eXo does portals well because we have deep roots and domain expertise, and I am personally extremely proud of the development work we’ve done with JBoss to make GateIn the definitive next-generation portal framework.
Starting with this second part, I will explain the many ways in which eXo Platform 3.0 goes well beyond what a portal can do.
As with many other portal vendors, the majority of eXo’s customers have used eXo Platform first and foremost to build a company intranet. Most of us who’ve used a company intranet know it to be pretty static, hard to personalize and not well integrated into our everyday work life. This is such the norm for intranets that it has prompted jokes about ‘intranet portals’ being outdated.
What eXo Platform 3.0 brings is anything but.
You can build a modern intranet that is slick, interactive and collaborative. eXo Platform 3.0 integrates with your company’s existing LDAP directory to create an enterprise social network. Profiles for employees and teams auto-populate the new ‘social intranet’ with directory permissions and security settings intact. From here, the social intranet can go wherever you want to take it, with:
Rich profiles that employees can customize
Work spaces for teams, where members can engage and share documents and information
Activity streams that push out updates from individuals and teams to their followers/colleagues
Even applications such as CRM can be integrated, with important changes streamed in real-time to the appropriate people
Intuitive email user experience, with the ability to tag and organize for finer-grained control and organization
Easy management using the LDAP directory to set permissions and access by users, roles or groups
Individual and group calendar accounts that can be managed and shared across the intranet
Answers capability where questions can be posed and experts identified
The enterprise social network is the new intranet, and eXo Platform 3.0 gives you everything you need to have a Facebook-like experience across your company network. For a full list of features, check out our resource page.
I’m just getting started, so stay tuned for more on what you can do with eXo Platform 3.0.
Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new feature on its website dubbed “Facebook Questions.” While the feature may be new to Facebook, the premise is by no means a novel one. In fact, looking to the web user community for answers to questions is what initially made Askjeeves.com such a popular website and what is driving the success of a specialized site like stackoverflow.com today.
The web has made collaboration easier, and it is now an expected characteristic of both consumer and enterprise apps. Facebook acknowledges with Facebook Questions, which is yet another way to tap into the wealth of knowledge offered by a repository composed of millions of social connections.
But, Facebook falls short of delivering truly focused answers. Asking a question to a pool of 500 million people might certainly make for some good odds of getting a response, but it’s also very easy for your question to be lost in the ether. As expected, as time passes by and metadata makes finding information easier on Facebook’s repository of questions, the site’s ability to answer a question accurately will improve.
For companies that can’t wait for metadata to speed up the process by which they mine information, a more focused community of experts is what’s needed.
We saw this need for surfacing subject matter experts three years ago when we first developed eXo Knowledge. At that time, we had an application called FAQ. It was intended to be a simple FAQ publishing engine. Our customers very quickly found this FAQ functionality to be useful for building a dialogue with their employees, clients and partners. So we decided to rename the application eXo Answers, and orient it more towards a Q&A dialogue tool. With such a tool, domain experts in the enterprise have a new mechanism for sharing their knowledge and helping new colleagues. The application had turned into a socially engaging collaboration hub while the original FAQ publishing became a secondary feature.
This was reinforced to me again recently, when I participated in a panel of experts at the Solutions Intranet conference in Paris. Our roundtable was focused on Knowledge Management. The experts agreed on the subject that social tools are taking the traditional KM discipline to an entire new level. Some of the key points that came out of this discussion include:
Social networks are the perfect place to find and connect to domain experts inside and outside one’s enterprise.
Conversational style collaboration (activity streams) pushes out information, a direct contrast to older document-based KM systems, where finding information has been difficult.
Information is not knowledge (activity stream is not a knowledge feed, but it helps to push information and resources).
A rating system powered by users will quickly surface the most useful questions and answers.
With these ideas in mind, we’ve done a bit of work on our Answers functionality, and it will be a top social feature in eXo Platform 3.0. We’re excited to be delivering Answers – and many other features – to you shortly. If you want to get in early on eXo Platform 3.0, check out our Early Adopter Program or download eXo Knowledge and see what Answers is all about.
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.
Did you attend one of the DevFest events recently hosted by Google in your area to learn more about developing OpenSocial applications? Are you currently developing or interested in developing applications for the Google platform? Have you started development on your application for the SE OpenSocial Application Contest? If you haven’t, you may want to get started…
This video explains how to test your application with the eXo Social demo.
If you’re entering this contest, e27 and MakeForce will be supporting the event by assisting developers who wish to get their projects funded. Learn more here . Not only do you have a chance to win a cool Apple iPod Touch or Nintendo Wii, but now you have an awesome opportunity to make a real business out of your efforts. ENTER NOW!
Last week, we organized an OpenSocial Hackathon in our Vietnamese office. We had more than 30persons who came to exchange about this new standard that we leverage in eXo Social.
It was a great exchange. Unfortunately, not many people wanted to hack, so instead we discussed for more than 4 hours about the standard, how to write gadgets, and and to implement the server using Shindig. It was also a great time more meeting other companies, and i know some started to work together after this meeting.
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