The eXo Summer Tour 2011 is continuing on to Rennes, France and Casablanca, Morocco. Tug Grall, eXo CTO, will be presenting at two upcoming events about the ways social and cloud technologies can be used together to improve the application development experience.
Tug will demonstrate how eXo Cloud IDE facilitates collaborative development, and how developers can reuse existing services and APIs, including the OpenSocial API, to build mashups and web apps that can be deployed easily to a cloud platform (PaaS).
If you are attending either event, be sure to check out Tug’s sessions.
eXo Platform 3 provides a set of services that makes it easier for developers to provide a better experience for end users. We now have a tool that will allow developers to add the social and collaboration UXP features of eXo Platform to any existing web app: the eXo Platform widget.
The widget can be embedded in any web page, where it can display activity steams within your application. It also creates a collaboration workspace (also known as a “Space”) within eXo Platform, bringing select activities from other apps right into your intranet, where users can discuss, share feedback, and respond faster and more effectively to their work.
Since this widget is hosted on your local instance of eXo Platform, it can display personalized information as well. An activity stream of the most recent user actions will display to the group’s members. To other users who are not already a member of the space, a link with information on joining the group is displayed.
The eXo Platform widget will empower developers to make any web application more social, by attaching social and collaboration features to any object. An object can be a customer, a contract, a bug… Any app your company uses will be able to benefit from real-time activity streams and all the other services offered by the same eXo Platform that runs your website or intranet.
It can be integrated in two ways. The first option is an iFrame that you insert in a page. It would look like this:
The second and more sophisticated option is a button. This approach allows you to display more information, and looks like this:
Check out the video demo to learn how to integrate it in your own page; we also show an example of adding the widget to XWiki. A step-by-step tutorial is available in the resource center as well.
Coupled with the OpenSocial API, you can create your own “chatter”-like features for your applications. By adding activity streams, your users can follow relevant groups, co-workers, or even application functions – making it easier to collaborate and work more effectively.
You can add the following information to your apps:
Profiles
User activity streams
Spaces (groups)
Updates sent by your applications
Social networks
Personalized dashboards
This is available in the latest version of eXo Platform 3. Stay tuned for a real-life example of what can be done with this new tool!
A couple of weeks ago we released eXo Social 1.0.1, which introduces a valuable new resource: developer documentation. (This is the most exciting feature of this release, which otherwise contains some bug fixes for the 1.0 version. You can download eXo Social 1.0.1 here.) We’re working on a lot more of these developer-focused resources, which will help developers build applications on top of eXo technology.
eXo Social is the first of the eXo projects to get the “developer docs treatment.” This documentation will show you how to extend your apps with social features. You will learn how to publish activities, add contacts, create spaces, invite people, plug your own backend for user profile, use the OpenSocial API, and a lot more. It contains everything you need to social-enable your existing apps.
Developers – check it out, and let us know what you’d like to see added.
Today we announced the availability of eXo Social 1.0. eXo Social provides an extension to the GateIn Portal Framework, to add social features to portal-based web apps; it also serves as a preview of some of the features of the future eXo Platform 3.0. Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the download (in addition to GateIn, which comes bundled with eXo Social 1.0).
Bringing users to the center
As a portal framework, GateIn is ready for enterprises, with strong support for LDAP and SSO. But is also a great application deployment platform, by reconciling server-side components, like portlets, with the Portal container and the portlet bridge for JSF. GateIn is perfect for the more mashup-oriented use cases, enabling easy development of gadgets. All around, it is especially well-suited for a corporate intranet.
Traditionally intranets have featured a mix of content and applications. Today, inspired by our observation of the consumer web, we want to bring another variable to the equation: people. Many intranet projects suffer because the lack of interest of the users – an intranet doesn’t engage, it provides top-down information sharing. Even on a well-structured intranet, finding a piece of information is often a pain.
eXo Social recognizes that users are more than just passive application operators and content consumers. They need to get the right information at the right time, have a voice, and exercise more control over their workflow.
eXo Social aims to revive your portal project by putting users in a more central place.
From a simple corporate directory to an Enterprise Social Network
The People module within eXo Social allows you to create a social network for existing portal users. Each portal user is added in a global directory, where users can search people by name and also by role, responsibility, experience and job skills. This makes it much easier to find domain experts for interdepartmental work. Each user has full control of the information he or she wants to publish in their profile.
We are talking about turning a company directory into an enterprise social network. eXo Social is able to do this with GateIn at the foundation. GateIn is very flexible in the way it lets you store the organization model (users, groups qnd roles). Under the hood, it’s the PicketLink IDM framework, which was designed for maximum adaptability.
There is a great step-by-step tutorial that explains how to configure GateIn to have the org model stored in an enterprise directory such as an LDAP or an Active Directory. Following these steps, all directory users will be instantly recognized as portal users. And portal users form the basis for eXo Social’s People directory.
But, enriching profiles and making them searchable is not enough. Indeed, there needs to be relationships between people to form a network. We do this by allowing users to connect with each other. Once two users are connected they will receive status updates about each other in their respective network activity streams. Connecting to someone else lets you follow his work. Users have full control of their connections, and can request or revoke connections at any time.
Community Management
In a corporate context, very often you need to go beyond individual connections and work collaboratively in a group. That’s where Spaces comes into play. A space is a group collaboration workspace within the portal.
How is it different from GateIn’s group pages? In GateIn, you can assign a set of pages to be viewable only to members of a group. A portal administrator will typically create a group, then initialize navigation, create a couple of pages and install some applications within it.
Spaces lets any user become a community manager by simply clicking a “add a new space” button. This will instantly and automatically create a new group, instanciate a navigation, predefine a layout and install a few initial pages: space home, dashboard, members and settings.
In a space, a community manager can add and remove applications to the workspace in a single-click. Behind the scenes, Spaces manages all the plumbing of creating a page, adding an application on it and setting up permissions. The available applications are coming from the GateIn Application Registry, so it’s still under the control of the portal admin. A “power” space manager can still have access to the page and application settings. Advanced managers can even completely edit the navigation and the layout of the pages. In fact, space mangers are local admins for their community, but the big difference it that they do not need extensive training to get started. Everything has been simplified to be ready to jam quickly!
Heads-up devs, it’s OpenSocial!
With the People and Spaces features within eXo Social, you have new tools to build vibrant intranet portals where people really interact. But you can go further. The support for gadgets offer great mashup capabilities, and they can be integrated as first-class applications with spaces or in classical dashboards.
There are also a number of extension points to help developers with integrations that further enhance the user experience.
As an example of it, take a look at this video that shows how a team of developers has tuned eXo Social for their own needs. They created activity streams for JIRA, Sonar and Hudson applications, which then publish application activity into a development team space.
The talk that Benjamin gave at the local Java SIG this week was so well-received, we decided to host an encore version as a webinar on 22 April, at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT. Benjamin will demonstrate how the eXo Platform can be used as an online Java development platform to create public and private clouds. He will walk through the different technologies that eXo leverages, such as the GateIn open source portal framework, JAX-RS, Groovy and OpenSocial Gadgets. Specifically, attendees will learn how to:
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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