eXo Platform (Enterprise WebOS)

Paris, 16th june 2008 - eXo Platform SAS, collaborative software editor, is proud to announce the arrival of Tugdual GRALL in the company, as Vice President of Business and Product Strategy.

Tugdual Grall as eXo Platform business and product strategy Vice President

Tugdual will take the responsibility of business and product strategy. From the business side, Tugdual will work with the field team, to animate partners (ISVs, VARs), and manage pre-sales opportunities. In addition to this, Tugdual will leverage his experience within Oracle labs, to closely work with eXo development team to ensure product strategy/coherence.

“With always more international business opportunities, the arrival of Tugdual in the team, is also of a great help to develop the business at an international level” higlights eXo Founder and CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, allowing him to focus more on international operations, like worldwide marketing and conferences around the world.

Tugdual Grall’s Background

Tugdual has 15 years of experience in the middleware applications in IT systems. He has been working for 8 years for Oracle corporation as consultant then as Product Manager for OracleAS Middleware, in Oracle Head Quarters, California.

As product manager, Tugdual has been focusing on JavaEE, Web Services/SOA and Portal. During this experience Tugdual was working on the product strategy in development organization, and with key customers to accelerate Oracle product adoption.

Lately Tugdual has been working as architect in Cap Gemini group (Sogeti), with a key role around SOA and Web 2.0 projects and evangelization.

He has been presenter at several international conferences such as JavaOne, Oracle Open World, ODTUG and has published articles on different sites and magazines. (Java Developer Journal, Oracle Technology Network, Select, Web Services Developer Journal)

Tugdual can be reached at tugdual.grall@exoplatform.com

Another great product built on top of eXo WebOS is Novaforge, an innovative Forge platform that aggregates and glue several Open Source tools used for Software Developments such as SVN repositories, Bug trackers, Continuous build…

Emmanuel Rias is leading the project developments and he sent me several commented screenshots:

NovaForge is a revolutionary forge based on WEBOS presentation. The final goal is to have the same functional behaviors and functionality than your computer in your browser. NovaForge brings also all the software development factories and project control functionality.
NovaForge based all his presentation on Portlet standard approach and used Exo platform to support both presentation, one in Portal mode and the other one in WEB OS mode.
In the User Workspace you can access to your agenda, the calendar or you can see your affected tasks.

You have, exactly as your favorite desktop, all the continuous integration functionalities available in several windows. We manage a repositories hierarchy configuration and the possibility to plug a continuous integration on many existing applications.

We integrate the very powerful ECM of Exo Platform. You can manage versions, start workflow (for example to approve a document), voting and you can access to your project documents directly from your favorite explorer. By drag and drop you can put or read documents according to your permissions.

Thanks Emmanuel and Co for choosing eXo, you made the right choice !

Miguel Valdes - Bonita Product Manager - introduces the new Bonita (and Orchestra consoles) to be part of NovaBonita (Bonita 4).

Of course it is based on eXo WebOS, this is the first product of a long incoming list that is based on the WebOS…things are changing

Mircosoft Sharepoint might hit 1 Billion $ sales this year.

The growth is tremendous and there are quite some reasons for it: the lack of competition from other large vendors, the Microsoft direct and indirect sales force, the Microsoft Office integration and of course the organic growth strategy used for that product which makes it a perfect out of the box solution.

Coupled with Active Directory, Exchange and on the client side Vista as well as the Office suite, you have the entire Microsoft stack that rules your entire business.

BUT, being a 100% Microsoft shop is an extremely risky move that will tie your company to the Redmond firm for the next 10 years if not more. Many IT directors do not want to take the risk to see licenses price increase suddenly or being forced to upgrade to new products that would not fit their needs - like Vista or Silverlight.

“The most interesting thing about SharePoint is the way Microsoft is using it to get inside corporations, and once inside, to further their grip,” said Gartner Inc. analyst Mark Gilbert a bit like IBM used to do with its mainframes (well, it is still the case in fact).

1) Other majors IT vendors do not have a competitive offering:

• IBM: you will need Websphere Portal, FileNet and Lotus Notes / Domino to get the same set of features. First it is extremely expensive and it is also a poorly integrated stack that can not compete for new customers. If you also add the dependency on the application software and in many cases on the hardware you come up with a huge heavy stack.
• Oracle: here again you will need Oracle WebCenter, Stellent and Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) to compete, but once again it is not integrated at all…it is even worse than for the IBM stack as the portal chosen (among the 2 from Oracle and the 2 from BEA) is WebCenter while OCS is built on an older version of the Portal. Finally the identity provisioning in those 3 products is complex and data synchronization is needed.

In both cases the external growth policy tend to create a poorly integrated suite that is not modular nor extensible and also extremely expensive.

2) New comers DO NOT leverage the existing IT system

There also exist several new comers but none of them, in different ways really get the importance of leveraging existing IT infrastructure, to build on top of standards or open protocols:

• Google: yes, Google is a new comer into the Enterprise game but with its positioning it currently targets more the small enterprise that can afford to have their data hosted on the cloud. Moreover, it does not really care about the existing standards and tends to always create new de facto ones which makes the integration more complex into the company
• Many Web 2.0 vendors such as JiveSoftware, TBlox try to compete with Sharepoint with the usual Start Page look - a la NetVibes - and the social approach seeing it as the next big Enterprise software shift. This move is indeed something that will happen but the social part will be a cross cutting concern that will have to lay on top of the existing IT infrastructure.

3) Up to now, NO Open Source alternative

The Open Source world is big and spread over a multitude of small applications written in many different programmatic languages.

Up to now no solution was able to offer the same functional scope as Microsoft Sharepoint and users or IT integrators had to glue pure players application such as Liferay / Jboss Portal, Alfresco / Nuxeo and Zimbra to compete. But even if licenses costs were low, the maintenance cost of the overall solution for the entire lifetime of the solution would over pass the sharepoint Total Cost of Ownership  (TCO).

Moreover, each applications having its independent road map, each upgrades of the solution tended to become a nightmare for the user and/or the IT integrator. To overcome those issues, Open Source vendors have tried, like Alfresco, to position itself as a Sharepoint competitor even if the functional scope was really far from the Sharepoint one (at the end, Alfresco is “just” a shared drive).

4) eXo Platform: The Open Source alternative

With the launch of eXo WebOS flagship product as the new type of Enterprise Portals and all its incoming optional modules such as eXo Enterprise Content Managment (eXo ECM) and eXo Collaboration Suite (eXo CS), we have been able to build the only true alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint.

But eXo Platform is not only a Sharepoint altrenative it goes much further:

• An Open Source solution: being Open Source for the application that is the entry point to your IT system is something that makes a lot of sense; being able to modify the solution to adapt it to your needs, profiling or security policies is a must. Open Source allows you to customize the software as you want and not only as the vendor wants.
• Based on Open Standards: we think that interoperability is even more important than being Open Source. Leveraging Open Standards is a must for an Enterprise Portal that will have to integrate with all your IT system and we all know this is not the strength of Microsoft products.
• Leveraging existing IT infrastructure: the JavaEE choice for the server side part of eXo Platform which for example allows the platform to be deployed on any application servers, to leverage administration and management solutions, or even to use the Java Connector Architecture components to communicate with mainframes and IT legacy. So, this allows to secure and leverage the big $ invested by the company. Hence, a new user interface to expose the information of older backend systems is available and will bring your IT to the next stage.
  
• Integrated Stack: the software we build is based on a platform strategy where a single core is used to plug services and applications on top of it to package dedicated products reusing the same components for all the products.
• Data Portability: this one is a side effect of being based on standards as we implement a specification from the Java Community Process (JCP) which allows us to structure data and meta-datas, to store them and more important to export them in a standard XML format.
• Application Portability: same as for the data portability, we have implemented another specification of the JCP which defines applications (called portlets) that can run in different portals such as the one of IBM or Oracle. In the incoming versions of our product, we will also support the Google gadgets along with our own widget API (that we developed before the launch of Open Social).
• Services exposure: exposing datas outside the platform is critical but being able to also expose business logic is even more important these days. Thanks to a REST framework built on top of a (in progresss) JCP specification it is possible to easily expose to anyone on the internet a set of API that could then be part of a mashup service hosted somewhere else on the internet.
• Microsoft Office AND Open Office Integration: documents stored inside eXo Document Management System can be remotely accessed inside Microsoft Office Suite thanks to an eXo plugin for Office developed using the .Net framework. It is also possible to compare versions or do advanced search of documents hosted on the server without moving from Mircrosoft Word. BUT, we also have developed the same kind of plugin for Open Office!
• Web 2.0, Social software and consumer habits moved into the enterprise: while Sharepoint has so far only tried to make older applications like Lotus or Websphere Portal more accessible in the enterprise, they have not yet pushed into the enterprise the new type of software we have seen with the rising of Web 2 services out there. Bringing Web 2.0 technology and methodology into the enterprise to make it more collaborative and user friendly is an important goal of the eXo mission.
• AN OS INSIDE THE BROWSER: finally but NOT LEAST, our revolutionary user interface that reproduces a multi-window environment inside the browser. Normal users may not understand why there is an OS inside the browser BUT it naturally eases the use of web applications and allows EVERYONE in the enterprise to move to the next generation of applications: rich web application based on standards. And we will keep that huge competitive advantage as for sure Microsoft will not go that way OTHERWISE it will kill its cash cow Vista product and will make its Software + Service strategy completely useless and outdated…

The market is looking for integrated stacks but for modular and extensible ones that customers can easily modify which is not the case of the Oracle or IBM ones.

eXo Platform and its new modules is truly the only alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint.

We have done a HUGE amount of work to build this platform from the ground and to bootstrap the company. Thanks to our early adopter customers who are really large organizations and companies, we were able to validate the solution. There is quite some work left but we did the most difficult part of it. It has not been easy all the time but we can all be proud of the work we have achieved so far.

All together, we will avoid a new monopoly!

Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo Platform CEO, will give a speech on eXo WebOS, desktop virtualization, at LinuxDays in Geneva.

Come on Wednesday 21st of May at 4pm

 StartWest is a famous startup competition in France

This year eXo won the development prize!

View the video on French TV LCI

 Bonita team, lead by Miguel Valdes from Bull SAS, and eXo Platform SAS have worked hard to show the first demo of the new Bonita and Orchestra consoles based on eXo WebOS at JavaOnce - San Francisco.

Bonita is a powerful Open Source workflow engine based on the new Process Virtual Machine (PVM) engine model. Orchestra is a BPEL engine, both share the same kernel.

In the new screenshots you can see the eXo WebOS environment customized for the monitoring consoles, it is possible to see the existing processes, their instances, the activities in the pipe as well as all the task list for users and groups!

As part of the incoming new product eXo Knowledge Suite (eXo KS) we today show you the first screenshots of eXo FAQ application.

This is a small but very useful application that let you manage categories of questions with some extremely efficient features such as moderation, question references or the ability to only display then unanswered  questions.

Create categories and sub categories of questions:

View unanswered questions:

Answer questions:

San Francisco, JavaOne, May 8th 2008 – eXo Platform SAS, collaborative software editor, has launched today its eXo WebOS 1.0, a desktop virtualization platform through the Web.

A platform that brings the best Web 2.0 pratices in organisations

eXo WebOS 1.0 is a desktop virtualization platform, accessible from a multi-windowed web interface that enables to access many add-ons in an easy and intuitive way.

Among these, we can find complementary modules developed by eXo Platform, such as :

• eXo Enterprise Content Management 2.0 (eXo ECM 2.0) which brings various and rich functionalities in document management capabilities that enables to capture, manage, store, preserve and access/deliver any type of document. Moreover, advanced workflow functionalities enable an effective management of team members who are working together on documents.

• The eXo Platform collaborative suite (eXo CS) regroups all the tools needed for a better team working and for a closer collaboration between team members. This suite comes with an email client supporting all email standards, a calendar that can be shared as required, and an address book that can also be spread among users.

• In order to allow more effective communication and collaboration, eXo Platform is developing two complementary components for the Collaborative Suite

• • Synchronous working with eXo Liveroom, coming with video conference tools, a real time interactive whiteboard and a chat.
  • Knowledge management with eXo Knowledge Suite (eXo KS) that brings companies tools such as wikis, blogs, FAQ and forums.

With the new working methods associated to the Web 2.0, eXo WebOS 1.0 has been designed to enable companies to take benefits from the best Web 2.0 practices. Every user, that can be customers, partners, providers or internal users, can personalize their own user experience through an intuitive interface displaying services adapted to their team needs, their role in the company and their collaborative needs.

As Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo Platform CEO, highlights it : “In addition to the fact that we developed powerful administration tools to answer more and more complex issues that are facing information system managers, we wanted this new portal, as all eXo modules, to be easy to access and handle for our customers.”

A solution easy to deploy and that fits perfectly the existing information system

Flexibility and adaptability qualities of the solution eXo WebOS 1.0 that enable a fast deployment based on service oriented architecture (SOA) adapted to the organisation and its processes. eXo WebOS 1.0 helps the company to quickly adapt to environment changes allowing developers to easily create new services.

The security and user management of eXo WebOS 1.0 have been improved to accelerate integration and deployment of the solution in the information system. Users can be managed using different databases that can be combined to any LDAP server.

« As part of setting up the new portal for the M6 group, the eXo solution has been a key to success in this project », stresses Benjamin Paillereau, Expert Consultant for Interakting, the interactive agency of the Business and Decision Group. « We have understood the complexity of the M6 architecture and brought solutions to issues that are specific to the media environment with a real autonomy for the customer. eXo provided us a platform on which we have created our services. This task has been easier than expected, thanks to the services management tools integrated to the eXo framework. Moreover, eXo respects the standards, so we could focus on pure business aspects of the project instead of the portal construction. Concerning the solution flexibility, the logic chosen by eXo to use a standard publication workflow that can be easily modified by a Groovy script, for instance, helped us to cover the functional perimeter in an effective way. Finally, the modular and open structure of the platform is a great advantage which enabled us to fine tune the system while controlling every consequences, even if not expected. The eXo structure enabled Interakting to provide a flexible solution with high control over risks. »

An intuitive solution integrating reliable standards

The respect of the standards and the will to improve them are important development vectors in the eXo Platform product strategy. So, « the open structure and the flexibility of the eXo platform are valuable assets » says Patrick Cambier, Integration Services Manager at Bull Belgium. « Architect of an open world and leader of the open source integration in Europe, Bull is partner with eXo for a long time and is one of the major contributor to the eXo community for ObjectWeb/OW2. This partnership enabled us to win together one of the most important Open Source project in Europe : the implementation of the collaborative platform and the document management system for the Service Public Fédéral des Finances (SPFF, Belgium Minister of Finance) in Belgium. Thanks to a mix of Bull services and eXo Platform innovations in the RIA and WebOS areas, this project will enable 30.000 SPFF users to benefit from the most complete and integrated open collaborative suite leveraging Web 2.0 practices ».

An eXo team, fully dedicated to usability and design of the solution, made eXo WebOS easy to use. Thanks to all the integrated wizards enabling users to quickly create new pages. An extensive use of AJAX enables eXo WebOS 1.0 to come with a new page dynamic : only the content that need to be refreshed is updated, increasing the system performance and scalability.

Moreover, eXo WebOS 1.0 supports latest portlet standards JSR 286 and WSRP 2. The JSR 286 standard, evolution of the JSR 168, offers a better AJAX support and a better portlet coordination due to an event management model. These portlets, called portlets 2.0 are capable to communicate and interact together, sharing parameters and content.

About eXo Platform SAS

French company founded in 2003 and now employing more than 70 employees, eXo Platform is developing a collaborative software suite that is based on an innovative enterprise portal solution which enables the virtualization of the workspace through an advanced WebOS interface. Standing in the international market, eXo Platform count as its customers the American Department of Defense, the Belgium Financial Minister, the State of Geneva and multiple french governmental offices and private companies.

For more information about eXo Platform and its products, go to : http://www.exoplatform.com