Dashboards: Central to the Modern Enterprise Intranet

Part 1 of The Enterprise Intranet “Goes Social” at eXo

Within the enterprise, a dashboard serves as a place where all employees start and return to throughout the work day to access the information, people, functionality and other resources they need to complete their work. An enterprise dashboard is a success if it’s sticky, if employees return to it frequently because it is useful, valuable, or a critical part of their jobs. For example, the discussions and feedback within an activity stream or forum can be easier to follow than long email threads, and more efficient to communicate with all stakeholders than one-off phone calls. Or the unique insight that a mashup of data from multiple applications can provide within a dashboard can enable a user to make better decisions.

Building enterprise dashboards is a key function of eXo Platform 3. To do so, users can leverage the following core features:

The enterprise portal foundation lets users integrate third-party application data and content in a single user interface. A page can have different views for different users, based on role, region, etc. Applications are built as portlets or gadgets. Portlets are an older, Java-specific way to present the views, while gadgets are a newer, faster, and easier way to build views and conform to the OpenSocial specification. To an end user, however, both look and work the same way.
The Web Content Management (WCM) component provides two key functions. One, it ensures a website or intranet has fresh, regularly updated content. Two, it makes it easy for anyone – even end users – to add, edit or publish content without knowing HTML or being a site admin.
The built-in IDE lets developers easily customize a dashboard. While they can be created in any IDE, gadgets and portlets created using eXo Platform’s built-in IDE can be developed, tested and deployed in minutes, right within a production environment. This unique feature lets business developers quickly extend and create new applications, similar to using VBA within Excel.

This short installment on the importance of dashboards is part of our more extensive story on “The Enterprise Intranet ‘Goes Social’ at eXo.” Next up: “Building and Organizing the Social Intranet.” We will continue to tell our story here in our blog, or you are welcome to read the paper in full – it’s available in the Evaluation Toolkit.