Launch of Exo Enterprise WebOS

Last Friday (April 18th) I was attending the launch of "eXo WebOS" in Paris. Benjamin Mestrallet, creator of eXo has started the event with a presentation of the solution and its impact on the IT. Like any internet user, each time I see eXo Web OS and applications I am very very impressed. They have pushed very far the use of AJAX based applications to offer a complete virtualization of the OS/Desktop, not in a Virtual Machine, but simply in your favorite browser.

As you can see in this screenshot, eXo is launching in your browser, a complete desktop, where I run many applications provided by eXo: Calendar, Forum, Mail, but a also a calculator gadget attached to the desktop itself. The easiest is to try the product, go to eXoplatform site and download it. After the presentation of the eXo new features, and vision, two customers have presented their project based on eXo Portal and Collaboration Suite:

• M6. M6 is one of the major French TV channel. M6 is using eXo for their new intranet. Some of the key point that I kept from this experience:
• Flexibility/Agility of the platform: M6 IT has been able, with Business&Decision, to answer end user needs in term of design/look&feel. Quite important in media industry ;)
• Extensibility: in addition to the pure publishing of personalized pages, eXo has showed lot of power. Creation of new services based on the core architecture of eXo (IoC based container), or simply by creation new Groovy script to capture events in the Java Content Repository. One example of such script, is the creation of a new script to automatically resize images when they are published in the repository.
• Belgium Minister of Finances, with Bull Belgium In addition to the classical portal usage of eXo. They have chosen to put in place for their 30 000 users, the brand new eXo Collaboration Suite (Mail, Calendar, Contacts) and even more exciting use the real time collaboration tools provided by eXo LiveRoom. This extension to eXo provides using a Flex based architecture exciting tools for collaborative work:
  • Video and Voice over IP for Web conferences
  • Shared Whiteboard allowing multiple people to see and modify documents and graphics
  For me these tools in addition to the eXo chat (Ajax based) are really exciting, and this for many reasons:
• it shows how the "Web 2.0" can really facilitate the collaborative work
• eXo is a green product ;) because with the eXo CS people do not need to travel to meet and work together.

The event was closed by a very passionate Round Table, moderated by Christian Faure (Atos Origin) with Adobe (Michael Chaize), eXo (Benjamin Mestrallet), Google (Dave Armstrong), Microsoft ( Christophe Lauer), Mozzila (Tristan Nitot) and Sun (Eric Mahe) have discussed many topics around Web/Internet, Standards, Open Source, and Web OS... If you are french speaker I am inviting you to take a look to the recording of this event available on the eXo blog:

• eXo WebOS launch Party: the Round Table Video with Adobe, eXo, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems!