News
eXo Beta Testing Its Cloud-Based 'Intranet-as-a-Service'
New service bridges gap between social networking features and enterprise requirements and enable teams to set up complete cloud-based social intranets quickly.
French company eXo is beta testing its eXo Cloud Workspaces, which the company calls a new social
"intranet-as-a-service" solution. The company said that the new service is designed to "bridge the gap between social
networking features and enterprise requirements" and enable teams within organizations to set up complete cloud-based
social intranets quickly.
"In between those public cloud services that are kind of
popular, but lack features, and the big [commercial] social intranet
offerings that are more enterprise oriented, there's a gap," said
Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo's founder and CEO. "And that's where we
have positioned Cloud Workspaces."
Mestrallet said he believes that the adoption of social enterprise
technologies (Salesforce.com's Chatter, for example) have created a kind
of power struggle between end users and IT. His company's new
intranet-as-a-service solution removes that tension, he told this
site, freeing users to "self-serve in the cloud,"
while allowing IT to maintain centralized access to enterprise
information "with the opportunity to scale horizontally, either
on-prem or in the cloud."
"The enterprise has always loved customization capabilities
and flexibility in distribution," Mestrallet said. "And that's
what we're providing here."
The list of features in the new Cloud Workspaces service includes:
document management (sharing, tagging, storing and version control),
collaboration apps (wikis, communities, group calendars, etc.), internal
social networks and native mobile apps (iPhone, Android, etc.).
Cloud Workspaces is built on eXo Platform 3.5, which the company bills as the
first integrated environment for building modern Java apps with such
features as content management, collaboration and social intranet
capabilities.The eXo Platform comes with a Web-based IDE, a portal
framework, collaboration tools, an enterprise content management
system, a knowledge management solution, and a set of enterprise
social networking capabilities. The core platform is architected on
the GateIn
portal framework (eXo is also known for its GateIn-based enterprise Java portal), an open source project developed jointly by JBoss
and eXo. The company describes it as "a cloud-ready, multi-tenant
platform that provides tools for building cloud- and data-center-based
social intranets, customer extranets and transaction-oriented Web
sites."
"As an organization grows, an intranet created in eXo Cloud
Workspaces can be migrated from the public cloud and deployed to eXo
Platform 3.5," the company explained in a statement, "where
it can scale to enterprise size as an on-premises or private
cloud-based solution."
Also co-headquartered in San Francisco, eXo recently began describing itself as "the user
experience (UPX) platform-as-a-service company." Think UXP as a
service, or a UXPaaS. The UXP is "the emerging implementation of
next-generation portal services," the company says. Unlike
traditional portal services, however, a UXP platform offers "an
integrated collection of technologies that speed the creation of
portals built around content, collaboration capabilities, social
streams and services, mobile access, and more."
For more information on the public beta and to sign up, go here.
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].