CMS Watch exo Feed

Gadgets as increasingly relevant portal standard?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:59:00 -0500

Earlier this year in June, I argued that JSR 286 might be the last portlet standard, mainly due to the lack of attention to the updated specification. Earlier this week noted portal guru Apoorv Durga from outsourcing firm Wipro continued the conversation by asking whether gadgets and widgets are really an alternative to portlets as "many customers are considering these for building their next generation of web properties".

To be more accurate, Google Gadgets are actually not a standard, but simply a Google specification. It is interesting though to note that portal vendors have added support for gadgets with some alacrity, including IBM in a royal wedding-like partnership in early 2007, JBoss in much hyped integration a few months later, and this week eXo as they released eXo Portal 2.5 with support of Google Gadgets.

Programming gadgets may turn into a very useful skill for 2009, but as Durga writes there are also non trivial issues to address if you want to roll them out for an enterprise solution. While researching for a new evaluation report called Google in the Enterprise, we've talked to quite a few enterprises that have experimented with gadgets. Not surprisingly, some of them were more gloomy than the vendor marketing, but interestingly gadgets have indeed been deployed for difficult problems. Few enterprises, though, seem to have considered the impact of using a proprietary alternative to standards, as most seem just excited to use something new and hot.

Here at the turn of the year, it feels a bit like the browser wars, where developers are busy writing for their own preferred platform, but not really considering the longer term impact. My advice to practitioners is that experimentation is good, and so is organizational learning. But if you want to avoid surprises, make sure to test and plan carefully.

Does eXo Portal have most active contributors?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sun, 2 Nov 2008 18:28:00 -0500

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.

With 85 employees, most of which are developers, the majority of the contributors happens to be on the eXo payroll.As I mentioned back in July eXo is in rapid growth mode and has many new hires. I would argue that if you deduct the eXo employees from the numbers, it would seem like there are very few contributors left from "the community," and as a buyer that is not necessarily a good thing.

With many government customers and a global footprint, I suspect that eXo, unlike other commercial open source vendors, has not been as badly hit by the current financial crisis. But despite their enthusiam, their community has some way to go.

eXo updates product suite and continues rapid growth

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:37:00 -0400

Flying below the radar for most North American analysts, French-based commercial open source portal vendor eXo has been very busy recently. Earlier this month marked the release of new versions of their key products, including eXo Portal, which we cover in the Enterprise Portals Report 2008.

Then last week eXo announced a new branch in Tunisia covering the emerging (but also largely underresearched) marketplace in Northern Africa.

When we started covering eXo back in 2006 the firm had a 27 employees and had just opened a US office. Today they have 70 developers have joined the growing ranks of open source projects trying to offer an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

eXo has also been an early adopter of Adobe Flex, which is actively used in several of the eXo products, including the beta version of the new "Liveroom" video conferencing component.

I don't pick favorites and am not saying that eXo is the "best" or "leading" enterprise portal, but in these times where the portal market is increasingly dominated by large vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) it is important to remember that the open source portal market may indeed offer you viable alternatives. Beyond eXo we also cover Apache Jetspeed, JBoss, Liferay, and Plone.

JSR 286: The last portlet standard?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:46:00 -0400

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.

Jason E. Shao from the CampusEAI Consortium asks in a blog whether the next generation portlet specification really matters and over at the TheServerSide.COM you can find a healthy discussion on the final spec release.

Standards generally go missing in this marketplace, but judging from the very limited attention this new version of the portlet spec has received, it makes me wonder whether the marketplace has already left the need for it in the dust. As a buyer the new industry standard might seem the preferred option over the many proprietary implementations that build on the shortcomings of JSR 168, but make sure to study the emerging implementations of the new standard carefully to avoid an early mover disadvantage.

Enterprise Portal Marketplace: 2008 Vendor Risk Profile

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0500

It is all too easy to identify vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market. But CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye argues that CIOs, procurement officers, and other technology leaders considering investments in enterprise portals should carefully examine the risk profile of prospective vendors to help identify the right "fit" for their needs.

Plone: What's in a name...

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:15:00 -0400

Earlier this month at the annual Plone Conference 2007, the consulting firm "Plone Solutions" announced it would change its name to "Jarn." Plone Solutions / Jarn has been among the most experienced Plone system integrators, in particular since one of its founders was also a founder of Plone.

So why change such an esteemed name? The company cites "commitment to the community, to the Plone Foundation, and to a fair and open marketplace around Plone." This certainly makes sense and is a smart community-relations move, but still a step that many other open source firms have not taken, e.g., Alfresco, Magnolia, or eXo. If you're an Alfresco (the tool) integrator, it kind of sucks to compete against Alfresco (the company).

So I think avoiding having a commercial firm by the same name represents an important measure of a true community-oriented project. Remember that the community around your product of choice can make a significant difference to your project, in particular for open source tools.

eXo upgrades and changes positioning to webOS

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:07:00 -0500

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.

CMS Watch updates Enterprise Portals Report

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:29:00 -0400

Today we release the 2nd edition of the Enterprise Portals Report. In this version we begin coverage of the eXo and Jetspeed portal platforms, and have added new scenarios and a longer review of business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) features. Most importantly, all vendor evaluations have been updated, including analysis of the latest portal offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and many more. Read the full press release. As always, you can download a free sample.

Open Source Portal eXo makes waves

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 1 Aug 2006 11:56:00 -0400

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 features than 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?