The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.”
eXo Platform: eXo products are built on top of Web-Oriented Architectures and are developed around our REST framework and the gadgets API. Gadgets that can be used inside or outside eXo products.
5. Enterprise Mashups
Gartner: “Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.”
eXo Platform: eXo products enable the users to build mashups on their personnal pages and thus to display information from different sources. This improve knowledge exchanges inside the company. Another idea implemented on eXo products is the applications mashup enabling companies to display different applications on a same page (Google gadgets for exemple).
7. Social Software and Social Networking
Gartner: “Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.”
eXo Platform: All eXo products have a strong collaborative dimension because we think that the future of companies lies in the Web 2.0 practices. Following this idea, we engaged ressources to develop a new product: eXo Social, which brings social networking inside the companies, pushing the traditional “walls” of the company to its customers and partners. More about eXo Social is coming soon ! Very soon !
As you can see, eXo Platform is standing in major technology areas defined by a reknowned IT consultant group : Gartner.
Today, some countries in the world, such as Vietnam, celebrate the Women’s day. Happy women’s day to all eXo girls !
This day is also a good opportunity to observe the diversity in our company. Our employees are located over 4 different countries (a new one will be added to the list pretty soon). In the Vietnamese center, for example, over 30% of employees are women, 8% are foreigners.
As we strongly believe in the strengh of diversity in a company, we will not stop here and plan to further improve those figures in the future.
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