Archive for June, 2010

JBoss World – A rookie’s retrospective

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I just joined eXo a few months ago as a technical evangelist, having just graduated from engineering school in Paris.  Last week I was in Boston at the 2010 JBoss World / Red Hat Summit, so I thought I’d share my perspective as a first-time attendee. With Red Hat announcing the new JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, which is powered by eXo’s Web Content Management module, the eXo team was out in full force (Bob Bickel, Benjamin Mestrallet, Benjamin Paillereau, Julien Viet, Jerome Agnola and myself). The announcement was big for eXo, but it was even better to see the enthusiastic response from the attendees I talked to.

The event kicked off Tuesday evening and it was easy to find our booth.  People were lining up to grab one of our new “Pimp My Java” t-shirts, along with the coordinating eXo “pimp cups” that could be filled with drinks at the bar.  We found ourselves running out of giveaways earlier that we thought.

We met even more people Wednesday, as most of the eXo team members gathered in the booth after Jim Whitehurst’s keynote introduction. In his speech, Red Hat’s CEO explained why Open Source software is more relevant than ever.  Customers are increasingly concerned with openess and modularity, to avoid having resources locked into their IT projects. Open standards and interoperability are something I’ve heard a lot about since I joined eXo, so it was great to hear this message repeated by the CEO of the biggest open source company out there.

That afternoon I spent most of my time giving demos in eXo’s booth and had some great discussions with people who dropped by. It was interesting to hear so many fresh ideas and opinions, and talking to “real-life” developers definitely helped me gain some perspective on our product. I already knew our product’s features and capabilities, but now I got to hear exactly what kind of apps people want to extend and build with it. Once again, the main concern everyone kept bringing up was integration. Being able to reuse existing code, hardware or data structures is the starting point for 99% of customers. On top of that, I heard a lot of people say that integrating a WCM solution with their existing applications is a key concern, so being able to get that on top of EPP5 is a huge plus for Red Hat customers.

The day ended with an on-site party and barbecue where I was able to meet some of eXo’s partners and fellow Red Hat team members, as well as Jim Whitehurst, who was casually chatting with attendees.

Thursday was big for eXo as Red Hat announced the EPP-SP portal in the morning keynote, and Benjamin Paillereau, product manager of eXo Content, held a session on Social Publishing on EPP-SP in the afternoon. After we hit up Faneuil Hall for the closing party, we all joined the pub crawl taking place nearby.  That’s where we were psyched to find Noelle, Red Hat developer evangelist, wearing the eXo t-shirt!

All in all, the conference was a great experience for the whole eXo team – I definitely learned a lot. It was awesome to meet all of you who stopped by our booth to have a chat (or a beer) with us.  And a big thanks to Red Hat for organizing everything so well!  For those of you who didn’t have the chance to attend, all the presenters’ slides are already available here.

I’ll hopefully see you at Red Hat Summit 2011!

The eXo booth

Introducing the eXo Modules

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eXo Webinar: How to Add Social Publishing to Portal-Based Applications

Monday, June 28th, 2010

GateIn, the open source portal framework developed by eXo and Red Hat, provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy portal-based applications. By adding Web Content Management (WCM) functionality and gadgets, these applications can be extended to allow end users to create and publish their own content, without having to know the inner workings of the portal infrastructure.

Developers can easily gain these capabilities with eXo WCM, which is tuned and optimized for the GateIn portal framework. Together, eXo WCM and GateIn can be used as a platform for integrating applications as well as managing and publishing content – all from a single, familiar console.

Join Benjamin Paillereau, product manager of eXo WCM, as he demonstrates how to get native WCM features inside GateIn. Sample use case scenarios and a live demo will also be provided.

Through the presentation and demo, attendees will learn:

  • How to set up a workflow process for getting content created, edited, approved and published
  • How to customize this workflow for the unique needs of the content author, the publisher and the site visitor
  • How to create a simple portlet to take advantage of extended publication features
  • How to extend the publication process with UIExtension Framework
  • How to use REST services to add authoring to a personal dashboard

Live eXo Webinar, Wednesday 7 July, 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT, register you seat now!

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eXo Expands Collaboration With Red Hat on JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

eXo powers newly announced CMS from Red Hat; further extends this forthcoming product with add-on modules to bring social, collaboration and knowledge management capabilities

BOSTON, June 24 - RED HAT SUMMIT – eXo (http://exoplatform.com) today announced the introduction of eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, a new content management system (CMS) powered by eXo that Red Hat previewed to customers today and will release later this year. With the eXo Add-on Modules, JBoss Site Publisher customers will be able mix and match their content with applications and publish across not only websites but also enterprise social networks, activity streams, instant messaging and forums.

eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss —  eXo Social, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge — are planned to be released concurrent with JBoss Site Publisher’s general availability. The modules will be based on eXo community projects which are available today as downloads bundled with GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to run out of the box.

News Highlights

  • Red Hat and eXo partnered in 2009 to collaborate on  GateIn, the next generation portal framework created by the merger of the eXo Portal and JBoss Portal. GateIn is the underlying technology of  JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, which is generally available today.
  • Site Publisher builds on this partnership with an add-on component based on eXo WCM.
  • eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher includes:
    — eXo Social: Turn any portal directory into a social network; create individual, team and application profiles; follow activity streams for individuals, teams and applications.
    — eXo Collaboration: Add integrated chat, rich email client and calendaring to better collaborate across teams.
    — eXo Knowledge: Build forums and FAQ sites to facilitate better knowledge sharing and service across the company, with partners or with customers.
    — Extensions for document management and workflow.

  • eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher are tested and packaged commercial offerings based on eXo open source projects.

Supporting Quotes

Jason Andersen, Red Hat senior product manager for portals: “Red Hat is pleased to expand our collaboration with eXo to deliver JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher later this year. The breadth and availability of eXo’s modules enabling social networks, collaboration and knowledge management will further enhance Site Publisher for our customers and provide the value they expect from an integrated platform for building rich, content-driven applications.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO, eXo: “Web content management is one of the most mature open source markets, so it’s a huge validation for eXo to be chosen by Red Hat to power JBoss Site Publisher. Being lightweight and flexible has been a core philosophy behind eXo’s architecture, enabling us to extend JBoss Site Publisher with a great number of applications for their platform.”

Online Resources

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eXo Forums upgrade

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Today we completed the migration of eXo Forums to eXo Knowledge 2.0. We’ve been so busy with the new releases of our community projects that we’ve neglected some of our community resources… To put it bluntly, the old forum was slow, buggy, and contained outdated information. (Side note/forums trivia question: I’ll send an eXo t-shirt to the first non-eXo employee who can tell me what Liveroom was.)

The new eXo Forums feature simplified categories that should be a lot easier to navigate. More importantly, it’s fast. Like the-French-team’s-World-Cup-trip fast. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The only downside is that it will take us a couple weeks to migrate all the old posts over. In the meantime, you can still post and answer new questions – give it a try and let us know what you think.

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eXo Delivers Web Content to Enterprise Java

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

eXo Web Content Management 2.0 now available as open source download

San Francisco, Calif. (June 15, 2010) – eXo (http://exoplatform.com) today released eXo Web Content Management (WCM) 2.0. Bundled with GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to run out of the box, eXo WCM is now available as a free download under the open source Affero Gnu Public License (AGPL). Commercial support for eXo WCM will be available as part of eXo Platform 3.0, expected later this year.

Why Use eXo WCM

Like all eXo services, such as eXo Social (announced just last month), eXo WCM is designed for IT organizations that want to be able to integrate web content with their existing enterprise Java systems. eXo WCM comes with tools and extensions already familiar to Java programmers, so they can starting developing from day one.

On its own, eXo WCM provides all the modern Web 2.0 capabilities needed to create, publish and manage web content. It runs with GateIn, the advanced new portal framework created by eXo and Red Hat, so users now have content management inside a portal. Users can integrate  applications in the portal and manage all the content from the same user interface.

With eXo WCM as a core piece of the eXo Platform, Java enterprises have a comprehensive user experience platform for integrating intranet, Web and transactional applications – similar to what SharePoint provides for .NET.

Highlights of eXo WCM

Visit the eXo site for a full list of eXo WCM features. Highlights include:

  • Scalable Content: eXo WCM is based on eXo JCR,  an open source implementation of the Java Content Repository specification. This implementation has been in production for several years within large productions environments with tens of thousands of users and millions of documents.
  • Ease of Use: eXo WCM makes it easy to create, approve and deploy content as part of an overall Java web application. Search, Favorites, Tagging, Voting, Cover Flows, Timelines, Versioning and Locking are all easily enabled for content users.
  • Customizability: eXo WCM can be customized to suit project needs. Users can change the content repository structure and use their own metadata, for example; choose from different content templates, or create new ones; and create specific views based on roles.
  • Extensibility: eXo WCM comes with ready extensions for adding document management and workflow. This package also includes a preview of a new authoring publication extension for more contextual and dynamic content life cycles. Users can create their own plugins and extensions to make eXo WCM work for them.
  • Flexibility: With eXo WCM, users can slice and dice their content in several ways and publish in multiple places with different workflows. Even if stored in just one repository, content can be classified in different hierarchies, tagged for public or private view and “favorited” so it can be quickly accessed from an individual’s private drive.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “With eXo WCM, Java enterprises have a complete portal and content management system in a single software package — eliminating the need to cobble together solutions from different vendors. Anyone can start using eXo WCM on its own today. But for those enterprises looking for an elegant, integrated way to modernize their Java applications, eXo WCM is a hint of what’s to come with the eXo Platform.”

Getting Started

Availability and Support

  • Download today
  • Commercial Production Support: eXo WCM 2.0 will be supported in the forthcoming eXo Platform 3.0, planned for later in 2010
  • Early Adopter Program includes one-year developer subscriptions and early access to other eXo offerings
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