Posts Tagged ‘social’

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eXo Platform 3.5 Now Available: First Cloud-Ready Enterprise Portal and User Experience Platform-as-a-Service (UXPaaS)

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Users connect, collaborate, and improve productivity — in the cloud, on mobile devices, or on the ground

  • Multi-tenancy support for deployment in public and private clouds
  • Secure access to personal dashboards, documents and activity streams via native mobile apps
  • Social network features and integration with existing infrastructure
  • Mashup and gadget development for third-party app integration in built-in web IDE

San Francisco, CA – January 31, 2012 – eXo, the user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company, today announced general availability of eXo Platform 3.5. This new release of eXo Platform is designed for organizations that want a cloud-enabled solution for creating and managing next-generation portal-based sites that facilitate engagements between colleagues, customers, or partners, and can easily integrate with existing enterprise applications, policies and procedures.

Enterprises today require greater flexibility and tools that will enable them to deliver rich user experiences for a variety of use cases — social intranets, extranets, transactional websites and more. They want options to deploy in the cloud or in the back office, to integrate with external web services and internal line of business applications. The eXo user experience platform (UXP) gives IT professionals the resources they require to meet all these needs.

“Built on open standards and open source technologies, eXo Platform 3.5 has the features and extensibility of a UXP and the cloud architecture to build public and private clouds. We built the first true UXPaaS,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “Imagine company ABC wanting to integrate their custom-built inventory application in an enterprise portal with social networking and document management capabilities, and then deliver that as a private cloud service to all their customers. eXo Platform 3.5 enables them to do just that — and to do it very efficiently.”

The Emergence of the UXPaaS

The user experience platform (UXP) is the emerging implementation of next-generation portal services. Unlike traditional portal services, though, a user experience platform offers an organization an integrated collection of technologies that speed the creation of portals built around content, collaboration capabilities, social streams and services, mobile access and more. eXo Platform has long provided these integrated platform services.

With the release of eXo Platform 3.5, eXo has added support for multi-tenancy and engineered this platform to be cloud-ready. Now, organizations or service providers that want to offer a UXP as a service — a UXPaaS — can do so. A single instance of eXo Platform 3.5 can support many UXP-based social intranets, extranets, transactional websites and more for many different clients, each in their own private cloud environment. To understand the UXPaaS landscape, see http://budurl.com/kah4.

Native Mobile Apps and Cloud-Ready Features for Unprecedented Deployment Flexibility

Using eXo Platform 3.5, companies can create a secure portal-based site and add the user experience services — such as content, document management and social activity streams — that best suit project needs. IT organizations can give their end users an easy yet controlled way to interact with their networks and work collaboratively. Key technology enhancements in eXo Platform 3.5 include:

  • Mobile Apps: Native iPhone, iPad and Android apps integrate elegantly with sites built on eXo Platform 3.5, ensuring that users can interact with personalized gadget dashboards, activity streams, document repositories and more — at any time, from anywhere.
  • Cloud-Ready: Support for multi-tenancy deployments includes the option to host isolated portals on a single auto-scalable instance of eXo Platform 3.5. The unique integration capabilities and extensive set of UXP features enable enterprises, service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build their own private and public cloud offerings with immediate productivity.

Additionally, eXo Platform 3.5 includes a range of new or enhanced features for delivering a rich user experience:

  • Simpler, More Intuitive Interface: The look and feel of all of the built-in apps has been refreshed for eXo Platform 3.5, with the goal of greater simplicity and enhanced readability. In addition, the new desktop mode allows users to access eXo Platform 3.5 services in a familiar and windowed environment, right within the browser.
  • Enhanced Social and Collaboration Tools: Rich collaboration features such as an enterprise Wiki, forums, polls, FAQs and shared calendar components (including remote calendar synchronization) are standard. Social network capabilities empower users to create work groups, follow activity streams of connections and groups, and more.
  • Improved Content Management: Enterprise Content Management features provide the ability to store, share, version and organize documents; integrate advanced workflows; and create dynamic content-rich websites. eXo Platform 3.5 introduces search engine optimization (SEO) features, improves Java Content Repository (JCR) performance, and enhances content explorer usability. Easier website authoring is facilitated by the new inline editing feature, making it possible to edit and publish content from the front-end in a single click.
  • Embedded IDE: An integrated web development environment (IDE) is embedded in eXo Platform 3.5, which enables an IT team to develop, customize and extend the experience presented to a user in a platform-based engagement environment. Developers can create and refine elements on the fly and deploy with one-click ease.
  • Integrated Sample Sites: The website samples included with eXo Platform 3.5 have been expanded to illustrate how developers can take advantage of many of the new features of eXo Platform 3.5 — from UI customization to the inclusion of rich content and improved site navigation.
  • eXo Platform Gadget Pack: The gadget pack includes 15 new gadgets that provide easy access to variety of adoption, collaboration, development, monitoring, social and other eXo Platform services. With easy access to the source code, developers can also use these gadgets as templates for building additional extensions and quickly become productive with the REST API of eXo Platform 3.5.
  • Enterprise Portal Framework: Integrated portlets, user- and role-based views, security, and single sign-on features (including integration with existing Active Directory and other LDAP systems) are supported.

Pricing and Availability

eXo Platform 3.5 is available today in two editions:

  • eXo Platform 3.5 Enterprise Edition is a full-featured implementation of eXo Platform 3.5. Offered under a subscription model, it includes the support and services needed for deployment in an enterprise production environment. Features include support for native mobile applications and multi-tenant deployment, as well as clustering, built-in web IDE and the eXo Platform Gadget Pack.
  • eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition is an open source package of the core features of eXo Platform 3.5. It is ideal for developers who do not require production support, mobile or cloud deployment options, or the extensibility and customization capabilities provided by the Gadget Pack or embedded IDE.

A 30-day trial version of eXo Platform 3.5 can be downloaded here.

Visit the website for more information about eXo Platform 3.5.

Additional Online Resources

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What’s Next for Enterprise Social?

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

The following post is by Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo.

Enterprise Social Gets Serious

First, Chatter. Now Jive goes public. All this is great news, validating the idea that the enterprise benefits from social networks as much as we do in our private lives. People have become accustomed to interacting on Facebook; they want enterprise-class tools that enable them to share content and interact with co-workers just as easily.

What’s Missing?

This is all new for the enterprise, so IT has questions: What about security for the “real” world? What about integration with existing infrastructure assets? What about cost of ownership? Ultimately, organizations need an approach to evolving a social intranet that takes into consideration user needs, security and flexibility. IT teams need to be able to evaluate on a small scale and broaden the adoption on demand. They need an easy on-ramp and an easy path to enterprise-wide adoption.

All of these needs, in turn, point towards the value of an Open Source solution. Security? Vendor independence? Rapid innovation? Open Source solutions are already proven in these regards. But more than that: the Open Source movement understands social better than anyone. That’s the way Open Source development works.

What’s New: An Open Source Alternative

The need for enterprise-class Open Source social business software prompted eXo to develop eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition. Released to customers last Sunday, eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition already delivers features that rival Jive — but with greater flexibility and control, and an easier on-ramp to adoption.

So, we’re pleased that the IPO for Jive has gone so well. The response from the market clearly validates the work that Jive, eXo and others have been doing to develop social business software. It also highlights the need for alternatives that support a variety of enterprise needs — and we’re very happy to be part of that community.

To learn more about eXo Platform 3.5 Community Edition, or to download the software, please visit http://budurl.com/uyn3.

###

Benjamin Mestrallet is founder and CEO of eXo, the enterprise Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company. He oversees the Company’s growth, marketing and sales strategy from its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. For more information on eXo, please visit http://exoplatform.com. For additional perspectives, please visit and subscribe to eXo RSS blog feeds at http://blog.exoplatform.org/. Follow eXo on Twitter at @exoplatform.

Readers are welcome to publish the above blog in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Commons license.

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eXo Summer Tour: Rennes and Casablanca

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

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.

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Adding Activity Streams to SugarCRM with eXo

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

As I promised in my previous post about the eXo Platform Widget, here is a real-life example of using the plugin to add social features to a popular enterprise application. Today we introduced the eXo Plugin for SugarCRM, for adding activity stream and collaboration capabilities to an instance of SugarCRM. The plugin is a cool prototype that shows the potential for our eXo Platform widget technology, and can be found (for free of course) on the SugarForge.

We have several new additions to the eXo Resource Center dedicated to the new SugarCRM plugin:

  • Video Demo showing the plugin integrated in SugarCRM
  • A Tutorial that provides more technical detail and step-by-step instructions for installing and using the plugin
  • Getting Started Guide – a video to show you how to install the plugin on your own

in action, we in this video demo, or start using it for themselves with the tutorial and getting started guide.

How Does It Work?

In this use case, we start with a SugarCRM user who has access to a case (1). If they click on the eXo icon, a popup window is displayed, and the content is loaded from the eXo server (3). Because the request is sent directly to the eXo server, it can return personalized content. This integration is possible with the eXo Platform widget.

Next, a user creates a task associated to a case (1). The eXo plugin prepares an activity and sends it to the eXo collaboration space that corresponds to the case (2).

To go into more technical detail about the implementation, we can look at the two main parts of the integration:

  • UI integration in the UI
  • Push mechanism for activities

The UI Integration

To integrate some of eXo Platform’s social and collaboration features into SugarCRM, we used the Sugar Cloud Connector. This allowed us to simply add the eXo Platform Widget.

We integrated our code snippet into the template:


spaces.createSpaceBox(document.getElementById("spaces_div"), "Sugar {$module} {$fields.{{$mapping_name}}.value}", "{$fields.name.value}");

Push Mechanism for Activities

Because eXo Platform implements OpenSocial, we can use it to publish the activities taking place in SugarCRM. As we used for the Grails integration in a previous demo, there is also a client library for OpenSocial in PHP.

To be notified of new tasks and other things created and modified, we used Logic Hooks. Events are filtered so only the ones the user is interested in are presented (i.e. only the events associated with a specific case). When a related event is found, eXo creates a new message. Finally, this message is submitted to the eXo Platform server using the following code:


$provider = new osapiProvider("", "", "", "", $spaces_config["os_rpc_url"], "eXo Social", true, null);

$auth = new osapiOAuth2Legged($spaces_config["os_oauth_key_name"], $spaces_config["os_oauth_key_secret"], $spaces_config["os_user"]);

$osapi = new osapi($provider, $auth);

//We create the activity
$osactivity = new osapiActivity();

$osactivity->setTitle($activity);
$osactivity->setBody($activity);

//Configuring the message
$params = array(
'userId' => '@me',
'groupId' => "space:".$spaceName,
'activity' => $osactivity,
);

// Start a batch
$batch = $osapi->newBatch();
$batch->add($osapi->activities->create($params));

//Sending the activity
$result = $batch->execute();

In the code, you may recognize that we use oAuth to authenticate the request. To learn how to configure oAuth for your eXo implementation, check out the OpenSocial documentation.

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eXo Plugin for Seesmic – Bringing the Social Intranet to the Desktop

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

eXo first developed activity stream capabilities over 2 years ago – where updates can be published in real-time for users and groups. Then, we expanded this by building some extensions so even applications can publish activity streams as well – like our developer dashboard that generates (and mashes up) updates for Jira and Hudson.

To view, subscribe and respond to any type of feed, you had to be logged into the eXo portal interface (which is used as a customer intranet most of the time). Even as we transformed the typical intranet, modernizing it into a “social intranet”, it is still disconnected from frequently accessed social networks that users check and interact with everyday. Enterprise users want the usability features of the consumer web, which eXo Platform 3 provides. But what if they want to access their professional and personal feeds in the same place?

Seesmic Desktop is a tool a lot of us already turn to, for aggregating feeds from social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. When they approached us about a new initiative to build plug-ins for enterprise activity streams, we realized what a great benefit this could for our customers.

The eXo plugin for Seesmic Desktop is one of their first enterprise plugins (they announced a future Chatter plugin, plus a couple others), joining over 50 social network plugins already available. With this plugin, users can now access internal company feeds without having to be logged into the intranet. You can follow your co-workers and groups right alongside your other feeds, and publish your activities or comments into these streams as well.

This isn’t just about convenience for users, to see everything in one place. What’s really cool is that you could see conversation related to your company happening in the community – in Twitter for example – then quickly engage your co-workers within your company intranet feed and turn around a response. This means community development or “social media marketing” is more accessible and attainable for more companies.

Starting today, you can download the eXo plugin for Seesmic Desktop from the Seesmic Plugin Marketplace. This is linked with our demo server, running the Acme Social Intranet sample app that is included with eXo Platform 3, so you can test the complete functionality. If you’re an eXo Platform customer, you’ll be able to use the plugin with your own social intranet early next year.

Read more about the interop effort here. Or:

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