A couple of weeks ago we released eXo Social 1.0.1, which introduces a valuable new resource: developer documentation. (This is the most exciting feature of this release, which otherwise contains some bug fixes for the 1.0 version. You can download eXo Social 1.0.1 here.) We’re working on a lot more of these developer-focused resources, which will help developers build applications on top of eXo technology.
eXo Social is the first of the eXo projects to get the “developer docs treatment.” This documentation will show you how to extend your apps with social features. You will learn how to publish activities, add contacts, create spaces, invite people, plug your own backend for user profile, use the OpenSocial API, and a lot more. It contains everything you need to social-enable your existing apps.
Developers – check it out, and let us know what you’d like to see added.
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.”
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.”
Today we announced the availability of eXo Social 1.0. eXo Social provides an extension to the GateIn Portal Framework, to add social features to portal-based web apps; it also serves as a preview of some of the features of the future eXo Platform 3.0. Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the download (in addition to GateIn, which comes bundled with eXo Social 1.0).
Bringing users to the center
As a portal framework, GateIn is ready for enterprises, with strong support for LDAP and SSO. But is also a great application deployment platform, by reconciling server-side components, like portlets, with the Portal container and the portlet bridge for JSF. GateIn is perfect for the more mashup-oriented use cases, enabling easy development of gadgets. All around, it is especially well-suited for a corporate intranet.
Traditionally intranets have featured a mix of content and applications. Today, inspired by our observation of the consumer web, we want to bring another variable to the equation: people. Many intranet projects suffer because the lack of interest of the users – an intranet doesn’t engage, it provides top-down information sharing. Even on a well-structured intranet, finding a piece of information is often a pain.
eXo Social recognizes that users are more than just passive application operators and content consumers. They need to get the right information at the right time, have a voice, and exercise more control over their workflow.
eXo Social aims to revive your portal project by putting users in a more central place.
From a simple corporate directory to an Enterprise Social Network
The People module within eXo Social allows you to create a social network for existing portal users. Each portal user is added in a global directory, where users can search people by name and also by role, responsibility, experience and job skills. This makes it much easier to find domain experts for interdepartmental work. Each user has full control of the information he or she wants to publish in their profile.
We are talking about turning a company directory into an enterprise social network. eXo Social is able to do this with GateIn at the foundation. GateIn is very flexible in the way it lets you store the organization model (users, groups qnd roles). Under the hood, it’s the PicketLink IDM framework, which was designed for maximum adaptability.
There is a great step-by-step tutorial that explains how to configure GateIn to have the org model stored in an enterprise directory such as an LDAP or an Active Directory. Following these steps, all directory users will be instantly recognized as portal users. And portal users form the basis for eXo Social’s People directory.
But, enriching profiles and making them searchable is not enough. Indeed, there needs to be relationships between people to form a network. We do this by allowing users to connect with each other. Once two users are connected they will receive status updates about each other in their respective network activity streams. Connecting to someone else lets you follow his work. Users have full control of their connections, and can request or revoke connections at any time.
Community Management
In a corporate context, very often you need to go beyond individual connections and work collaboratively in a group. That’s where Spaces comes into play. A space is a group collaboration workspace within the portal.
How is it different from GateIn’s group pages? In GateIn, you can assign a set of pages to be viewable only to members of a group. A portal administrator will typically create a group, then initialize navigation, create a couple of pages and install some applications within it.
Spaces lets any user become a community manager by simply clicking a “add a new space” button. This will instantly and automatically create a new group, instanciate a navigation, predefine a layout and install a few initial pages: space home, dashboard, members and settings.
In a space, a community manager can add and remove applications to the workspace in a single-click. Behind the scenes, Spaces manages all the plumbing of creating a page, adding an application on it and setting up permissions. The available applications are coming from the GateIn Application Registry, so it’s still under the control of the portal admin. A “power” space manager can still have access to the page and application settings. Advanced managers can even completely edit the navigation and the layout of the pages. In fact, space mangers are local admins for their community, but the big difference it that they do not need extensive training to get started. Everything has been simplified to be ready to jam quickly!
Heads-up devs, it’s OpenSocial!
With the People and Spaces features within eXo Social, you have new tools to build vibrant intranet portals where people really interact. But you can go further. The support for gadgets offer great mashup capabilities, and they can be integrated as first-class applications with spaces or in classical dashboards.
There are also a number of extension points to help developers with integrations that further enhance the user experience.
As an example of it, take a look at this video that shows how a team of developers has tuned eXo Social for their own needs. They created activity streams for JIRA, Sonar and Hudson applications, which then publish application activity into a development team space.
Did you attend one of the DevFest events recently hosted by Google in your area to learn more about developing OpenSocial applications? Are you currently developing or interested in developing applications for the Google platform? Have you started development on your application for the SE OpenSocial Application Contest? If you haven’t, you may want to get started…
This video explains how to test your application with the eXo Social demo.
If you’re entering this contest, e27 and MakeForce will be supporting the event by assisting developers who wish to get their projects funded. Learn more here . Not only do you have a chance to win a cool Apple iPod Touch or Nintendo Wii, but now you have an awesome opportunity to make a real business out of your efforts. ENTER NOW!
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