wcm « eXo Blog – The Cloud User Experience Platform

Posts Tagged ‘wcm’

Dashboards: Central to the Modern Enterprise Intranet

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

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.

*****

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.

Share this blog post with :

Tags: IDE, portal, resources, social intranet, wcm
Posted in Use Cases | No Comments »

eXo Delivers First User Experience Platform for Java

Monday, September 20th, 2010

eXo Platform 3.0 marks the future of Java application development: enterprise content management, collaboration, social and rich UI with enterprise portal capabilities

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

Share this blog post with :

Tags: eXo Platform, GateIn, Java, open source, portal, Press Release, social intranet, social software, user experience platform, UXP, wcm, web content management
Posted in Company News, Industry Trends | 2 Comments »

What is eXo Platform 3.0? (Part 3)

Friday, September 17th, 2010

In the last two posts introducing eXo Platform 3.0, I’ve focused on its portal capabilities, which is expected of any enterprise portal, and the social intranet, an area in which some portal vendors have ventured.

Now, we’re entering new territory for portal vendors. In this post and the next, I will detail what makes eXo Platform 3.0 really stand apart.

I previously noted that even though portal capabilities are still very critical, the needs of today’s business have outgrown a portal. The rise of web 2.0 brought high levels of interactivity and richer user experiences, not to mention an explosion of data driven by web apps. All this means more demand on businesses to be able to do more with their applications.

Java middleware vendors have been very focused on scalability and efficiency of controlled, self-hosted relational database applications. But in today’s world, relational database systems are no longer the keys to the castle. In fact, one could argue that the most valuable database in the world is Google’s index of the web — which is certainly not a relational database. The web’s core is built around documents and document linking. New web architectures and data stores like BigTable, Hadoop and Cassandra are replacing relational database systems.

Our Content services were built for this new world order, providing the tools, automated workflow and templates to get websites up and running fast:

Intuitive file explorer dashboards, drag and drop controls, multiple views for easily navigating, organizing and sharing documents
Integration with your existing OCR solutions, your LDAP directory, and WebDAV HTTP extensions give you flexibility and a ‘drop in’ solution
Templates, fast features with CSS and JavaScript support and version control means you can launch a website immediately
Workflow to automate content creation, approvals and publishing or design your own business process
A UI extension framework that can be used to create plugins and extensions for content management

And because eXo Platform 3.0 is designed for this new world order, it can work with content from many data sources: documents, existing relational database or even data stored in the cloud, such as Amazon S3 — all mapped to our Java content repository (JCR), so developers have advanced capabilities for versioning, locking and more.

But ultimately, eXo Platform 3.0 is more than the sum of its parts. Managing your content is just one aspect. But now, imagine doing this with a social intranet, where changes are published automatically to the appropriate people in their activity stream and workflows notify the editors and publishers when it’s their turn to act.

Stay tuned to my next post, when I wrap up what eXo Platform 3.0 can do. Rest assured, I’m saving the best for last.

Share this blog post with :

Tags: ECM, eXo Platform, user experience platform, wcm, web content management
Posted in Use Cases | No Comments »

eXo Webinar: How to Add Social Publishing to Portal-Based Applications

Monday, June 28th, 2010

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!

Share this blog post with :

Tags: exo, GateIn, portal, tour, wcm, web content management, webinar
Posted in Events | No Comments »

eXo WCM 1.2 : Four videos for a complete overview

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Benjamin Paillereau, eXo WCM 1.2 product manager, just posted four videos to provide a complete overview of WCM 1.2 main features. Benjamin starts to explain the new design coming with this release, then he moves on the category management, the newsletter creation and in a final video, Benjamin talks about the form generator feature.