In the last two posts introducing eXo Platform 3.0, I’ve focused on its portal capabilities, which is expected of any enterprise portal, and the social intranet, an area in which some portal vendors have ventured.
Now, we’re entering new territory for portal vendors. In this post and the next, I will detail what makes eXo Platform 3.0 really stand apart.
I previously noted that even though portal capabilities are still very critical, the needs of today’s business have outgrown a portal. The rise of web 2.0 brought high levels of interactivity and richer user experiences, not to mention an explosion of data driven by web apps. All this means more demand on businesses to be able to do more with their applications.
Java middleware vendors have been very focused on scalability and efficiency of controlled, self-hosted relational database applications. But in today’s world, relational database systems are no longer the keys to the castle. In fact, one could argue that the most valuable database in the world is Google’s index of the web — which is certainly not a relational database. The web’s core is built around documents and document linking. New web architectures and data stores like BigTable, Hadoop and Cassandra are replacing relational database systems.
Our Content services were built for this new world order, providing the tools, automated workflow and templates to get websites up and running fast:
- Intuitive file explorer dashboards, drag and drop controls, multiple views for easily navigating, organizing and sharing documents
- Integration with your existing OCR solutions, your LDAP directory, and WebDAV HTTP extensions give you flexibility and a ‘drop in’ solution
- Templates, fast features with CSS and JavaScript support and version control means you can launch a website immediately
- Workflow to automate content creation, approvals and publishing or design your own business process
- A UI extension framework that can be used to create plugins and extensions for content management
And because eXo Platform 3.0 is designed for this new world order, it can work with content from many data sources: documents, existing relational database or even data stored in the cloud, such as Amazon S3 — all mapped to our Java content repository (JCR), so developers have advanced capabilities for versioning, locking and more.
But ultimately, eXo Platform 3.0 is more than the sum of its parts. Managing your content is just one aspect. But now, imagine doing this with a social intranet, where changes are published automatically to the appropriate people in their activity stream and workflows notify the editors and publishers when it’s their turn to act.
Stay tuned to my next post, when I wrap up what eXo Platform 3.0 can do. Rest assured, I’m saving the best for last.
