Part 1 of The Enterprise Intranet “Goes Social” at eXo
Within the enterprise, a dashboard serves as a place where all employees start and return to throughout the work day to access the information, people, functionality and other resources they need to complete their work. An enterprise dashboard is a success if it’s sticky, if employees return to it frequently because it is useful, valuable, or a critical part of their jobs. For example, the discussions and feedback within an activity stream or forum can be easier to follow than long email threads, and more efficient to communicate with all stakeholders than one-off 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.
Building enterprise dashboards is a key function of eXo Platform 3. To do so, users can leverage the following core features:
The enterprise portal foundation lets users integrate third-party application data and content in a single user interface. A page can have different views for different users, based on role, region, etc. Applications are built as portlets or gadgets. Portlets are an older, Java-specific way to present the views, while gadgets are a newer, faster, and easier way to build views and conform to the OpenSocial specification. To an end user, however, both look and work the same way.
The Web Content Management (WCM) component provides two key functions. One, it ensures a website or intranet has fresh, regularly updated content. Two, it makes it easy for anyone – even end users – to add, edit or publish content without knowing HTML or being a site admin.
The built-in IDE lets developers easily customize a dashboard. While they can be created in any IDE, gadgets and portlets created using eXo Platform’s built-in IDE can be developed, tested and deployed in minutes, right within a production environment. This unique feature lets business developers quickly extend and create new applications, similar to using VBA within Excel.
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This short installment on the importance of dashboards is part of our more extensive story on “The Enterprise Intranet ‘Goes Social’ at eXo.” Next up: “Building and Organizing the Social Intranet.” We will continue to tell our story here in our blog, or you are welcome to read the paper in full – it’s available in the Evaluation Toolkit.
Today we officially announced our new Evaluation Toolkit: Vendor Evaluation Resources for Social Intranet and Enterprise Portal Projects for eXo Platform 3.
If you’re a Java developer or a project manager, you’ve inevitably had to participate in the “vendor evaluation” process at some point: define an upcoming project, list out all the technical requirements, find all the possible vendors that should be considered, then research on each vendor’s website to fill in some type of evaluation spreadsheet. Finding product features, standards supported, lists of customer references – this can be daunting, considering the information can be presented in “marketing speak” or across multiple resources.
Our consultants and engineers often are asked to help partners and prospective customers find the technical information required during the vendor evaluation process. They started to notice that this process was remarkably similar for all customers – regardless of the type of IT project or the vertical industry, geographic location or size of the company. In fact, several eXo consultants worked as systems integrators (IT consulting firms) prior to joining eXo, and they had several of these “vendor evaluation checklist” templates just like what our customers were using.
That got us to thinking… why not make this easier for our developer community? So the idea for the new Evaluation Toolkit was formed. We want to give you another option for quickly and easily finding the information you need about eXo for your upcoming social intranet, company website or enterprise portal project.
The organization of resources in the Evaluation Toolkit is intended to mirror the typical vendor evaluation process:
Features & functionality – quickly gather the features of eXo Platform to input into your checklist; find related case studies and tutorials demonstrating how these features can be implemented
Technology – find more detailed specs on the standards, environments and languages supported in eXo Platform, the available integration points, and interoperability with 3rd party tools
Competence – gain a better understanding of what skills are required of your team to work successfully with eXo Platform, what resources we provide to shorten the on-ramp, and how we work with our partners
Customer success – find customer snapshots and references, and what an eXo subscription provides to ensure the success of customer projects
It’s also worth noting that the Evaluation Toolkit site features a new whitepaper detailing a real-life eXo Platform implementation: “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise.” We’ll be adding more new resources soon, like performance benchmarks and step-by-step project guides.
Since the Evaluation Toolkit originated from customer and partner feedback, we want to hear what you think. You can check it out here.
Evaluation Toolkit Streamlines Task of Compiling Information Needed to Evaluate eXo Platform 3 for Social Intranet and Enterprise Portal Projects
SAN FRANCISCO — July 7, 2011 — eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company, today announced the launch of its Evaluation Toolkit: Vendor Evaluation Resources for Social Intranet and Enterprise Portal Projects at http://evaluation.exoplatform.com/index.html.
What is the Evaluation Toolkit?
The Evaluation Toolkit provides clear and concise information about the features and technical specs of eXo Platform 3, as well as the experience and skills required to successfully work with eXo. The site features a new, in-depth case study of a social intranet based on eXo Platform 3: “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise.” Additional resources include:
customer testimonials
customer success stories
technical articles
tutorials and demos
Performance benchmarks and step-by-step project guides will be added soon.
Who will benefit?
The Evaluation Toolkit was built expressly for Java developers and project managers charged with building a transactional website, building a new company intranet, or adding social network features to an existing intranet.
Why is the Evaluation Toolkit being offered?
The task of compiling a list of vendors and product specifications to evaluate for software development projects can be an exercise in frustration. Information is either hidden or missing from vendor websites. When information is found, it’s often incomplete or confusing. The Evaluation Toolkit presents a helpful, complete resource that puts everything in one place and in the language Java developers and project managers understand.
How was it developed?
The Evaluation Toolkit reflects the customer-focused philosophy that drives product development at eXo. To help organize and deliver the content of the Evaluation Toolkit, eXo gathered actual vendor evaluation resources from both partners and customers. The resulting toolkit mirrors the typical categories of a vendor evaluation and project requirements document.
Company introduces the first cloud-ready user experience platform and launches a free new Cloud IDE developer service for Java Platform as a Service (PaaS)
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif (Mar. 15, 2011) — eXo, a Java portal technologies pioneer, today unveiled its roadmap to take modern enterprise portals, gadgets and mashups to cloud computing environments. For enterprise companies that have invested in Java, eXo is offering a path to the cloud that will help reduce costs, simplify administration and substantially shorten time-to-deployment for new applications. In support of this roadmap, eXo is making two announcements today:
eXo introduces eXo Platform 3.5, the first and only multi-tenant user experience platform (UXP) for Java systems. A UXP is the evolution of the enterprise portal to support a variety of consumer web technologies that affect how people interact with the web today. In addition to multi-tenancy and cloud management capabilities, eXo Platform 3.5 will feature improvements to its web-based IDE, making it easier to write, test and deploy gadgets, mashups, HTML5 and content applications.
eXo is launching eXo Cloud IDE, a new service offering available today as a private beta. The first of a set of free cloud services planned for 2011, eXo Cloud IDE is a hosted development environment that facilitates social coding–the collaborative development of gadgets and mashups that can be deployed directly to a PaaS. eXo Cloud Services enhance PaaS development and will leverage core technologies in eXo Platform 3.5, including multi-tenancy, social and collaboration features.
“Over the last six months, our customers have found a real Java alternative to SharePoint with eXo Platform 3.0, and they’re deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and building next-generation gadgets and dashboards with it,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo. “In 2011, eXo is once again changing the game for enterprise portals with deployment options that meet today’s computing requirements. With our cloud-ready user experience platform and PaaS developer services, eXo is paving a path to the cloud for Java enterprises.”
A Cloud-Ready User Experience Platform
eXo Platform is an integrated UXP based on the open source GateIn portal 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…
eXo Platform 3.5 makes it easier to develop, extend and deploy modern enterprise portals, gadgets and mashups in cloud computing environments. Furthermore, it opens up cloud deployment options for multiple users, including:
Service Providers: Manage portals with a single user experience across many customers. Shared OS multi-tenancy means lower cost for service providers with only one JVM to worry about.
IT Operations: Manage and monitor a private or public cloud from within one portal. A single user experience makes it easy to learn and lowers support costs.
Users: Add enterprise social and collaboration capabilities easily. Embed business applications in dashboards. Extend the portal by aggregating private and public cloud applications. A smartphone or tablet user interface means the portal can be accessible on those devices without extra coding.
General availability for eXo Platform 3.5 is planned for the second half of 2011.
eXo Cloud Services
eXo Cloud Services is a set of free services that will enhance PaaS development. The first service out the gate is eXo Cloud IDE, launching today as a private beta open to development teams. Key features and benefits in the Cloud IDE roadmap include:
Web Development: A single environment for wiring REST services, HTML5, Gadgets and structured content to create rich mashups and web apps on the fly. Because coding is done in a production environment, moving from code to testing and deployment can be done much faster.
Quick Setup of New Domains: As a multi-tenant service, creation of a new network is almost instant. Developers can pick a domain, invite their development team and start coding in their own IDE.
Source Control Integration: Support for Git and SVN.
Collaborative Development: Enables social coding with activity streams and collaboration tools like wikis and forums.
Deployment Flexibility: Ability to deploy locally on the Cloud IDE platform, or remotely via Git push or classic WAR deployment.
PaaS-agnostic: Develop and package Java web projects as webarchive (.war) and deploy on popular Java PaaS. In the future, eXo intends to extend support beyond Java to Rails, Node.js, Play and .NET, among others.
We’ll be meeting with our customers, partners, and others who want to learn about using eXo Platform 3 to build modern enterprise intranets with social and collaboration features. As the first and only user experience platform for Java, eXo Platform 3 provides many capabilities required for an intranet out-of-the-box, yet it can be extended easily with custom APIs to integrate with existing apps.
eXo’s technology is already being used to build collaborative, portal-based solutions for many customers in Europe, from e-government portals to enterprise intranets for telecom, finance, insurance and other industries. These customers chose eXo because they needed a flexible, scalable way to integrate third party applications, improve collaboration, and provide complete web content and document management tools – all within the trusted security of an enterprise portal.
If you are in attendance, please come by and introduce yourself. We’d be happy to share a little more about what our customers are doing with eXo, answer any questions, or give you a live demo of eXo Platform 3. Hope to see you there!
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