Today we officially announced our new Evaluation Toolkit: Vendor Evaluation Resources for Social Intranet and Enterprise Portal Projects for eXo Platform 3.
If you’re a Java developer or a project manager, you’ve inevitably had to participate in the “vendor evaluation” process at some point: define an upcoming project, list out all the technical requirements, find all the possible vendors that should be considered, then research on each vendor’s website to fill in some type of evaluation spreadsheet. Finding product features, standards supported, lists of customer references – this can be daunting, considering the information can be presented in “marketing speak” or across multiple resources.
Our consultants and engineers often are asked to help partners and prospective customers find the technical information required during the vendor evaluation process. They started to notice that this process was remarkably similar for all customers – regardless of the type of IT project or the vertical industry, geographic location or size of the company. In fact, several eXo consultants worked as systems integrators (IT consulting firms) prior to joining eXo, and they had several of these “vendor evaluation checklist” templates just like what our customers were using.
That got us to thinking… why not make this easier for our developer community? So the idea for the new Evaluation Toolkit was formed. We want to give you another option for quickly and easily finding the information you need about eXo for your upcoming social intranet, company website or enterprise portal project.
The organization of resources in the Evaluation Toolkit is intended to mirror the typical vendor evaluation process:
- Features & functionality – quickly gather the features of eXo Platform to input into your checklist; find related case studies and tutorials demonstrating how these features can be implemented
- Technology – find more detailed specs on the standards, environments and languages supported in eXo Platform, the available integration points, and interoperability with 3rd party tools
- Competence – gain a better understanding of what skills are required of your team to work successfully with eXo Platform, what resources we provide to shorten the on-ramp, and how we work with our partners
- Customer success – find customer snapshots and references, and what an eXo subscription provides to ensure the success of customer projects
It’s also worth noting that the Evaluation Toolkit site features a new whitepaper detailing a real-life eXo Platform implementation: “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise.” We’ll be adding more new resources soon, like performance benchmarks and step-by-step project guides.
Since the Evaluation Toolkit originated from customer and partner feedback, we want to hear what you think. You can check it out here.
