Archive for the ‘exo’ Category

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Polytechniciens Visit eXo’s Vietnam Office: My “World is Flat” Story

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Today’s guest post is from is by our marketing manager for eXo Vietnam, Thuy Dang Thanh.

As a member of eXo’s Marketing & Communication team, I get to meet and work with a lot of interesting people – whether they are partners, customers, journalists, or job candidates. One of the coolest experiences I’ve had in this position was getting to spend a day with a great group of students who visited our office in Hanoi last week.

Every year, 10 of the top students at the prestigious Polytechnic of Paris (Polytechnique) are selected for a special program that provides intensive technology and leadership courses. At the end of this program, they visit a foreign country to experience different local and business cultures. This year, Vietnam was selected – and eXo was one of the companies they chose to visit during the trip.

The team was definitely buzzing with anticipation when they arrived at our Hanoi office last Thursday. After a warm welcome from the 80+ eXoers on our team, they wanted to walk around and check out our facility and the big open spaces where we all work. Next, Brice Revenant, the General Manager of our office, led a discussion about the Vietnam market and eXo’s business model. One of my co-workers who works on the GateIn development team, To Minh Hoang, shared a lot of information about the Vietnam economic climate, our history, main industries, employee culture and work ethics, cost of living, and more.

The Polytechnique students asked a lot of questions too. They wanted to know about the benefits eXo provides to its employees, open source adoption and the software industry in Vietnam, Vietnamese business culture, and other government-related issues like regulations and taxes. The most interesting topic for all of us seemed to be the comparison between eXo and other local major companies (FPT or Viettel), and how we stack up on issues like management style, local recruitment efforts, and the upward mobility of employees.

The students left with a better understanding of not only Vietnamese culture, but also of eXo’s vision for hiring and promoting the best and the brightest engineers in the country. It was especially great to show them that our distributed development model not only provides better value to all our customers, but it also provides fantastic opportunities for our local employees.

After the meeting, I had a question for the students too: What had they liked the most about eXo? Julien de Zélicourt answered, saying ¨eXo impressed us by the fact, among all local and foreign companies we visited during our study trip, it is the only one who manages to carry out R&D operations. Almost all businesses just focus on project outsourcing for remote countries, without a strong activity in research.”
The team leader, Matthieu Deconinck, concluded the meeting with another memorable quote: “We were impressed by the company culture and profile. To us, it looked like a mini-Google. Good luck!”

Here are some pictures from the day:

The students arriving at our office in Hanoi.

The students arriving at our office in Hanoi.

Open discussion with the students and eXoers in our meeting room.

Open discussion with the students and eXoers in our meeting room.

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Posted in exo, fun, meet people, team | No Comments »

JBoss World – A rookie’s retrospective

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I just joined eXo a few months ago as a technical evangelist, having just graduated from engineering school in Paris.  Last week I was in Boston at the 2010 JBoss World / Red Hat Summit, so I thought I’d share my perspective as a first-time attendee. With Red Hat announcing the new JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, which is powered by eXo’s Web Content Management module, the eXo team was out in full force (Bob Bickel, Benjamin Mestrallet, Benjamin Paillereau, Julien Viet, Jerome Agnola and myself). The announcement was big for eXo, but it was even better to see the enthusiastic response from the attendees I talked to.

The event kicked off Tuesday evening and it was easy to find our booth.  People were lining up to grab one of our new “Pimp My Java” t-shirts, along with the coordinating eXo “pimp cups” that could be filled with drinks at the bar.  We found ourselves running out of giveaways earlier that we thought.

We met even more people Wednesday, as most of the eXo team members gathered in the booth after Jim Whitehurst’s keynote introduction. In his speech, Red Hat’s CEO explained why Open Source software is more relevant than ever.  Customers are increasingly concerned with openess and modularity, to avoid having resources locked into their IT projects. Open standards and interoperability are something I’ve heard a lot about since I joined eXo, so it was great to hear this message repeated by the CEO of the biggest open source company out there.

That afternoon I spent most of my time giving demos in eXo’s booth and had some great discussions with people who dropped by. It was interesting to hear so many fresh ideas and opinions, and talking to “real-life” developers definitely helped me gain some perspective on our product. I already knew our product’s features and capabilities, but now I got to hear exactly what kind of apps people want to extend and build with it. Once again, the main concern everyone kept bringing up was integration. Being able to reuse existing code, hardware or data structures is the starting point for 99% of customers. On top of that, I heard a lot of people say that integrating a WCM solution with their existing applications is a key concern, so being able to get that on top of EPP5 is a huge plus for Red Hat customers.

The day ended with an on-site party and barbecue where I was able to meet some of eXo’s partners and fellow Red Hat team members, as well as Jim Whitehurst, who was casually chatting with attendees.

Thursday was big for eXo as Red Hat announced the EPP-SP portal in the morning keynote, and Benjamin Paillereau, product manager of eXo Content, held a session on Social Publishing on EPP-SP in the afternoon. After we hit up Faneuil Hall for the closing party, we all joined the pub crawl taking place nearby.  That’s where we were psyched to find Noelle, Red Hat developer evangelist, wearing the eXo t-shirt!

All in all, the conference was a great experience for the whole eXo team – I definitely learned a lot. It was awesome to meet all of you who stopped by our booth to have a chat (or a beer) with us.  And a big thanks to Red Hat for organizing everything so well!  For those of you who didn’t have the chance to attend, all the presenters’ slides are already available here.

I’ll hopefully see you at Red Hat Summit 2011!

The eXo booth

Introducing the eXo Modules

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Posted in exo, fun, marketing, meet people, wcm | 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!

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Posted in ECM, GateIn, demo, exo, portal, video, wcm, webinar | No Comments »

eXo Expands Collaboration With Red Hat on JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

eXo powers newly announced CMS from Red Hat; further extends this forthcoming product with add-on modules to bring social, collaboration and knowledge management capabilities

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

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Posted in ECM, GateIn, Strategy, application, business, exo, marketing, open source, partnership, portal, press, social, wcm | No Comments »

eXo Forums upgrade

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Today we completed the migration of eXo Forums to eXo Knowledge 2.0. We’ve been so busy with the new releases of our community projects that we’ve neglected some of our community resources… To put it bluntly, the old forum was slow, buggy, and contained outdated information. (Side note/forums trivia question: I’ll send an eXo t-shirt to the first non-eXo employee who can tell me what Liveroom was.)

The new eXo Forums feature simplified categories that should be a lot easier to navigate. More importantly, it’s fast. Like the-French-team’s-World-Cup-trip fast. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The only downside is that it will take us a couple weeks to migrate all the old posts over. In the meantime, you can still post and answer new questions – give it a try and let us know what you think.

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Posted in KS, exo | No Comments »

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