Questioning Your Social Network

August 16th, 2010 by Patrice Lamarque

Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new feature on its website dubbed “Facebook Questions.” While the feature may be new to Facebook, the premise is by no means a novel one. In fact, looking to the web user community for answers to questions is what initially made Askjeeves.com such a popular website and what is driving the success of a specialized site like stackoverflow.com today.

The web has made collaboration easier, and it is now an expected characteristic of both consumer and enterprise apps. Facebook acknowledges with Facebook Questions, which is yet another way to tap into the wealth of knowledge offered by a repository composed of millions of social connections.

But, Facebook falls short of delivering truly focused answers. Asking a question to a pool of 500 million people might certainly make for some good odds of getting a response, but it’s also very easy for your question to be lost in the ether. As expected, as time passes by and metadata makes finding information easier on Facebook’s repository of questions, the site’s ability to answer a question accurately will improve.

For companies that can’t wait for metadata to speed up the process by which they mine information, a more focused community of experts is what’s needed.

We saw this need for surfacing subject matter experts three years ago when we first developed eXo Knowledge. At that time, we had an application called FAQ. It was intended to be a simple FAQ publishing engine. Our customers very quickly found this FAQ functionality to be useful for building a dialogue with their employees, clients and partners. So we decided to rename the application eXo Answers, and orient it more towards a Q&A dialogue tool. With such a tool, domain experts in the enterprise have a new mechanism for sharing their knowledge and helping new colleagues. The application had turned into a socially engaging collaboration hub while the original FAQ publishing became a secondary feature.

This was reinforced to me again recently, when I participated in a panel of experts at the Solutions Intranet conference in Paris. Our roundtable was focused on Knowledge Management. The experts agreed on the subject that social tools are taking the traditional KM discipline to an entire new level. Some of the key points that came out of this discussion include:

  • Social networks are the perfect place to find and connect to domain experts inside and outside one’s enterprise.
  • Conversational style collaboration (activity streams) pushes out information, a direct contrast to older document-based KM systems, where finding information has been difficult.
  • Information is not knowledge (activity stream is not a knowledge feed, but it helps to push information and resources).
  • A rating system powered by users will quickly surface the most useful questions and answers.

With these ideas in mind, we’ve done a bit of work on our Answers functionality, and it will be a top social feature in eXo Platform 3.0. We’re excited to be delivering Answers – and many other features – to you shortly. If you want to get in early on eXo Platform 3.0, check out our Early Adopter Program or download eXo Knowledge and see what Answers is all about.

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Posted in collaboration, exo, social | No Comments »

Introducing New Developer Documentation – Starting with eXo Social

July 29th, 2010 by Katie Poplin

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.

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Posted in development, social, technical | No Comments »

eXo Accelerates Modern Java Application Development with Early Adopter Program

July 22nd, 2010 by Julien Brulland

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

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Posted in GateIn, business, development, enterprise2, portal, press, social, wcm | No Comments »

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

July 12th, 2010 by Katie Poplin

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

June 29th, 2010 by Mark Downey

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 »

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