Archive for October, 2011

New Content Management features in eXo Platform 3.5

Friday, October 28th, 2011

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

New CMS features for eXo Platform 3.5 from Benjamin Paillereau on Vimeo.

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Introducing Enterprise Social Features in eXo Platform 3.5

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

In eXo Platform 3.5, social networking and collaboration features play a central role. As we described in our white paper, making your intranet more “social” is an easy way to keep employees coming back to interact, contribute and increase productivity levels across the board. For eXo Platform 3.5, we’ve continued to advance our vision of an engaging and interactive platform where users can connect, discuss and collaborate.

After introducing the main concepts of our social intranet, I’ll show some of the exciting new features you can expect in eXo Platform 3.5, and describe some of the work we’ve done to improve user experience and ergonomy.

Our enterprise social features are organized into 3 main concepts:

  • People directory & network
  • Spaces
  • Activities

People directory and network

The People directory is foundation of a private social network, where you find contacts and establish connections. You can search for people by name, but you can also find contacts that match a certain skill-set or type of position.

Once you’ve connected with other employees, the people in your network can follow your real-time intranet activity in their own activity stream. It’s also easy to chat directly with a contact right within the intranet, using the built-in instant messaging feature.

In the People directory, you can access different lists of people such all existing users, people you are already connected to (your Network), pending connection requests or connection requests your have sent. You are able to invite, remove, or decline invitations to connect.

People page

Compared to our previous version of eXo Platform, we improved the user experience by displaying more people on each page and replacing pagination by a “more” button at the bottom of the page.

Spaces

A Space is a private area where you can collaborate with individual coworkers, teams or groups. Spaces can be public, meaning they are visible and anyone can freely join, or private, where membership is subject to approval from the creator. Spaces can also be hidden from the directory list entirely, where the creator controls who is invited to view and join. You can create a Space for each department within your organization, while other Spaces can be dedicated to a specific topic or project, allowing intradepartmental collaboration.

Spaces can also be customized by adding other features or tools that support a specific group or project’s needs. By default, a new Space is already integrated with our other collaboration, knowledge management and document management tools (Wiki, Forum, Calendar, Answers, Content Explorer).

In the screenshot above, you can see the wiki integrated inside the “eXo” space. This space contains an agenda, a dashboard, a forum and a content management system.

The context of these apps is bound to each space, meaning the agenda or document repository belongs to that space. Additionally, if you want to add other custom functionality to a Space, you can very easily add applications. Once you’ve developed and deployed your portlet or gadget in eXo Platform, it’s available and easy to add to a Space.

Each Space also has its own activity stream which – as explained below – is tightly integrated with the different apps.

As we did for the People directory, we also reworked the user interface to make it easier both to find and navigate within Spaces.

Activities

The activity page is the most visible part of a social application. Everyone is familiar with Facebook and Twitter activity stream systems, which provide an easy way to share status updates and comments with your connections. eXo Platform 3.5 provides a similar feature. People and Spaces have their own dedicated feeds to display a person or group’s actions and comments.

Activities are tightly integrated with other eXo Platform features; because they are extensible, you can even create custom activity types. Built-in apps including the Wiki, Forum and CMS each has its own activity type. When an action is taken within a given Space’s forum, wiki, or other app, this activity is published in the Space activity stream. For example, when you edit a Wiki page inside a space, a “Wiki activity” will be displayed in the Space’s activity stream.

Take a look below at the custom activities for Wiki, Forum, and Agenda application:

Finally, you can filter which activities you want to see in your homepage:

  • All activities within your company.
  • Only activities from your contacts.
  • Only activities from your spaces.
  • Only your own activities.

REST API & Client Library

eXo Platform 3.0 already supports the OpenSocial API, using Shindig (an open-source OpenSocial container). In eXo Platform 3.5, we added a new REST API to provide support for additional use cases related to social features.

We also created a client library to easily interact with activity streams using this kind of code:

   // Context information
   SocialClientContext.setProtocol("http"); //by default it is set as "http"
   SocialClientContext.setHost("platform35.demo.exoplatform.org");
   SocialClientContext.setPort(80);
   SocialClientContext.setPortalContainerName("portal");
   SocialClientContext.setRestContextName("rest");
   SocialClientContext.setRestVersion("v1-alpha1");
   SocialClientContext.setUsername("demo");
   SocialClientContext.setPassword("gtn");

   ClientServiceFactory clientServiceFactory =
       ClientServiceFactoryHelper.getClientServiceFactory();

   //it's all for Client to work, now just get the Service to use
   ActivityService activityService = clientServiceFactory.createActivityService();

   IdentityService identityService = clientServiceFactory.createIdentityService();
   //...

   ActivityService activityService = client.getActivityService();
   RestActivity restActivity = (RestActivity) activityService.get("123456789");

This client library is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/exosocial/exo.social.client

An easy example of client library usage are our Mobile applications, which use the library to access the platform’s social data.

For now, the library is only available for Java environments, and works perfectly on Android devices.

Performance

Social applications have to deal with a large volume of data. Since the read operation is the most commonly used data operation, we focused on improving the data model to simplify and optimize this function.

We also refactored the caching strategy to prevent unnecessary database access, which speeds up performance nicely.

These improvements should further enhance your experience building and working within a social intranet, while also making it easier to write and integrate 3rd party applications in a “social environment”.

You can preview all the new features eXo Platform 3.5 by joining our Early Adopter Program, which provides exclusive access to beta versions and customized, hands-on training to get you up-to-speed on all the core product functionality.

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eXo Kicks Off Training World Tour

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

The company pioneering the development of social intranets is enabling developers around the world to push their skills into the cloud.

  • Five days of training will be offered in eight cities around the world
  • Hands-on experience building intranets with social networking, activity streams, and more

SAN FRANCISCO — October 13, 2011 — eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company, today announced the eXo Training World Tour. Taking place between October 2011 and April 2012, these week-long events will enable developers to gain hands-on experience with eXo Platform 3.5, eXo Cloud IDE, and other eXo technologies—all the while expanding their understanding of social intranet architecture, design, development, deployment and administration.

“We’re seeing real momentum in the uptake of eXo Platform and eXo Cloud IDE,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “Developers around the world know that the websites and intranets they build going forward are going to have to incorporate key real-time tools such as Facebook- and Twitter-like collaboration, social networking, activity streams, enterprise wikis, and more. eXo has the tools today that can help them accomplish that, and our Training World Tour provides an unequalled opportunity for developers to take their skills and understanding to a new level.”

Training Program Highlights

The eXo training program will be delivered by expert certified trainers who work closely with eXo engineering teams as well as customers and partners. Sessions are held in an interactive, hands-on setting where students will learn essential skills and best practices for building social intranets and websites with eXo Platform. Two course tracks will be offered sequentially:

  • eXo Fundamentals (2 days): This course introduces the key benefits and features of eXo Platform. Participants will learn how to set up, access and use the core features, gain experience with the rich website and social intranet sample applications, and find answers to the most common questions.
  • eXo Developer (3 days): Learn how to effectively customize eXo solutions to support POCs and deployments. Prerequisite: successful completion of an eXo Fundamentals training course.

For more information, including registration details and pricing, please visit the eXo training tour website.

Training World Tour

The eXo Training World Tour will visit locations around the globe, including the following:

Europe

  • Madrid, Spain. Week of October 31st, 2011
  • Berlin, Germany. Week of November 21st, 2011
  • Paris, France. Week of February 6th, 2012

Middle East & Africa

  • Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Week of December 11th, 2011
  • Tunis, Tunisia. Week of January 23rd, 2012

Asia

  • Singapore. Week of January 16th, 2012
  • Tokyo, Japan. Week of April 23rd, 2012

USA

  • San Francisco, California. Week of March 12th, 2012

Additional cities and dates will be announced in the coming weeks. Both the eXo Fundamentals and eXo Developer course offerings will be delivered in each location, and participants will receive a certification of attendance. For more information, including registration details and training venues, please visit the eXo training tour website.

Additional Online Resources

Recent News

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eXo discute APIs standards et propriétaires au MEITO 2011

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Tugdual Grall, Directeur Technique d’eXo, sera présent le 18 Octobre 2011 à l’événement MEITO (Mission pour l’Électronique, l’Informatique et les Télécommunications de l’Ouest) organisé à Vannes pour y présenter la vision d’eXo sur le développement et l’utilisation d’APIs, aussi bien pour la communauté eXo que pour les partenaires et clients eXo. eXo soutient fortement le développement d’APIs standards tout en se conformant aux APIs propriétaires.

Cette présentation sera suivie d’une table ronde sur l’utilisation des APIs à laquelle participera également Tugdual.

Pour plus d’infos et rencontrer Tug, c’est ici !

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New Collaboration and Knowledge Management Features in eXo Platform 3.5

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

At eXo, I’m in charge of the collaboration & knowledge management tools included in eXo Platform. Our team is responsible for the development of a tool suite helping users to be more productive, easily share their knowledge and foster innovation and collaboration.

With the upcoming release of eXo Platform 3.5, we’ve been working on amazing new features that will help you build a powerful and engaging social intranet.

The objective with this new version was both to improve the user experience and introduce new features. Since the tools we develop are targeted at end-users, we put a special effort to craft functional and enjoyable user interfaces. In this new version, we also wanted to add a new tool for sharing knowledge which is why we introduce a brand new enterprise Wiki. We already use it internally in our own company intranet, and it’s been a great success! We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

In this post, I will unveil the exciting new enterprise wiki, and describe other new features that will be available in the upcoming eXo Platform 3.5 release.

Enterprise Wiki

We’ve talked about adding a wiki to eXo Platform for a few years now, and lot of work has been done to get there. Our hard work has paid of and I am proud to introduce our enterprise Wiki. It is simple, user-centered and fully integrated with eXo Platform 3.5.

The wiki is an exceptionally useful and powerful tool for sharing knowledge and collaborating on documents. Its simplicity and customizable UI makes it very accessible to all types of users. It is also the most flexible tool we have built so far. Whatever you want to do, the wiki can accommodate.

Easy Start:

Before creating your wiki content, you can choose one of the wiki page templates to start with a clean and structured page. We also introduced an advanced WYSIWYG editor to let users edit content without knowledge of any wiki syntax. Wikis are sometimes a little difficult to understand and their adoption is probably not what they deserve. Therefore, we made sure to keep the wiki in eXo Platform 3.5 simple and easy to use from the start!

Stay Informed:

Everybody likes to keep track of new content or edits to important documents. The “watch” feature can send email notifications and post notification on your activity stream when a wiki page is modified. Once a change is made, you can track it, compare it with a previous version, and revert it if necessary.

Advanced Content:

The wiki provides all the tools you need to create amazing advanced content. It lets you use a set of macros to organize the content of your wiki pages. Not enough for you? You can create your own macros and take advantage of our extensible macro engine!

Finally, I let you discover the complete list of features that will be provided in the eXo Platform 3.5 wiki:

  • User Interface: Clean, simple and user-centered.
  • Advanced Editors: Edit wiki pages with the easy to use XWiki WYSIWYG editor or directly with wiki markup.
  • Multiple Wiki Syntax Support: Support for many wiki syntaxes (XWiki 1.0, XWiki 2.0, Confluence 1.0, Creole 1.0, MediaWiki 1.0, JSPWiki 1.0, TWiki 1.0). so the user can select their favorite one.
  • Syntax Helper: Discover and learn wiki syntaxes.
  • Advanced Editing: If you don’t need to edit the entire wiki page, you have the option to select specific paragraphs to edit.
  • Administration: Advanced page permissions management is available, so you can define who can view or edit pages.
  • Page History: Browse, compare or restore previous version of any pages, so modifications are never lost.
  • Notifications: Subscribe to track modifications on a page by using the “watch” function.
  • Related Pages: Define, find and browse related pages easily.
  • Templates Management: Provide page templates to users and give them a useful starting point to create their own wiki pages.
  • Macro: Add advanced content to your wiki pages with notes, tips, info, warnings, todos, questions, sections, columns, code panels and more.
  • Extensible Macro: Add your own advanced macro with our extensible macro engine.
  • Advanced Search: Find content in the wiki with an advanced search system.
  • Bookmarkable Content: Bookmark any page by using the available permanent bookmarkable URL.
  • Attachments: Manage every type of attachment for any wiki page.
  • Social Integration: Update activity streams when wiki pages are created or modified.

A video is often better than words, so check out the screencast:

Calendar:

Remote Calendars:

In eXo Platform 3.5, you’ll be able to connect your other online calendars, such as Google Calendar or Yahoo Calendar, to your work calendars in an eXo-based social intranet. Simply provide an ICS URL and eXo Platform will synchronize them automatically via CalDAV.

Task Management:

Many people have adopted “Getting Things Done“ or other similar methods to help manage and prioritize their day-to-day work. So to let users manage theirs tasks with eXo Platform 3.5, we created a simple task management tool, with due date, reminders and delegation management. It’s simple and efficient, especially when sharing tasks with your teams within a social intranet.

Chat:

Notifications:

When coworkers are online at the same time, instant messaging can be much more efficient than sending emails. You can now receive notifications directly within the social intranet’s built-in chatbar about status availability of your colleagues.

Forum:

Fresh New Design:

Forum has a lot of improves in its look and feel. It’s now really slick, simple with light colors and a lot of useful improvements that your users will love for creating discussions with their communities.

Wiki Syntax Support:

As we work a lot on the Wiki, we also provide it a good integration all our collaborations tools. You can create a topic, and simply paste the content of a wiki page.

Address Book:

Permission Management:

Managing the permissions of address books you share with other users is another improvement you’ll find in eXo Platform 3.5. You can grant read-only access and manage the access rights of public address books for users, groups or memberships within your social intranet.

Mail Client:

Email Account Delegation:

Mail accounts can now be delegated to other users within your social intranet. This has been a frequently requested feature in corporate environments, either for executive assistant delegation or for teams operating on functional mailboxes. A mailbox’s access permissions can be restricted to read-only if required.

Advanced Document Management Integration:

You can now add resources stored in the Content Management System directly from the Mail client. If your recipient has access to the eXo server, you can also decide to simply include a link to the server file instead of attaching the full content. Finally, when you save an attachment, you can save it on the server, in any of your drives.

These new features are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be many more to discover in eXo Platform 3.5. We believe that these tools will drastically improve your collaboration experience as you will have one single productivity platform for all your applications and collaborators.

In the following post, we’ll explain how we integrated these different tools within the Social Intranet to make them even more engaging and useful.

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