When we started to develop our social intranet, we wanted a better way to communicate comprehensive and detailed information on all things eXo, from project status to team activities and beyond. We wanted our users to want to return to the social intranet, eagerly and frequently. As hoped, we experienced dramatic success with some unexpected, yet invaluable benefits.

How has the social intranet improved our day-to-day work experience and productivity? We’ve seen social and communications improvements that we didn’t anticipate but that are having a positive impact on operations, management and motivation.

Unifying the company. Our social intranet lets everybody participate in the development and evolution of the eXo Platform. Employees are better aligned with the company’s strategic direction through visibility into management’s activity streams, while company leadership also has improved visibility into all aspects of company operations. All of which makes for a sticky site that everybody returns to, over and over. For a company that has offices in the U.S., France, Ukraine, Tunisia and Vietnam, our intranet unites us in a way that email and file sharing never could. The social intranet has penetrated regional and departmental silos, making it easier for us to communicate and share ideas and operate as a cohesive, unified organization.

Improving usability feedback. Let’s take a look at how we develop software, specifically how we deal with bugs. Previously, we used a bug tracking application that centered on tasks, and used email to notify team members of updates and progress. Our updates created an information flood that actively discouraged us from sharing information and discussing.

Now, we still use our bug tracking app. But we’ve supplemented it with forums in our social intranet to report bugs, suggest improvements and collect related ideas and feedback. Anything written in these forums shows up in the associated activity streams, making it easy for users to follow and contribute to the resolution. We’ve also added gadgets to follow the tasks within the space they are related to. Compared to the bug tracking software alone, this approach encourages discussions by establishing consolidated, centralized views of bug-related conversations, each in its own window.

Expanding access. The gadgets and dashboards found on our intranet are accessible on several devices, including mobile devices. We actually consider our mobile applications to be mobile portals, which let us distribute our intranet’s customized dashboards to multiple devices, with a user experience designed specifically for the iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Now, our remote employees and those who travel frequently can stay connected to the heart of the company – our social intranet – via their mobile devices.

We consider the web to be a completely distributed environment where apps can be created and hosted in one location, while being viewed as embedded objects in many other websites. To support a broad range of use cases, our gadgets are based on the Open Social standard and our intranet—and the eXo Platform itself—can be viewed as an open gadget directory, which third-party applications like iGoogle can reach to consume gadgets. We also support Netvibes widgets, and allow developers to deploy UWA widgets to cool Netvibes dashboards.

Developing new features. The most powerful yet unexpected benefit of our social intranet is the degree to which it empowers developers and harnesses the creativity of all employees, translating suggestions into real dashboard and product improvements. As noted earlier, our web-based IDE lets our developers skip the operations-oriented processes to deploy new gadgets and applets. It also gives developers access to all the functionality, libraries and APIs provided by eXo Platform. And while our platform is built on Java, the IDE uses a lightweight development model so almost anyone can build a gadget, often in a few hours, even if he or she has virtually no gadget development experience.

The combination of 1) immediate, one-click deployment, 2) easily reusable code, and 3) a broad developer base fosters a new type of innovation, driven from the bottom up. Most gadgets create different views of existing eXo Platform features, and our developers are extending our intranet with new gadgets and use cases that we didn’t anticipate or include in our roadmap.

For example, we didn’t roll out our social intranet with gadgets for user profiles, a social inbox, contacts, what’s new, who’s online, polls, or top-voted topics (to name a few). eXo developers built those gadgets, after spending time within the social intranet, in response to what they believed would be useful functionality. Who decides if a gadget is useful? eXo employees. Useful gadgets get added to users’ personal dashboards and to their team and project spaces. Gadgets deemed sub-par are simply ignored. It’s simple, objective and democratic—the wisdom of crowds applied to product development.

Social Intranet, Serious Advantage

Is a social intranet right for your organization? Consider these questions:

• Do you have a distributed enterprise, but cross-departmental functions are critical to success/operations?
• Do you have silos of knowledge and resources, duplication of effort between teams, complaints from users about lack of communication?
• Do you have trouble encouraging users to log into the existing intranet or use other applications provided by IT?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, you can improve communication, collaboration, your users’ overall experience and your organization’s efficiency with a social intranet. We’ve seen these advantages first hand, by giving our users the tools they needed to establish connections and share information, ideas and resources. We’ve now tapped the wisdom and creativity of our entire organization. We’ve become a social enterprise. Yours can, too.

For the full report on “The Enterprise Intranet ‘Goes Social’ at eXo,” please visit http://budurl.com/ubk9 – it’s available in our new Evaluation Toolkit.

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Convertigo to commit widget wiring technology to GateIn portal project, co-led by eXo and Red Hat

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (April 12, 2011) – eXo, a provider of Java portal and user experience technologies, and Convertigo, maker of server technology to create composite applications and mashups, today announced a partnership to accelerate user-centric development with widgets and gadgets on eXo Platform. As part of this agreement, Convertigo will also be contributing its widget wiring technology to the GateIn project.

Today, portal developers have no easy way to create dynamic widgets or gadgets that can interact with each other, requiring instead time-consuming custom coding. In fact, if developers are using legacy assets, they often need to rewrite all the applications from scratch. The eXo-Convertigo partnership changes all this. eXo will integrate the Convertigo InteractionHub with eXo Platform, enabling eXo customers to easily ‘widgetize’ any application (legacy, modern or third-party), wire them together and put them to work in the eXo environment. The result is customized eXo-based dashboards and a richer user experience for customers — with up to 90 percent less development time and reduced project costs.

News Highlights

Convertigo’s non-intrusive integration capabilities enable developers to capture and expose business processes where they are, and then create, store and share reusable components as “wireable” widgets. As a result, creating dynamic composite applications for private and public clouds or mobile devices becomes much easier.

As part of the eXo-Convertigo agreement, Convertigo is contributing this widget wiring technology to the GateIn project co-led by eXo and Red Hat. GateIn is an open source portal project, created by the merger of eXo Portal and JBoss Portal in 2009. The Convertigo code donation will be integrated into the GateIn code base, which underpins eXo Platform and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform.

eXo Platform is an integrated user experience platform (UXP) for building and deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and creating gadgets and dashboards. It lets companies leverage their existing Java infrastructure, while accommodating changing user behavior driven by consumer web technologies such as social networks, social publishing, forums, etc.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “Convertigo is steps ahead of everyone else in the market in creating this very rich, dynamic widget-wiring technology for portal environments. Through this partnership, eXo is able to leap ahead as well, and offer our customers a truly amazing user experience. Our ability to integrate Convertigo is a testament to the extensibility and breadth of the eXo Platform.”

Olivier Picciotto, CEO of Convertigo: “We’re thrilled to partner with eXo on bringing our wiring technology to its portal solution. With eXo, we’ve found a partner as focused on delivering as great user experience as we are, and as committed to developing the most cutting-edge technology. It simply made sense to not only collaborate but to also contribute our software to the GateIn project.”

Jason Andersen, director of product marketing for JBoss at Red Hat: “Convertigo provides an elegant solution for widgetizing and wiring applications into the GateIn framework, which in turn simplifies our customers’ experience with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. With Convertigo’s contribution of this technology, GateIn becomes that much stronger of a portal foundation.”

Additional Online Resources

• Video of a sales dashboard built with Convertigo and eXo
• Step-by-step tutorial for adding Convertigo widgets to eXo Platform
• eXo blog post on “The Modern Enterprise Dashboard”
• Overview of eXo Platform 3.0
• Overview of Convertigo technology
• GateIn project

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Since it is central to our platform vision, and driving many new partnerships and features we’ll be introducing in the future, we should start by defining the term “dashboard.” This is the place where all employees start and return to throughout the work day; where they can find real-time updates to the projects they care most about (whether sales opportunities or website stability), discuss and act on new ideas, and share content and feedback with team members.

The measure of a dashboard’s success is its “stickiness” – do employees return to it? Users must believe it can help them complete their work more efficiently and effectively. It must be highly personalized, relevant, customizable, and adaptable.

If the dashboard can be a tool that saves time – maybe by presenting third-party application data in a centralized place, preventing the extra steps of having to login to other apps – users will naturally adopt it.

And if employees can accomplish their work more effectively, the dashboard will be worth returning to. For example, the discussions and feedback within an activity stream or forum can be faster and more effective than email or phone calls. Or the unique insight that a mashup (of data from multiple applications) can provide within a dashboard can enable a user to make better decisions.

At eXo, the vision of the modern enterprise dashboard is driving innovative new features for eXo Platform 3. Just last week we announced native mobile applications for iPhone, iPad and Android, so the dashboards built and used within eXo Platform can be available to users wherever they go. And many of the demos we’ve built in the last few months are examples of gadgets and mashups that could be added to a customized work homepage, like the Marketing Metrics Mashup or the Developer Dashboard.

We want to deliver more powerful tools for integrated, customizable workspaces, and enable even more applications to run within an enterprise dashboard. To realize this vision, we’ll be introducing new partners to the eXo ecosystem in the coming days and weeks. So stay tuned…

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• use a JCR data store to model a cloud tenant
• store and dynamically deploy JAX-RS services written in Groovy
• store and dynamically deploy OpenSocial Gadgets that connect to previously online-created REST APIs
• remotely expose those Gadgets to the public cloud

The complete abstract and other details are available on the registration page.

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If you thought Portal was only about serious stuffs such as content aggregation, integration of different applications, out of box personalization and natural front end to SOA etc then think again. Using GateIn’s gadgets, you already could import different cool gadgets say from Google to your dashboard and page. Now you can tic-tac-toe as well. Here is a screen shot from GateIn Portal for you i-dont-believe-until-i-see kinds.

Check out the rest of his post here.

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Emphatically, no.

First, portals are evolving. I reflected in a previous post that “The nature of portals has changed, and with GateIn (eXo + JBoss), we’re seeing portal’s transformation from an aggregator of external applications to a platform for building and delivering services that add value to the user organisation.”

In this world, the question is not whether a developer has to choose between portlets or gadgets but rather, which services are best delivered as gadgets and which as portlets.

At eXo, we do not make a great distinction between a gadget or a portlet. They are merely categorized in a way that makes it easy for users to go and grab more gadgets or portlets to customize their application. The user doesn’t care.

From the developer side, we use portlets for more robust components that take longer to build while gadgets are lighter and take less time to build. The difference comes from the technical aspect behind the scene. Even if we see some similarities in the last specifications, originally portlets were more Java server side components that generate fragments of HTML code while gadgets dynamically generate that HTML on the client side thanks to JavaScript and REST server calls. The main difference is then in the application lifecycle as portlets have to be deployed as WAR packages on the application server while the gadget is just an XML file that can be dynamically added and edited online. Gadgets allows our business users to build applications on the cloud very quickly.

Next generation portals will support both models but this is just one of the building blocks of the platform of tomorrow. Horizontal services like content, mail, calendaring, or profiles are other pieces that can be mashed up together to easily build a custom web application… online. We’re baking functionality into GateIn that will enable it to be the ultimate “mash up” platform for combining and recombining components. Times have changed, let’s be more agile.

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