eXo Social Project Released

We rolled out our Social open source project yesterday. To me there are two interesting things that Java shops will now be able to do very easily:

1. Activity Streams. Rich Friedman calls this the new Home Page. In Facebook land this translates to other messages posted by friends. In the Enterprise world, this means events that happen in the organization. The critical events in an organization are typically tracked by enterprise Java Apps - things like new sales, new leads, escalation of problems, thresholds being hit, inventory levels rising or dropping too fast. With eXo Social, we make it easy to let users have access to these events via their own Activity Stream.

2. The Real Organization. Companies are not always run by the formal organization, but the informal network that is created when individuals work collaboratively to solve problems and move the company forward. Social networking has a bad image of employees wasting time with Farmville, but when implemented within the enterprise it can help enable the natural collaboration and communications channels that are needed to move companies forward.

We got a lot of coverage on this announcement. I like this one from CMSWire - "Things have changed a lot for eXo". Other highlights:

"Free to download under the AGPL license today is eXo Platform's new eXo Social 1.0, a software package based on OpenSocial. It allows developers and IT organizations to "own" the move to enterprise social networks, unlike the simplistic packages that let business managers run the software." - JavaLobby

"The eXo software is part of a platform that extends Java middleware into cloud applications." - Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet

"A set of built-in gadgets are included as the starting point for those developing custom enterprise social gadgetry. Applications can appear as "users" of the social network too, allowing users to follow the progress of, for example, a bug tracking or integration system or results from a data analysis process. eXo says that eXo Social will make it easy to integrate with other applications to create developer dashboards, present aggregate data or just incorporate social features in existing applications." - The H Open

"While there are many proprietary tools aimed at allowing enterprises to customize their social networking, eXo Social may command an advantage because it is open source and therefore easy to tweak according to varying needs." - O-Static

"Very excited about eXo social: the activity stream as a service. Beautifully restful & open http://budurl.com/xsoc" - Edwin K

And of course the official eXo Social blog post:
  • From a simple corporate directory to an Enterprise Social Network
  • Spaces lets any user become a community manager by simply clicking a “add a new space” button. In a space, a community manager can add and remove applications to the workspace in a single-click. Behind the scenes, Spaces manages all the plumbing of creating a page, adding an application on it and setting up permissions.
  • The support for gadgets offer great mashup capabilities, and they can be integrated as first-class applications with spaces.
  • As an example of it, take a look at this video that shows how a team of developers has tuned eXo Social for their own needs. They created activity streams for JIRA, Sonar and Hudson applications, which then publish application activity into a development team space.
Also, check out the eXo Social Resource Center for some great tutorials and videos like this one showing extending the Grails Bookstore demo app. This is similar to how VMWare/Spring demonstrated with Salesforce Chatter for VMForce - only it can work with your data, not just the SalesForce data model.

Java developers can download eXo Social now and have sample apps up and running in an hour or less.

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