Exo portal
ECM (Enterprise content management ) - is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
ECM employed the technologies and strategies of content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.
French-based commercial open source portal vendor eXo recently used a blog post
to announce that they have almost 100 active contributors. According to
the blog, eXo now has more active contributors than most other open
source projects, including familiar ones such as JBoss Application
Server and Mozilla Firefox
Tracking the number of contributors can be a relevant indicator of
the health of a product development community, but looking behind the
numbers reveals a slightly less positive impression.
The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process for the important (Java) portal standard.As a follow-up to the widely-adopted JSR 168, this portlet specification 2.0 moves to make portals more like integrated apps and less like collections of disconnected windows. Specifically it adds support for events, public render parameters, resource serving, and a portlet filter.Some vendors like eXo, IBM, JBoss and Liferay have already been supporting earlier iterations of the standard and two years ago, I commented that most commercial portal vendors are behind this new portlet standard. While this is still the case, many significant changes have happened in the marketplace since the initial draft of JSR 286 in August 2006.
In recent news open source portal vendor eXo has joined the list of few vendors to support the emerging JSR-170 repository standard. Meanwhile, eXo Portal was tested earlier this year by part of the US Department of Defense during a three-week collaboration exercise with allied armed forces. This is interesting as eXo is the only European-based open source portal vendor on our radar. Also eXo out-of-the-box comes with fewer featuresthan other open source portals, even though the project is clearly trying to enhance its content management capabilities. Perhaps thin and focused is the way to go?
Open Source vendor eXo recently announced a new version of their portal package. According to eXo Platform CEO Benjamin Mestrallet the new 2.0 release has a 100% AJAX based user interface, which by design should resemble a desktop-like UI. "Current personal pages like Netvibes are also in that trend and introduce more interaction with the user but that is just a transition phase to a full OS environment inside the browser," says Mestrallet. I remain sceptical of portal dashboard interfaces, but take a look at a couple of screenshots of the new release and judge for yourself. As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, eXo excels mainly at the simpler scenarios. Version 2, while still only in alpha, does not seem to change this.
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