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.
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.
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.
GateIn is the open source portal framework that serves as the backbone of eXo Platform, and the upcoming GateIn 3.2 will provide eXo Platform 3.5 with a set of great portal features. GateIn 3.2 is a logical evolution of the GateIn 3.1 release; the vision is to improve the project and continue the implementation of what we started with GateIn 3.0. In this post, I will describe a few of GateIn’s numerous new features.
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:
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…
Program Gives Developers an Exclusive Jump-start on Evaluating and Developing with New Collaboration and Content Management Features of the Upcoming eXo Platform 3.5
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.
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