eXo Platform (Enterprise WebOS)

The eXo Chat module - part of eXo LiveRoom (eXo LR) is on its way to be released on time

Here is the screenshot with the new skin.

From San Francisco airport with a poor sound … anyway, worth the 3 minutes video

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!

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

eXo Mail is an application part of eXo Collaboration Suite (eXo CS)

It includes many many features and today I will introduce one of my favorite: the different views available to read the mail list.
The first one is the thread view which displays the related message in a tree as shown in the next screenshot:

In fact there exist 3 default views: the normal list view, the threaded view and the conversation view

The conversation one is a bit like the gmail view

Enjoy!

Patrick Cambier is Bull Belgium Open Source Business Unit manager.

In this video (in French) he introduces the work done at the SPF Finance (Ministry of Finance in Belgium) and especially the first demo of eXo Video and eXo Whiteboard applications that are part of eXo Liveroom incoming product (along with eXo Chat previously introduced).