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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 »

On a Lighter Note… How to Play Tic-Tac-Toe in GateIn Portal

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Prabhat Jha, one of the JBoss developers collaborating with the eXo team to build GateIn, shows how to add a tic-tac-toe gadget to GateIn on his blog today.  Here’s how he describes it:

If you thought Portal was only about serious stuffs such as content aggregation, integration of different applications, out of box personalization and natural front end to SOA etc then think again. Using GateIn’s gadgets, you already could import different cool gadgets say from Google to your dashboard and page. Now you can tic-tac-toe as well. Here is a screen shot from GateIn Portal for you i-dont-believe-until-i-see kinds.

Check out the rest of his post here.

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Posted in GateIn, fun, gadget | No Comments »

Add code quality metrics to your GateIn Dashboard with Sonar

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Sonar is an open source platform to manage code quality. It enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. At eXo Platform, we use Sonar to manage and monitor the quality of our codebase. As Arnaud Heritier (our Software Development Manager) pointed out:

The inherent challenge to developing software is maintaining and improving the quality of the code as you add features and expand the codebase over time.
To manage our code quality, we rely on Sonar. Sonar provides us views ranging from a high level global dashboard down to the most granular detail about individual lines of code – from these we can extract quality indicators from our code development.

GateIn, the new portal that eXo is co-developing with JBoss, provides a dashboard where you can install gadget and customize them. So we wrote gadgets that you can add to your dashboard and customize to your needs. As Gadget is a standard, it’s also working in Jira. Arnaud explain more about this:

Managing a product isn’t only about focusing on quality. We also have to deliver on time, meet our subscription customers’ requirements, and incorporate as many community feature requests as possible. To keep an eye on everything, we wanted to leverage the flexible interface of the GateIn portal framework. By integrating Sonar’s gadgets, we’ll be able to quickly create our own set of customized dashboards to track all the metrics we need, like the activity of our teams, development roadblocks, tasks and issues on products, and a lot more. We’re even able to reuse Jira Gadgets in GateIn – it saves us a lot of time and is definitely more effective.

Sonar Gadget in GateIn Dashboard:

sonar Gadget in GateIn Dashboard

Sonar Gadget in Jira4:

sonar Gadget in Jira4 Dashboard

If you want to try these gadgets in your own development environment, you can grab them from Google App Gallery. They can work in any standard OpenSocial/gadget container, and they’ve been tested with GateIn and Jira.

If you want to look under the hood, go to the Sonar gadget repository on github or download them. You can also easily add your own metrics to the gadgets.

Links:

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Posted in GateIn, application, demo, development, enterprise2, experiments, fun, gadget, web2 | 1 Comment »

[videos] Mashups with GateIn, the real platform power

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Last week I wrote a blog about: “Is OpenSocial hurting portals”

I have made a new video on how to use Gadgets and dynamic languages inside GateIn to quickly build REST APIs and Gadgets on a live GateIn instance

Build Mashups in GateIn from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

What we show here:

- provide a simple text file with a list of adresses, deploy it on GateIn WebDAV drive
- Build with our online IDE a REST API on the cloud (using groovvy language and the JSR 311 specification) that read the content of that file and expose it as a REST service with a simple click
- Consume that REST service within a Gadget and use the Google maps API to do render a map that points to the adress from the file

All live… only on GateIn

By the way, this is also what I demoed at Google Devfest in Argentina:

IMG_2130

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Posted in GateIn, demo, experiments, fun, gadget, video | No Comments »

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