eXo Platform 5.3: Reward and empower your workforce
We are excited to announce the general availability of our latest version: eXo Platform 5.3. This release incorporates a number of changes to its predecessor 5.2 in terms of user experience and design as well as several bug fixes and improvements. It also embodies our vision to provide our clients with a solution capable of engaging, empowering and rewarding employees through a set of ambitious features, like gamification, rewards and recognition.
What is new?
- A built-in gamification system of points and badges to motivate users to adopt positive behaviours.
- An employee recognition feature designed to encourage peer-to-peer recognition and to improve continuous feedback.
- A system for rewarding and exchanging digital tokens to valorize employee engagement through a digital wallet app, allowing users to send and receive payments in tokens.
- An internal marketplace in which users can redeem perks using their tokens.
- Integration with the “OnlyOffice” editors to facilitate the co-editing of MS Office documents.
- New widgets for spaces to display descriptions, managers and events.
- Spaces templates to enable users to pick a predefined and reusable template during space creation.
- The ability for admin to update the name of the portal in the sidebar.
Gamification
Gamification represents a system for the automatic allocation of points and badges to users for their activity within the platform. The add-on is designed to engage users, reward positive behaviors and promote a culture of healthy competition within the workplace.
Different actions, like sharing a document, posting a comment, creating a task or resolving a support ticket, have different point values.
Actions are grouped in domains that are configurable by the platform administrator. Some examples of domains include:
- “Social” for actions such as liking, commenting or sharing pieces of content.
- “Knowledge” for posting information.
- “Teamwork” for creating tasks and events.
Points can also be collected from activities performed on third-party applications and platforms. In this way, users who do not spend much time on the platform can still be rewarded for their efforts. This is an initiative that we illustrated recently by rewarding our developers for their contributions on GitHub but it can be expanded to any business app with a simple integration process.
Users are able to track how they rank each week, month or since the moment the gamification was started through leaderboards.
Leaderboards are displayed by default on the home page and show the number of points collected as well as a pie chart detailing the percentage of points obtained by domain for each user.
Finally, users can check their detailed activities by domain and the badges they have received on the “My Achievements” menu.
Kudos
The kudos feature is a built-in system designed to encourage peer-to-peer recognition and to improve engagement. With it, users can praise their peers’ work by sending kudos to a coworker.
Each user has a periodic allowance of kudos to give, so although they are free to give out, they are scarce enough to be meaningful. By awarding kudos to a coworker, employees help them to stand-out and can help reveal the untold efforts of those working hard in the shadow. It’s a great motivational tool for managers too as it lets employees receive continuous feedback on their work rather than once a year in a conventional evaluation interview.
eXo Wallet and Rewards
eXo Wallet is a built-in digital wallet solution based on the Ethereum blockchain technology. With eXo Wallet, users are able to send and receive payments using a special utility token created by eXo to represent employee engagement.
Both the gamification points and kudos earned can let users fill their eXo Wallet with tokens. Every month, kudos and gamification points earned are converted into tokens and paid to every employee as a reward for their engagement and peer recognition. The system is designed to be extensible so you can plug in your own reward programmes, such as performance and/or anniversary bonuses, bounties and challenges of all kinds.
Users can check their balance on the “My Wallet” menu. The wallet app displays the current balance, the accumulated rewards and the latest transactions.
The Perks Store
The Perk Store is an internal marketplace app where anyone can use their tokens to purchase perks posted by the HR department or by their peers. In this final version, we redesigned the app and introduced an orders management back office to help empower a healthy economy of engagement within your organization.
Over the past few months, we have been experimenting with a number of use cases for the Perks Store. From the office cafeteria to team-building events and training classes, a variety of activities have been added as ‘products’ in the Perks Store and have proven to be efficient perks to improve employees work lives and meaningful ways for them to spend their hard-earned tokens. This aspect is now ready to ship into your organization together with the appropriate perks that make most sense within your corporate culture.
Space templates
In a nutshell, space templates enable users to pick a predefined and reusable template during space creation, and then to customize it. Each template has a predefined set of built-in applications (activity stream, tasks, wikis, documents, etc.), predefined visibility settings (hidden or visible) and user joining method (open, closed or validation-based). This feature also allows space administrators to easily invite users or space members.
Space templates were designed to avoid repetitive tasks when creating a space, like replicating space settings, lists of apps or visibility settings.
Four baseline templates are available by default: community, communication, project and team space templates. Each template has a brief description specifying its purpose, use and target users:
- Community: A general purpose area for collaboration and communication within a digital community.
- Communication: Interpersonal communication area where members can share ideas, skills and interests.
- Project: A project space where members can coordinate on tasks towards a predefined outcome.
- Team: A central destination for the members of a team.
Space widgets
Space widgets are designed for both space members and administrators. It gives space members the possibility to access different information about a space, such as its general description, the space’s managers list, the space members online and latest events relevant to that space.
Further developments are expected to include more widgets for documents, tasks and other apps available within a space.
Co-editing with OnlyOffice
The possibility to co-edit documents directly within the solution represented a top priority for both our clients and prospects. As a result, we decided to partner with OnlyOffice . With the ONLYOFFICE add-on, eXo Platform completes its existing integrations with mainstream office stacks through an open-source alternative that improves the overall user experience and brings significant value to clients and prospects that require on-premise installations.
After a fruitful beta period, we are proud to make the OnlyOffice integration generally available to all customers on future installments of the eXo Platform 5.3 version. This add-on allows users to co-edit documents in real time, track changes and facilitate shared access to information.
Company Branding
Space administrators are now able to change the company name without coding.
When the platform admin confirms the company name, it will be updated in various places:
- The company name on the left navigation bar instead of Company.
- The company logo on the top bar.
- The email notification will include the company name.
What else ?
eXo Platform 5.3 is one of our most ambitious releases to date thanks to its rich set of features that cover our four main pillars “Communicate, Collaborate, Empower and Reward”. The new version includes a number of bug fixes to enhance the user experience and drive adoption.
With 5.3, we decided to remove Shinding, “an Apache attic project”, since it is no longer maintained and has certain structural vulnerabilities. Support for gadgets and profile dashboards was also discontinued with the existing gadgets to be replaced by VueJS portlets.
Beyond the features highlighted in this article, eXo Platform 5.3 has undergone over a hundred bug fixes and security enhancements as well as dozens of smaller improvements. Check out the full change log here.
What’s next ?
Follow our roadmap page to stay updated on the latest product improvements we are planning for our next releases.
A 30-day trial of the eXo Platform Enterprise Edition is available on the downloads page. This ships as a pre-built docker image. Subscribed customers can get access to the Tomcat bundle through their support channel.
As always, we welcome your feedback, questions and requests. Contact us here if you have any.
On behalf of all the eXo team, we thank you for your support and hope you enjoy another new release of eXo Platform!
Brahim Jaouane
I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.