Last week, Ippon technologies, French IT Company specialized in architectures and expert of the J2EE platform, presented a conference about the Open Source Portal market.
The conference room was full and it proved an increasing interest for Open Source Portals as decision makers are more and more looking for alternatives to proprietary software.
In the first part of the conference, Bertrand Pinel, Technical Manager at Ippon, explained some technological aspects of the enterprise Portals to make J2EE portals compliant with each other, as the JSR 168 and 286 for the portlet specifications and the JSR 170 for the Java Content Repository.
Then, Ippon Technologies presented its expertise on the eXo stack through the work done for one of its customers: Globecast, which is a subsidiary of France Telecom. Attendees have been able to understand how these tools contributed to improve the time needed to display new information and features to the users and how the portal are integrated to Information Systems already running in the companies.
Through these customer feedbacks, some interesting findings came up:
- Open Source portals are gaining interests and companies are more and more choosing the open source way instead of heavy and locked solutions (like Oracle, IBM and SharePoint);
- Nowadays, the tools are mature enough in terms of features and interfaces to produce real websites with modern designs;
- Some big companies are using the eXo Community edition for critical missions;
- Most clients are using Tomcat as a server for their portal;
Nicolas Martignole, a well known IT expert, author of the blog “Le Touilleur Express“, attended the event and came back with some interesting comments. Here is an extract of his point of view:
“From what I heard, eXo Platform have real products, with Product Managers, like Patrice Lamarque, eXo CS and KS PM. This is interesting because this product-oriented approach is more opened. Where LifeRay is the Office suite, eXo seems to provide different layers that correspond to your needs.”
“And finally, isn’t the eXo modules oriented approach more interesting that the all-or-nothing approach of LifeRay? I write on my notebook… Modules=flexibility=eXo.”
“I then attended the presentation of an Intranet project built with eXo Portal and eXo WCM for Globecast, subsidiary of France Telecom and customer of Ippon Technologies. The Intranet “websites factory” is a content oriented project that aims to ease the communication inside the company and between the different departments. The portal also provides the ability to mash up contents, enables all the teams to work together and to build contents.”
“We also had the opportunity to discuss with Patrice Lamarque, Product Manager at eXo. The new engine version is called GateIn and comes from the partnership between eXo and JBoss. It is a promising product and I think we will have a brand new Portal generation in few months.”
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“eXo has the proven technology, talent and market potential that I look for when considering which companies I’d like be involved with at a strategic level,” noted Bickel. “While enterprise companies have benefited from a wide range of open source options at the operating system and middleware level and with development tools, choices in applications and content services have been limited. This is the next significant opportunity for driving out costs in the enterprise. Given its pioneering history and its successes with large European customers, eXo is primed to lead this charge in North America. I look forward to working with Benjamin and his team to make this happen.”
“Benjamin is a smart, dynamic leader who has built up a lean but global company the old fashioned way — with solid technology, hard work and a disciplined eye on the bottom line,” said Khodabakchian. “I believe eXo has a bright future ahead of it and I am honored to have a part in shaping this.”
