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.

*****

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Additional Online Resources

• Overview of eXo Platform 3.5
• Overview of eXo Cloud IDE, including how-to videos and sample applications
• Join the eXo Cloud IDE private beta
• Benjamin Mestrallet’s blog post about eXo Cloud IDE
• Evaluation download of eXo Platform 3.0

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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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But to me the most exciting definition of eXo Platform 3.0 is as a powerful, modern application development platform. I like to think it is the platform that will make Java relevant again in this Web 2.0 world where dynamic languages like Ruby and PHP rule. Now Java can stand as a first-class language for Web 2.0 applications.

What really sets eXo Platform 3.0 apart is its REST architecture. Any portal can present third-party application data as portlets, but eXo offers advanced integration using web services to actually communicate and interact with applications. You can integrate third-party apps, whether they’re written in Java, .NET, PHP or any other language, with eXo Platform’s native APIs.

But more importantly, you can create custom REST APIs on the fly — and deploy them directly from the platform. This means unlimited extensibility; with the custom APIs, you can build as many extensions as you need. eXo Platform provides a standard way to develop these JAX-RS REST services, with development, testing and deployment all done online in a new web-based IDE. Besides REST services, this IDE lets you rapidly build applications, JavaScript files, Groovy scripts, gadgets and mashups.

It’s this architecture that lets eXo integrate easily with third-party apps. In fact, at Java One this week, we will be demoing how a simple plug-in can social-enable an enterprise application, in this case Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) software. One of the immediate benefits of such an integration would be the automated syndication of BI events and user interactions in activity streams, enabling users to see relevant information for new and modified reports in real time. Salesforce.com got a lot of buzz for Chatter. eXo lets any app get the same “Chatter” features — without having to build it themselves.

We’ve also modularized eXo Platform 3.0, with a new mechanism using will make upgrading to future versions almost effortless.

What all these features amount to is a systematic way to build rich Java apps with content management, collaboration, social and knowledge. I invite you to go under the hood with me in these online video demos — a short intro (8 min) and a more in-depth tour (30 min). We’re also offering a 30-day evaluation subscription that includes support tickets, so download and give it a try.

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JAVA ONE (BOOTH #5209), SAN FRANCISCO, CA (September 20, 2010) – eXo today delivered the next generation of its flagship product, eXo Platform 3.0. Architected on the new GateIn portal framework, eXo Platform 3.0 offers the first integrated environment for building modern Java applications with features such as content management, collaboration and social. The product’s features will be showcased this week at Java One (booth #5209).

Why Use eXo Platform 3.0

Enterprises have invested millions in their Java infrastructure, but now those applications are beginning to show their age, especially when compared to the user experience and collaboration driven by the consumer web. End users of Java applications are demanding more than most Java shops can deliver in terms of collaboration, personalization and dynamic content.

“Until now, Java developers have been cobbling together a wide range of ‘best of breed’ software for content management, collaboration or social into their Java systems — because their only other option has been SharePoint,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “You shouldn’t have to throw out our Java investments to get these capabilities. With eXo Platform 3.0, Java enterprises now have a user experience platform for building modern Java apps with rich, interactive and social features — all in a modular architecture that developers are used to.”

eXo Platform 3.0 runs on standard Java middleware, but leverages REST services, Groovy, JavaScript, mashups and gadget-based development to build user-centric Java applications.

What You Can Do with eXo Platform 3.0

eXo Platform 3.0 offers all the capabilities expected of an enterprise portal. It leverages GateIn, the portal framework that eXo co-develops with Red Hat, to build portal-based applications complete with features like access control and single sign-on (SSO) for security.

But eXo Platform 3.0 goes well beyond an enterprise portal to provide:

• A social intranet: Build an intranet by turning an LDAP directory into an enterprise social network where employees can connect and interact; teams can collaborate in their own online work spaces; and real-time updates and relevant information can be published in activity streams to the right people.
• An integrated web content management (WCM) system: Quickly build and launch dynamic web 2.0 websites with a full suite of tools, including automated workflow for content publishing, version control and templates.
• An application development platform for modern Java applications: With a REST architecture and native APIs, eXo Platform 3.0 is an extensible framework for building composite applications quickly and easily. eXo Platform 3.0 includes a web-based IDE for building and integrating applications, gadgets and mashups.

Technical Advantages

• Unlimited extensibility: Create custom REST APIs on the fly to integrate any third party applications — even from .NET, PHP and other programming languages.
• GateIn extensions: This new mechanism significantly simplifies application development. Developers can augment and customize GateIn’s features using extensions — without the need to modify the underlying GateIn framework itself. Upgrades to future versions will only require artifacts with the modified files.
• Powerful and scalable content repository: By keeping applications’ structured data in a content repository, eXo Platform 3.0 provides developers with advanced capabilities that are lacking in traditional databases, including versioning, locking and more. IT operations also benefit from a wide range of management and monitoring functions — all provided in a scalable, clusterable architecture optimized for the consumer web.
• Extensive open standards and protocol support: These include Java Content Repository (JCR), Java Portlet specification (JSR-286), JAX-RS for REST services and Content Management Integration Specification (CMIS). eXo Platform also implements the OpenSocial specification for gadgets and social APIs for People and Activity.

Availability & Support

eXo Platform 3.0 is immediately available for purchase or with a 30-day trial subscription that includes three support tickets. Download eXo Platform 3.0 today.

Online Resources

• Video: Overview of the top features in eXo Platform 3.0
• Video demo: Comprehensive introduction to eXo Platform 3.0 capabilities
• Complete feature list for eXo Platform 3.0
• Download the article: “What You Can Do with eXo Platform 3.0″
• Resource center with video demos, tutorials, screenshots and data sheets
• Download the white paper on Java Middleware for Cloud Services

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JAVA ONE (BOOTH #5209), SAN FRANCISCO, CA (September 20, 2010) – eXo eXo, the Java user experience platform company, and Jaspersoft, the world’s most widely deployed business intelligence software, have teamed up to highlight the power of enterprise business intelligence (BI) integrated with rich social and collaboration features. The two companies will be showcasing the combination of Jaspersoft Enterprise with eXo Platform 3.0, announced today, at Java One (booth #5209).

News Highlights

• The eXo and Jaspersoft interoperability brings new tools for extending BI applications with collaboration workspaces and real-time activity streams — in a social intranet, or as a gadget that can be added to dashboards. Developers can further enhance this integration, while business users have more customization options for their reports and dashboards.
• eXo Platform can be integrated with Jaspersoft in minutes with a simple, free plug-in, which will be available for download by the end of this month.
• eXo Platform 3.0 is the first integrated environment for building modern Java applications with features such as content management, collaboration and social. It is based on open standards and open source, including the GateIn portal framework eXo co-develops with Red Hat.
• Jaspersoft Enterprise is a high-performance business intelligence solution that can be deployed as either a stand-alone or embedded application, providing easy to use web based reports, dashboards, and data analysis capabilities.

Collaboration + BI Together Deliver:

• BI Events in Activity Streams: Automatically syndicate JasperReports events and user interactions in activity streams, enabling users to see relevant information, such as newly available or modified reports, in real-time.
• Single View Analysis of Multiple Activity Streams: Developers can mashup activity streams from several third-party applications with eXo, then analyze the social data captured over time in a single report from Jaspersoft. This reduces the need for multiple reports, and also provides analysis of separate but related data sources.
• Gadgets and Dashboards: Developers can quickly build gadgets to display their BI activity streams, which can be displayed in any OpenSocial-supported dashboard, from an enterprise intranet to iGoogle.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “eXo just rolled out eXo Platform 3.0 today, and we could not have a better way to demonstrate its capabilities than in this interoperability with Jaspersoft. By social-enabling their enterprise BI application to push out real-time information, eXo Platform 3.0 can provide enhanced collaboration for BI developers — while the ability to report on historical content and activity streams shows how easy it is to extend and connect with eXo.”

Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft: “eXo recognizes Jaspersoft as the best-in-breed BI provider by choosing to demonstrate the extensibility of eXo Platform by interoperating with Jaspersoft’s enterprise BI application. This collaboration shows the power of these two open platforms to solve customer needs and deliver updates to decision makers as they happen.”

Online Resources

• More information about the eXo-Jaspersoft interoperability effort
• Video: demo of eXo and Jaspersoft integration
• Video: example of multiple activity streams mashed up to create a single developer dashboard

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA (July 21, 2010) – eXo today announced the eXo Early Adopter Program designed to give Java enterprises access to the training and technical resources they need to begin rolling out cutting-edge, rich Java applications built on eXo Platform 3.0. The company’s much-anticipated flagship offer, planned for general availability by the end of the year, has been re-architected with the fast, modern portal framework co-developed by eXo and Red Hat, GateIn.

In recent months, eXo has delivered new and updated community versions of all the key components in eXo Platform 3.0 to run on GateIn 3.0: eXo Social, eXo Content, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge. The Early Adopter Program goes beyond a beta program, and instead offers eXo’s most innovative customers and other Java enterprises a realistic path to modernizing their legacy Java applications.

The training and developer support offered through the Early Adopter Program is designed to help developers begin prototyping a new breed of rich, interactive, social Java applications that can run popular Java environments such as JBoss, Spring, Tomcat or IBM WebSphere. Applications developed today will be compatible with the GA release. These services will be delivered by eXo’s technical product leaders.

Program Details

• Early access to all updates between now and final GA.
• Three-hour web-based trainings on all eXo components comprising eXo Platform 3.0.
• One-year Developer Subscriptions, giving users support on community and beta releases.
• Discounts on eXo Platform 3.0 Production Subscriptions down the road.
• Participation in the Early Adopter Program is a one-time $5,000 fee, which can be applied to the future purchase of a Production Subscription.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “The enthusiasm we’re seeing for eXo Platform 3.0, even in this early stage, validates the heavy investment we’ve made to deliver the best user experience platform on the market for Java enterprises. The Early Adopter Program, which we initially opened to select customers, has been so well received that we’re opening it up to more enterprises looking for a ‘SharePoint’ of their own that would work with their existing Java systems and make the most of their Java talent. This program puts the power of the eXo Platform in developers’ hands, with a practical roadmap to get them from design and development to production.”

Online Resources

• Overview of the Early Adopter Program
• Learn more about eXo Platform 3.0
• Download the eXo white paper on “Java Middleware for Cloud Services”

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GateIn, the open source portal framework developed by eXo and Red Hat, provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy portal-based applications. By adding Web Content Management (WCM) functionality and gadgets, these applications can be extended to allow end users to create and publish their own content, without having to know the inner workings of the portal infrastructure.

Developers can easily gain these capabilities with eXo WCM, which is tuned and optimized for the GateIn portal framework. Together, eXo WCM and GateIn can be used as a platform for integrating applications as well as managing and publishing content – all from a single, familiar console.

Join Benjamin Paillereau, product manager of eXo WCM, as he demonstrates how to get native WCM features inside GateIn. Sample use case scenarios and a live demo will also be provided.

Through the presentation and demo, attendees will learn:

• How to set up a workflow process for getting content created, edited, approved and published
• How to customize this workflow for the unique needs of the content author, the publisher and the site visitor
• How to create a simple portlet to take advantage of extended publication features
• How to extend the publication process with UIExtension Framework
• How to use REST services to add authoring to a personal dashboard

Live eXo Webinar, Wednesday 7 July, 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT, register you seat now!

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BOSTON, June 24 - RED HAT SUMMIT – eXo (http://exoplatform.com) today announced the introduction of eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, a new content management system (CMS) powered by eXo that Red Hat previewed to customers today and will release later this year. With the eXo Add-on Modules, JBoss Site Publisher customers will be able mix and match their content with applications and publish across not only websites but also enterprise social networks, activity streams, instant messaging and forums.

eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss —  eXo Social, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge — are planned to be released concurrent with JBoss Site Publisher’s general availability. The modules will be based on eXo community projects which are available today as downloads bundled with GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to run out of the box.

News Highlights

• Red Hat and eXo partnered in 2009 to collaborate on  GateIn, the next generation portal framework created by the merger of the eXo Portal and JBoss Portal. GateIn is the underlying technology of  JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, which is generally available today.
• Site Publisher builds on this partnership with an add-on component based on eXo WCM.
• eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher includes:
  — eXo Social: Turn any portal directory into a social network; create individual, team and application profiles; follow activity streams for individuals, teams and applications.
  — eXo Collaboration: Add integrated chat, rich email client and calendaring to better collaborate across teams.
  — eXo Knowledge: Build forums and FAQ sites to facilitate better knowledge sharing and service across the company, with partners or with customers.
  — Extensions for document management and workflow.

• eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher are tested and packaged commercial offerings based on eXo open source projects.

Supporting Quotes

Jason Andersen, Red Hat senior product manager for portals: “Red Hat is pleased to expand our collaboration with eXo to deliver JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher later this year. The breadth and availability of eXo’s modules enabling social networks, collaboration and knowledge management will further enhance Site Publisher for our customers and provide the value they expect from an integrated platform for building rich, content-driven applications.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO, eXo: “Web content management is one of the most mature open source markets, so it’s a huge validation for eXo to be chosen by Red Hat to power JBoss Site Publisher. Being lightweight and flexible has been a core philosophy behind eXo’s architecture, enabling us to extend JBoss Site Publisher with a great number of applications for their platform.”

Online Resources

• Overview of eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss
• Download eXo community projects today
• Read the related Red Hat  press release

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San Francisco, Calif. (June 15, 2010) – eXo (http://exoplatform.com) today released eXo Web Content Management (WCM) 2.0. Bundled with GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to run out of the box, eXo WCM is now available as a free download under the open source Affero Gnu Public License (AGPL). Commercial support for eXo WCM will be available as part of eXo Platform 3.0, expected later this year.

Why Use eXo WCM

Like all eXo services, such as eXo Social (announced just last month), eXo WCM is designed for IT organizations that want to be able to integrate web content with their existing enterprise Java systems. eXo WCM comes with tools and extensions already familiar to Java programmers, so they can starting developing from day one.

On its own, eXo WCM provides all the modern Web 2.0 capabilities needed to create, publish and manage web content. It runs with GateIn, the advanced new portal framework created by eXo and Red Hat, so users now have content management inside a portal. Users can integrate  applications in the portal and manage all the content from the same user interface.

With eXo WCM as a core piece of the eXo Platform, Java enterprises have a comprehensive user experience platform for integrating intranet, Web and transactional applications – similar to what SharePoint provides for .NET.

Highlights of eXo WCM

Visit the eXo site for a full list of eXo WCM features. Highlights include:

• Scalable Content: eXo WCM is based on eXo JCR,  an open source implementation of the Java Content Repository specification. This implementation has been in production for several years within large productions environments with tens of thousands of users and millions of documents.

• Ease of Use: eXo WCM makes it easy to create, approve and deploy content as part of an overall Java web application. Search, Favorites, Tagging, Voting, Cover Flows, Timelines, Versioning and Locking are all easily enabled for content users.

• Customizability: eXo WCM can be customized to suit project needs. Users can change the content repository structure and use their own metadata, for example; choose from different content templates, or create new ones; and create specific views based on roles.

• Extensibility: eXo WCM comes with ready extensions for adding document management and workflow. This package also includes a preview of a new authoring publication extension for more contextual and dynamic content life cycles. Users can create their own plugins and extensions to make eXo WCM work for them.

• Flexibility: With eXo WCM, users can slice and dice their content in several ways and publish in multiple places with different workflows. Even if stored in just one repository, content can be classified in different hierarchies, tagged for public or private view and “favorited” so it can be quickly accessed from an individual’s private drive.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “With eXo WCM, Java enterprises have a complete portal and content management system in a single software package — eliminating the need to cobble together solutions from different vendors. Anyone can start using eXo WCM on its own today. But for those enterprises looking for an elegant, integrated way to modernize their Java applications, eXo WCM is a hint of what’s to come with the eXo Platform.”

Getting Started

• Getting started with eXo WCM video
• Demo video: Authoring extension and REST services
• Screenshots: file explorer and example homepage

Availability and Support

• Download today
• Commercial Production Support: eXo WCM 2.0 will be supported in the forthcoming eXo Platform 3.0, planned for later in 2010
• Early Adopter Program includes one-year developer subscriptions and early access to other eXo offerings

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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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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.”

More resources:

• Conference slides (French)
• Ippon Technologies on its conference about Open Source Portals (French)
• Nicolas Martignole, from the blog “Le Touilleur Express”, about the conference (French)

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Formation Publique sur eXo Portal et introduction à GateIn

26 et 27 Octobre 2009

Julien Viet, Product Manager d’eXo Portal, donnera une formation de deux jours afin de revenir sur les options étendues de configuration d’eXo Portal et l’utilisation de ses fonctions clés. Julien vous formera vous et vos équipes à l’utilisation des éléments du portail ainsi que de son modèle organisationnel.

Ancien de JBoss, et à l’origine du projet JBoss Portal, Julien Viet présentera également une introduction à GateIn, le nouveau portail issu de la collaboration entre eXo et JBoss reprenant le meilleur des deux projets.

Venez rencontrez Julien Viet, spécialiste de l’applicatif middleware et membre du groupe d’expertise de la spécification de Portlet 2.0 JSR 286, qui aura tous le temps nécessaire pour répondre à vos questions.

Exploitez toute la puissance d’eXo Portal, Inscrivez vous !

Formation Publique sur la suite eXo ECM

du 28 au 30 Octobre

Benjamin Paillereau, Product Manager de la suite de gestion de contenus eXo ECM, reviendra en détails sur les capacités d’eXo WorkFlow et d’eXo WCM. Benjamin vous accompagnera tout au long des trois jours de formation dans la création de workflows complexes et dans la création de sites en utilisant les capacités de gestion de sites multiples, de leur édition et de gestion de leur publication.

Ce sera également l’occasion pour vous de rencontrer Benjamin Paillereau afin d’en savoir plus sur le future de la suite eXo ECM et de discuter de vos besoins et remarques concernant la gestion de vos contenus d’entreprise.

Maitrisez les fonctions avancées et innovantes d’eXo ECM, Inscrivez vous !

Les deux formations à un prix préférentiel

du 26 au 30 Octobre

Il vous est bien entendu possible d’assister aux deux formations pour un tarif préférentiel. Vous pourrez ainsi bâtir des connaissances solides sur les produits phares d’eXo et rencontrer nos deux experts.

Bulletin d’inscription

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From August 31st to September 2nd, eXo will attend the annual JBoss World as a new partner of JBoss. The JBoss World event is the perfect place to share about new technologies, best practices and industry trends with experts. It also will be a nice occasion for us to meet companies that need new and innovative solutions and to show our ability to develop custom solutions for specific needs.

After three months in collaboration with JBoss, it is time for eXo to unveil the next generation of portal as well. eXo and JBoss teams joined their efforts and worked hard to present a portal gathering the best of two successful open source solutions: eXo and JBoss Portals. This new portal will set a new standard of quality in the industry and will offer new capabilities to customers. During the JBoss World, eXo will preview this new Open Source portal as well as how eXo complete stack will run on top of it.

To see this preview, to meet us and share about your expectations, your industry insights, or to talk about our solutions and the industry in general, come and meet us at booth 223. More than building knowledge, you will also spend a nice time

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This event, will be the end of the “Spring US Trip” for the eXo team, and this is a good moment for us to present key messages around our product and business strategy. Stay tune, more news to come during the week.

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