Social networking platform eXo Social released

eXo has announced the release of eXo Social 1.0, an enterprise social networking package which supports OpenSocial, under an AGPL licence. eXo Social is bundled with eXo's GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to allow users to configure a social network "out of the box". eXo Social is aimed at enterprises who want to integrate social networking concepts into their existing infrastructure.

Using a company's existing LDAP-based company directory, eXo Social can be configured to create what the company calls "an instant social network", complete with roles, groups and permissions. The framework also supports OpenSocial 0.8.1, with a gadget container, oAuth support, REST and RPC protocols, and implementations of the social APIs. The overall list of features in eXo Social describes a platform which allows users to maintain extended personal profiles, publish an "activity stream" which others can subscribe to, manage relations between other users and create "spaces" for sub-communities within the network.

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 company plans to commercially support eXo Social 1.0 later in the year as part of eXo Platform 3.0. The software is available to download from the eXo site, although at the time of writing, only a beta version of the 1.0 release was available. A number of videos are also available which cover demonstrations of the functionality, getting started guides and examples of mash-ups with Jira, Sonar and Hudson.

(djwm)