Archive for the ‘portal’ Category

eXo Accelerates Modern Java Application Development with Early Adopter Program

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Customers can begin prototyping modern Java applications for the forthcoming eXo Platform 3.0 through new program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (July 21, 2010) – eXo today announced the eXo Early Adopter Program designed to give Java enterprises access to the training and technical resources they need to begin rolling out cutting-edge, rich Java applications built on eXo Platform 3.0. The company’s much-anticipated flagship offer, planned for general availability by the end of the year, has been re-architected with the fast, modern portal framework co-developed by eXo and Red Hat, GateIn.

In recent months, eXo has delivered new and updated community versions of all the key components in eXo Platform 3.0 to run on GateIn 3.0: eXo Social, eXo Content, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge. The Early Adopter Program goes beyond a beta program, and instead offers eXo’s most innovative customers and other Java enterprises a realistic path to modernizing their legacy Java applications.

The training and developer support offered through the Early Adopter Program is designed to help developers begin prototyping a new breed of rich, interactive, social Java applications that can run popular Java environments such as JBoss, Spring, Tomcat or IBM WebSphere. Applications developed today will be compatible with the GA release. These services will be delivered by eXo’s technical product leaders.

Program Details

  • Early access to all updates between now and final GA.
  • Three-hour web-based trainings on all eXo components comprising eXo Platform 3.0.
  • One-year Developer Subscriptions, giving users support on community and beta releases.
  • Discounts on eXo Platform 3.0 Production Subscriptions down the road.
  • Participation in the Early Adopter Program is a one-time $5,000 fee, which can be applied to the future purchase of a Production Subscription.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “The enthusiasm we’re seeing for eXo Platform 3.0, even in this early stage, validates the heavy investment we’ve made to deliver the best user experience platform on the market for Java enterprises. The Early Adopter Program, which we initially opened to select customers, has been so well received that we’re opening it up to more enterprises looking for a ‘SharePoint’ of their own that would work with their existing Java systems and make the most of their Java talent. This program puts the power of the eXo Platform in developers’ hands, with a practical roadmap to get them from design and development to production.”

Online Resources

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!

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 SocialeXo 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

Is OpenSocial hurting portals?

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Last week, I participated in a panel discussion on using OpenSocial in the enterprise, along with execs from IBM, Atlassian, and SocialText. Although only two of the companies represented had portal offerings, a good portion of the discussion was focused on portals, namely is OpenSocial destroying the portal world and portlets in general.

Emphatically, no.

First, portals are evolving. I reflected in a previous post that “The nature of portals has changed, and with GateIn (eXo + JBoss), we’re seeing portal’s transformation from an aggregator of external applications to a platform for building and delivering services that add value to the user organisation.”

In this world, the question is not whether a developer has to choose between portlets or gadgets but rather, which services are best delivered as gadgets and which as portlets.

At eXo, we do not make a great distinction between a gadget or a portlet. They are merely categorized in a way that makes it easy for users to go and grab more gadgets or portlets to customize their application. The user doesn’t care.

From the developer side, we use portlets for more robust components that take longer to build while gadgets are lighter and take less time to build. The difference comes from the technical aspect behind the scene. Even if we see some similarities in the last specifications, originally portlets were more Java server side components that generate fragments of HTML code while gadgets dynamically generate that HTML on the client side thanks to JavaScript and REST server calls. The main difference is then in the application lifecycle as portlets have to be deployed as WAR packages on the application server while the gadget is just an XML file that can be dynamically added and edited online. Gadgets allows our business users to build applications on the cloud very quickly.

Next generation portals will support both models but this is just one of the building blocks of the platform of tomorrow. Horizontal services like content, mail, calendaring, or profiles are other pieces that can be mashed up together to easily build a custom web application… online. We’re baking functionality into GateIn that will enable it to be the ultimate “mash up” platform for combining and recombining components. Times have changed, let’s be more agile.

[video] GateIn beta 2, what’s new

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Here is the new GateIn beta 2 video which includes:

  • the new layout management for groups and dashboards
  • the new skins management with hot deployment support
  • a lot of UI enhancements
  • an introduction to the great new packaging to easily extend GateIn

GateIn 3.0 beta 2, what is new? from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

You can download GateIn Beta 2 or watch the first video