Users connect, collaborate, and improve productivity — in the cloud, on mobile devices, or on the ground

• Multi-tenancy support for deployment in public and private clouds
• Secure access to personal dashboards, documents and activity streams via native mobile apps
• Social network features and integration with existing infrastructure
• Mashup and gadget development for third-party app integration in built-in web IDE

San Francisco, CA – January 31, 2012 – eXo, the user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company, today announced general availability of eXo Platform 3.5. This new release of eXo Platform is designed for organizations that want a cloud-enabled solution for creating and managing next-generation portal-based sites that facilitate engagements between colleagues, customers, or partners, and can easily integrate with existing enterprise applications, policies and procedures.

Enterprises today require greater flexibility and tools that will enable them to deliver rich user experiences for a variety of use cases — social intranets, extranets, transactional websites and more. They want options to deploy in the cloud or in the back office, to integrate with external web services and internal line of business applications. The eXo user experience platform (UXP) gives IT professionals the resources they require to meet all these needs.

“Built on open standards and open source technologies, eXo Platform 3.5 has the features and extensibility of a UXP and the cloud architecture to build public and private clouds. We built the first true UXPaaS,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “Imagine company ABC wanting to integrate their custom-built inventory application in an enterprise portal with social networking and document management capabilities, and then deliver that as a private cloud service to all their customers. eXo Platform 3.5 enables them to do just that — and to do it very efficiently.”

The Emergence of the UXPaaS

The user experience platform (UXP) is the emerging implementation of next-generation portal services. Unlike traditional portal services, though, a user experience platform offers an organization an integrated collection of technologies that speed the creation of portals built around content, collaboration capabilities, social streams and services, mobile access and more. eXo Platform has long provided these integrated platform services.

With the release of eXo Platform 3.5, eXo has added support for multi-tenancy and engineered this platform to be cloud-ready. Now, organizations or service providers that want to offer a UXP as a service — a UXPaaS — can do so. A single instance of eXo Platform 3.5 can support many UXP-based social intranets, extranets, transactional websites and more for many different clients, each in their own private cloud environment. To understand the UXPaaS landscape, see http://budurl.com/kah4.

Native Mobile Apps and Cloud-Ready Features for Unprecedented Deployment Flexibility

Using eXo Platform 3.5, companies can create a secure portal-based site and add the user experience services — such as content, document management and social activity streams — that best suit project needs. IT organizations can give their end users an easy yet controlled way to interact with their networks and work collaboratively. Key technology enhancements in eXo Platform 3.5 include:

• Mobile Apps: Native iPhone, iPad and Android apps integrate elegantly with sites built on eXo Platform 3.5, ensuring that users can interact with personalized gadget dashboards, activity streams, document repositories and more — at any time, from anywhere.

• Cloud-Ready: Support for multi-tenancy deployments includes the option to host isolated portals on a single auto-scalable instance of eXo Platform 3.5. The unique integration capabilities and extensive set of UXP features enable enterprises, service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build their own private and public cloud offerings with immediate productivity.

Additionally, eXo Platform 3.5 includes a range of new or enhanced features for delivering a rich user experience:

• Simpler, More Intuitive Interface: The look and feel of all of the built-in apps has been refreshed for eXo Platform 3.5, with the goal of greater simplicity and enhanced readability. In addition, the new desktop mode allows users to access eXo Platform 3.5 services in a familiar and windowed environment, right within the browser.

• Enhanced Social and Collaboration Tools: Rich collaboration features such as an enterprise Wiki, forums, polls, FAQs and shared calendar components (including remote calendar synchronization) are standard. Social network capabilities empower users to create work groups, follow activity streams of connections and groups, and more.

• Improved Content Management: Enterprise Content Management features provide the ability to store, share, version and organize documents; integrate advanced workflows; and create dynamic content-rich websites. eXo Platform 3.5 introduces search engine optimization (SEO) features, improves Java Content Repository (JCR) performance, and enhances content explorer usability. Easier website authoring is facilitated by the new inline editing feature, making it possible to edit and publish content from the front-end in a single click.

• Embedded IDE: An integrated web development environment (IDE) is embedded in eXo Platform 3.5, which enables an IT team to develop, customize and extend the experience presented to a user in a platform-based engagement environment. Developers can create and refine elements on the fly and deploy with one-click ease.

• Integrated Sample Sites: The website samples included with eXo Platform 3.5 have been expanded to illustrate how developers can take advantage of many of the new features of eXo Platform 3.5 — from UI customization to the inclusion of rich content and improved site navigation.

• eXo Platform Gadget Pack: The gadget pack includes 15 new gadgets that provide easy access to variety of adoption, collaboration, development, monitoring, social and other eXo Platform services. With easy access to the source code, developers can also use these gadgets as templates for building additional extensions and quickly become productive with the REST API of eXo Platform 3.5.

• Enterprise Portal Framework: Integrated portlets, user- and role-based views, security, and single sign-on features (including integration with existing Active Directory and other LDAP systems) are supported.

Pricing and Availability

eXo Platform 3.5 is available today in two editions:

• eXo Platform 3.5 Enterprise Edition is a full-featured implementation of eXo Platform 3.5. Offered under a subscription model, it includes the support and services needed for deployment in an enterprise production environment. Features include support for native mobile applications and multi-tenant deployment, as well as clustering, built-in web IDE and the eXo Platform Gadget Pack.

• eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition is an open source package of the core features of eXo Platform 3.5. It is ideal for developers who do not require production support, mobile or cloud deployment options, or the extensibility and customization capabilities provided by the Gadget Pack or embedded IDE.

A 30-day trial version of eXo Platform 3.5 can be downloaded here.

Visit the website for more information about eXo Platform 3.5.

Additional Online Resources

• Discover eXo Platform 3.5 in 3 minutes
• eXo’s CTO Gives a Full Feature Tour of eXo Platform 3.5
• What’s New in eXo Platform 3.5
• eXo Platform 3.5 datasheet
• eXo Platform 3.5 features table

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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

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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.

###

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.

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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!

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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.

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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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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.

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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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

• eXo University webinar series for developers

Recent News

• eXo Introduces Early Adopter Program for eXo Platform 3.5 Beta
• eXo Cloud IDE Gives Developers an On-Ramp to VMware Cloud Foundry PaaS
• eXo Cloud IDE First to Support Java, Direct PaaS Deployments for Developers
• eXo Extends Enterprise Portals to the Cloud

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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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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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Navigation Controller

The navigation controller is a major change that could be summarized as the decoupling of URL expression and URL processing in GateIn. This means that:

• URLs processed by GateIn can be easily changed because they are now declared in an XML file
• Friendly URLs are now supported, giving the portal administrator freedom to configure how http URLs should appear

Desktop Mode

A new Desktop Mode feature was developed for the eXo Platform 3.5 release, and we’ve already updated it to run on top of GateIn 3.2. While providing a desktop experience to your sites, this new feature also gave us an opportunity to polish the UI and bring a few more improvements:

• Ability to upload desktop backgrounds
• Revamped dock UI

Site Describability

Sometimes there are features that are difficult to name. We had one in this version of GateIn, which we decided to call site describability. This new feature enhances GateIn’s usability by allowing the administrator to provide a display name and description for a portal site. Here are a couple of screen shots to show you what I’m referring to:

Navigation is an important concept in GateIn that allows web pages to be organized as a hierarchical navigation tree for portals and groups. Internationalization in navigation was supported until now with the help of resource bundles by providing a label containing a specific expression (like ${portal.home} for instance). In some cases this approach is not dynamic enough because, in order to to handle custom resource bundle keys, it requires a resource bundle to be updated when a new navigation node is added.

GateIn 3.2 will include fully dynamic support of navigation i18n. The setup can be done easily in navigation.xml file in a similar fashion of portlet.xml (using the xml:lang attribute to specify a language) deployment descriptor. You can watch a video of this feature on this page.

Of course it is also possible to edit the navigation i18n labels in the user interface:

Portal Public Parameters

As a portlet developer, you often need to extend the GateIn server and create portlets that interact with the environment. So you will likely enjoy this new feature, which allows you to obtain contextual information like the current navigation URI, the current page name and so on. The best thing about this feature is that it leverages the JSR 286 API to get this information in a very intuitive and natural fashion. If you think about it, the most adapted way to obtain this information is via the public render parameter API. This feature is therefore very easy to use, as the only thing you need to do is to declare a specific public render parameter in your portlet XML deployment descriptor. For instance, if you want to obtain the current site name, you will need to declare:


<portlet>
...
<supported-public-render-parameter> site_name < /supported-public-render-parameter >
...
</portlet>

<public-render-parameter>
<identifier>site_name</identifier>
<qname xmlns:prp='http://www.gatein.org/xml/ns/prp_1_0'>prp:site_name </gname>
</public-render-parameter>


And voilà, at run-time you can get the current site name by using the portlet request render parameters, pretty much like:


protected void doView(RenderRequest req, RenderResponse resp) throws PortletException, IOException {
...
writer.println("The current site is " + req.getParameter("site_name"));
...
}


Everything we thought might be useful to a portlet developer to see was done (and if you think that we forgot something useful, don’t hesitate to tell us, or even better contribute it!):

• navigation_uri: the current navigation URI
• page_name: the current page name
• site_type: the current site type (“portal” for portal, “user” for dashboard, “group” for group)
• site_name: the current site name
• window_width: the current window width
• window_height: the current window height

Performance

No major release of GateIn would be complete without performance improvements. In this release we focused on the improving how GateIn loads a site’s navigation tree. The navigation tree used to be entirely loaded from the Java Content Repository and was eventually an issue for sites using a large navigation. Our team worked hard to improve it, and the result is the capability to load navigation fragments instead of the whole tree, while simultaneously keeping the user interface consistent. As a bonus it improved the concurrent edition of the navigation and now we are glad to support concurrent real-time editions of the navigation, as you can see in this video.

Finally

We also made a lot of minor enhancements that will make your life with GateIn better. Here are the ones I think are most relevant:

• Resource compressor: we provide pluggability for resource compression (JavaScript and CSS), and we integrate the YUI and Google Clojure compressors by default. It works with a system of plugins; if you want to change the configuration you can have a look at the resource-compressor-configuration.xml file. You can even develop your own compressor if you want.
• A drop-down list for portal or group sites when adding a new page: it’s a minor usability enhancement, yet convenient.
• A lot of work was done to make the deployment of the WSRP service more modular in JBoss AS, just how it used to be in JBoss Portal.
• The portlet container session life cycle could sometimes have a lifetime greater than that of the portal, especially when a logout was performed. We fixed this issue, so now a logout on GateIn invalidates pending portlet sessions.

Check out JBoss.org for the latest downloads, and be on the lookout for previews of eXo Platform 3.5…

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SAN FRANCISCO — September 28, 2011 — eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company, today announced that it has opened its Early Adopter Program (EAP) for eXo Platform 3.5. Participating developers have access to beta versions of eXo Platform 3.5, along with training and support, so they can begin developing next-generation social intranets and websites. Developers can join the EAP program today by visiting http://budurl.com/e7g5.

Around the world, developers are trying to build websites and intranets that incorporate key real-time tools such as Facebook- and Twitter-like collaboration, social networking, activity streams, enterprise wikis, and more. No single tool provided all the features necessary to accomplish this before the release of eXo Platform 3.0. With the roll-out of eXo Platform 3.5, the first cloud-ready enterprise portal and user experience platform, eXo has extended and enhanced the functionality of the 3.0 release. EAP participants can explore the latest features and functionality of this new release months before it becomes generally available.

Early Adopter Program Highlights

Developers participating in the eXo Platform 3.5 EAP gain the following:

• Access to Beta Versions of eXo Platform 3.5 allows members to gain hands-on experience with enhanced platform functionality (including content management, social networks, collaboration, and development tools), and to preview new features like the enterprise wiki and desktop mode.
• Exclusive Hands-On Training introduces developers and administrators to the capabilities of eXo Platform 3.5. A series of web-based sessions focus on the most common use-case scenarios, such as building social intranets and websites.
• Development Support ensures that participants can provide feedback directly to the eXo team building the product. EAP participants also receive prioritized bug resolution support (15 support tickets that are valid for one year), as well as complete access to developer documentation.
• Subscription Discounts provide participating companies with three developer licenses for $7,000 (€5,000 for customers in Europe); the entirety of that amount will be applicable against licenses for eXo Platform 3.5 when the GA release becomes available.

The EAP also offers participants a first-to-market advantage. While the beta version of eXo Platform 3.5 is not intended for production use, developers participating in the EAP will be poised to deploy their new websites and social intranets in a production environment as soon as the GA version is released.

eXo Platform 3.5 High-Level Enhancements

“Developers were very enthusiastic about the 3.0 release of eXo Platform,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo, “but they’ve also been asking for a lot of enhancements. The 3.5 release continues to demonstrate our commitment both to developers and the customers they serve.”

Enhancements to eXo Platform include:

• Mobile Apps: Native iPhone, iPad, and Android apps integrate elegantly with intranets built on eXo Platform 3.5, ensuring that users can interact with personalized gadget dashboards, activity streams, document repositories, and more–at any time, from anywhere.
• New Enterprise Wiki: eXo Platform 3.5 includes a full-featured wiki that integrates easily with other social network features (networks, activity streams, and so on). It includes standard enterprise wiki features, such as WYSIWYG, watches, macros, permissions, versioning, and more.
• Simpler, More Intuitive Interface: Users asked, and we delivered. eXo Platform 3.5 provides a simpler, more intuitive interface that’s easier to use.
• Enhanced Social and Collaboration Tools: eXo Platform 3.5 extends and enhances the collaboration features in eXo Platform 3.0, adding features such as delegation, expanded support for calendar synchronization, the ability to view all activity streams, and more.
• Improved Content Management: eXo Platform 3.5 includes improved search engine optimization (SEO) features, advanced workflow integration, expanded Java Content Repository (JCR) support, and more.
• Improved Sample Apps: The sample website included with eXo Platform has been expanded to illustrate how developers can take advantage of many of the new features of eXo Platform 3.5–from UI customization to the inclusion of rich content and improved site navigation.

The beta release of eXo Platform 3.5 does not yet include all the features that will be included in the GA release, which is scheduled for delivery in the next few months. Full multi-tenant support will be available in the GA release, but is not included in the beta versions released during the program. Other services may continue to evolve throughout the beta release period as eXo incorporates user feedback.

For more information or to register for the EAP, visit the eXo Platform 3.5 website at http://budurl.com/qdbw.

Additional Online Resources

• What’s New in eXo Platform 3.5
• EAP datasheet and training curriculum
• eXo Platform 3.5 datasheet
• eXo Platform 3.5 features table

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At eXo, I lead a team of developers in building eXo JCR, our open source implementation of the JSR-170 spec, which is used in eXo Platform. We’ve just released eXo JCR 1.14.0-GA, which will add many new features and enhancements to the upcoming eXo Platform 3.5. This version is quite a big step forward since JCR 1.12: between JCR 1.12 and 1.14, we worked on no less than 50 improvements and 100 new features!! In this post, I will describe the new features and improvements that we added since my last blog post.

New Features

Managed Transactions & JCA Support

In eXo JCR 1.12 and earlier, our Java Transaction API (JTA) support was limited and experimental. Because we wanted to be able to support managed transactions and JCA 1.5 in eXo Platform 3.5 and beyond, we completely overhauled our JTA support for eXo JCR 1.14.

• Managed Transactions Support: If you use managed data sources, you simply need to configure your eXo JCR instance to allow it to distinguish the managed data sources from the others. eXo JCR will then know whether or not it needs to delegate the commit and rollback calls to the Application Server.
• Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) Support: If you intend to use eXo JCR in your custom application to store your data, and you would like to delegate the management of the JCR session life-cycle to your application server, you can now use the JCA Resource Adapter for eXo JCR.

Asynchronous Indexing

Lucene is used any time we execute a JCR query, which means it’s a critical part of eXo JCR. That’s also why, in previous versions, full indexing used to be blocking. Now you can make it non blocking in order to access to your application immediately, even if a full indexing is running. However, as long as the indexing is running, you won’t be able to execute a JCR query; only pure API calls will be allowed. Another interesting aspect of this feature is the fact that you can rebuild the Lucene indexes of a given workspace at runtime, using JMX.

External Backup Tools Allowed

eXo JCR now provides a secure way for you to use external backup tools to back up the data of your JCR instance. It was possible to use third-party backup tools with previous versions, but you had to ensure that no transactions were running (which is not trivial). The latest version of eXo JCR leverages JMX, which lets you suspend and resume all the current transactions on your JCR instance. So if you want to use your own tools, simply suspend the current transactions, launch your tools to back up your data, then resume the transactions.

Other Interesting New Features

• If you wanted to keep big objects or non-serializable objects in a replicated eXo cache instance, you can configure your eXo cache to enable an invalidation mechanism. This will automatically invalidate your data anytime it detects a changed value in your cluster.
• A new syntax allows you to define a default value in your configuration files. For example, ${my.value:10} will be understood by the kernel as, try to find the value of the variable called “my.value”, and if no value is found use “10″.
• You can use your own Lucene lock factory and/or Lucene directory if the default ones don’t fulfill your requirements.
• We added a mime type detection mechanism that allows eXo JCR to properly extract the meta-data and the full text content of a document, even if the extension is missing in the name of the file.

Improvements

Multi-Database Schema Support

Frequently a single database instance must be shared by several other applications. But some of our customers have also asked for a way to host several JCR instances in the same database instance. To fulfill this need, we had to review our queries and scope them to the current schema in a different way; it’s now possible to have one JCR instance per DB schema instead of per DB instance.

Monitoring

In this new version, we worked a lot on improving the monitoring capabilities. We did this by exposing many new MBeans in the JMX console, and by simply giving more understandable names to all the threads of eXo JCR. You now have a better overview of what’s going on in your eXo JCR instance.

Pattern-based Methods

In many applications based on eXo JCR, we realized that people obtain their data property by property; this is not necessarily a good practice, especially when there are many properties to fetch. To provide a much more scalable solution, we worked on improving the methods Node.getNodes(NamePattern) and Node.getProperties(NamePattern). So now, instead of potentially making the eXo JCR execute as many queries as you have properties in your node (assuming that the cache is empty), we can obtain all data properties using a single query.

Other Interesting Improvements

• Access Control List (ACL) management has been updated to drastically reduce the total amount of database accesses needed to get the ACL of a given node.
• We added a new method in our internal interface called ExtendedNode.getNodesLazily. This can be used as an alternative of Node.getNodes in the parts of your application where you can have a lot of sub nodes, and where consistency is not necessarily an issue.

Download

You can download eXo JCR 1.14.0-GA from here and get the documentation from jboss.org here.

Enjoy,
Nicolas

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Now that we’re gearing up for the release of eXo Platform 3.5 in the coming months, it’s time to start sharing more details about the most exciting changes you’ll find. Starting this week, we’ll regularly feature posts from our core developers, each one giving his unique perspective and previews of the key features he’s been working on. The first post will start with JCR, the heart of eXo Platform. So stay tuned, and get ready to be blown away by what eXo Platform 3.5 can do.

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Open Source Day is a unique virtual conference format. This means, although the event is organized and hosted from Poland, attendees are welcome to participate from any location. Registration is free, all you need is an internet connection.

eXo CTO Tugdual Grall will lead a presentation titled “eXo Platform: A Journey from the Social Intranet to Development in the Cloud.” In addition to an overview of eXo Platform features, Tug will explain how eXo uses industry standards to allow enterprises to extend the platform and integrate it into existing information systems. Attendees will also learn how eXo, the leader in cloud-based development with eXo Cloud IDE, offers an innovative way to build and deploy Java, PHP and Ruby applications, which can be integrated in eXo Platform or other cloud services.

The eXo Team will also be present at the DMS Expo in Stuttgart, Germany next week, 20-22 September. You can schedule a meeting or in-person demo with our team by dropping a line to sales@exoplatform.com. Hope to see you there!

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Tugdual montrera également comment, grâce à un environnement de développement en ligne, il est maintenant possible de raccourcir les temps de mise en place de nouveaux services pouvant être développés et déployés en local, mais aussi poussés sur le cloud sur les nouvelles PaaS, comme par exemple OpenShift de Red Hat Cloud, ou Cloud Foundry de VMWare, avec différents langages tels que Java, Ruby/Rails ou PHP.

Par ailleurs, Arnaud Héritier, responsable des outils et méthodes de développement chez eXo, participera à un débat consacrée aux communautés opensource. Il sera accompagné par des représentants des communautés Jenkins et Apache Maven qui exposeront leurs modèles de développement.

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Our courses will allow you to gain hands-on experience with eXo Platform, while learning the key concepts related the successful architectural design, development, deployment and administration of eXo-based solutions. Attendees can elect to complete the full week of training, or choose from either course:

• eXo Fundamentals (2 days): This course introduces the key benefits and features of eXo Platform. Participants learn how to demo the core capabilities of eXo Platform, including content management, portal, social and collaboration features, and answer the most common questions.
• eXo Developer (3 days): Learn how to effectively customize eXo Platform to integrate with existing applications, and build successful POCs and deployments. (Prerequisite – successful completion of an eXo Fundamentals training course.)

For more details on pricing, availability and more, check out our website or contact us. Only a few seats remain, so book yours today!

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Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with B2B, one of the largest software distributors in Poland, and the first official eXo Authorized Distributor. Responding to increased demand in the retail market, our partnership with B2B will help address the needs of eXo Platform users among major retailers, including catalog retailers, and on-line resellers.

For more details about eXo partner programs, visit the Partners section of our website. To learn more about B2B, check out their website or contact us.

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• Develop Java, Spring, Ruby and other apps in the cloud; deploy direct to cFoundry
• Access cloud-resident code from virtually any computer
• Intro webinar on eXo Cloud IDE scheduled for September 8: http://budurl.com/ubm3
• View video about deploying with eXo Cloud IDE at http://budurl.com/aevz

SAN FRANCISCO — August 24, 2011 — eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company, today announced that its eXo Cloud IDE, the industry’s only cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) for Java applications, has added Cloud Foundry™ to its roster of supported platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. Developers deploying Java, Spring, Ruby and other types of applications to Cloud Foundry can now take advantage of the increased agility and accessibility delivered by cloud computing. View the related video at http://budurl.com/aevz.

Cloud computing and PaaS offerings have been evolving for some time, but until now developers have not actually been able to build Java applications in the cloud. With eXo Cloud IDE, developing and deploying Java apps becomes much more streamlined and makes cloud platforms more accessible to developers.

“Cloud IDE makes it possible for developers to collaborate on building Java applications in the cloud, apps that they can deploy directly to Cloud Foundry in minutes,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “The code now lives in the cloud, accessible from virtually anywhere with a browser and Internet access—so creating an app and moving it into Cloud Foundry is now very easy.”

eXo is showcasing Cloud IDE in booth #171W at VMworld® 2011, being held at The Venetian and The Wynn hotels in Las Vegas, August 29–September 1, 2011. A webinar introducing eXo Cloud IDE is scheduled for September 8, 2011; participants can register at http://budurl.com/ubm3.

Expanding Opportunities

eXo Cloud IDE expands the options for developers. It is the only development-as-a-service (DaaS) offering to support Java application development, and the first to support Java Spring applications. It’s the only offering that developers can use to build Java applications in a cloud-based IDE and deploy them directly to a PaaS. With the announcement of Cloud IDE as an on-ramp to Cloud Foundry, eXo Cloud IDE now supports a total of four PaaS environments. eXo has already announced eXo Cloud IDE support for CloudBees, Heroku and Red Hat OpenShift.

Today, developers around the world are using eXo Cloud IDE to collaborate on the creation of HTML5/JavaScript applications and OpenSocial gadgets as well as Java-, PHP-, and Ruby-based web apps. Support for additional languages, frameworks and PaaS environments is planned for the future.

eXo Cloud IDE Webinar

On September 8, eXo developer evangelist Jeremi Joslin will host a webinar on eXo Cloud IDE for developers and IT managers. Starting at 8:00 a.m. Pacific time, Jeremi will cover topics ranging from the advantages of developing in the cloud to deploying applications to PaaS offerings such as Cloud Foundry, Heroku, OpenShift and others. For more information and to register, go to http://budurl.com/ubm3.

Recent News

• eXo Cloud IDE First to Support Java, Direct PaaS Deployments for Developers
• eXo Cloud IDE Now Available in the Chrome Web Store
• History of eXo Cloud IDE
• eXo Extends Enterprise Portals to the Cloud

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• eXo captures the allure of social networks and turns it to corporate advantage.
• Employee engagement and cross-departmental collaboration has increased.
• Visit http://budurl.com/ygvh to download the free white paper.

SAN FRANCISCO — August 9, 2011 — If social network sites were boring, no one would use them. But they’re not boring; they’re hugely popular. Java middleware firm eXo then asked the question: What if we redesigned our enterprise intranet as an internal social network? Not only for Chatter-style updates/activity streams, but more as a place where employees throughout the enterprise could interact and engage with each other, where they could share content and ideas, and collaborate on projects. Would it be more popular and useful than the existing intranet that, like so many enterprise intranets, few people actually use?

The short answer is yes, and a more detailed and engaging account of the company’s experience can be found in “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” a free white paper available at http://budurl.com/ygvh.

Unprecedented Employee Participation

eXo executives had a straightforward if ambitious goal: create an intranet that employees around the world would want to use. It would not be the dumping ground for meeting notes, HR memos, and other static content, but rather the crucible of employee interaction and ideas. It would be a customizable, extensible intranet, one that employees could personalize easily using dashboards, gadgets, activity streams, and more. It would be a place where they could create and share content with co-workers, with content management technology behind it all to maintain order and ensure easy discovery.

Using its own eXo Platform 3, eXo built out this new intranet and made it available to employees on January 1, 2011. Use of this intranet, and participation in the social spaces it provided, was completely voluntary—yet within 15 days virtually every eXo employee was actively engaging with it. eXo employees work from sites in the United States, France, Ukraine, Tunisia and Vietnam, yet they all meet and stay connected on the new eXo social intranet. They discuss and engage around projects, customer needs, bug reports, travel plans, even sporting events. There’s a sense of unity that did not exist before, a sense of common experiences shared across four separate continents.

A Replicable Model

In “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” eXo provides useful insights into the design and construction of its new social intranet. Key sections of the white paper include:

• Dashboards: Central to the Modern Enterprise Intranet
• Building and Organizing the Social Intranet
• Using the Social Intranet
• Impact and Unexpected Benefits of the Social Intranet

What becomes clear in this free white paper is that “going social” holds the potential for huge benefits for enterprises of all sizes. The tools exist today to create such an intranet, and the model can be replicated and expanded on the fly to meet the needs of virtually any organization.

Download “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise” at http://budurl.com/ygvh to learn more about the success that eXo has achieved with this new approach.

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