eXo Platform SAS, one of Europe’s leading open source companies, today announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with Red Hat’s JBoss Community Portal to create a comprehensive, standards-compliant, open source portal platform that will serve as the underlying technology for eXo’s portfolio of content, collaboration, and social networking enterprise solutions.

The goal of the new project is to forge a strong portal solution by bringing together the technical strengths of the two projects through the open source community. To further bolster this new effort, eXo Platform has contributed a new project to the JBoss Community, eXo JCR, which is a robust, cluster-ready Java Content Repository that is standards based and a key component for the project.

“Open source software has delivered substantial returns on investment for organizations and we have the opportunity to deliver that same value within the portals space,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform. “What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals."

eXo Portal is the foundational technology for all of eXo’s products. In development for over six years, eXo Portal is known for its intuitive administrative capabilities, advanced user interface features, and a robust community presence. The JBoss Community Portal project will be the overall portal engine for the new project and is a standards-based portal framework known for its lightweight installation, performance, security, and scalability. It has been downloaded by tens of thousands of users over the last four years, and leverages JBoss Community technologies such as JBoss Application Server and Hibernate.

“The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org's current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features, combined this collaboration project will help drive portal capabilities forward,” said Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat. “We are pleased that eXo is joining the JBoss Community to collaborate on this newly formed project.”

Under the terms of the partnership, eXo Platform will migrate the code base for its portal project to JBoss.org, where it will be integrated with the JBoss Portal code base. The new JBoss eXo portal project will be licensed under the Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Visit the new projects at http://jboss.org.

About eXo Platform SAS

eXo Platform is a provider of integrated, standards-based open source portal, content management, and collaboration software that hundreds of customers use to share, access, and publish information across their organization. These customers include Generali, Belgium’s Ministry of Finance, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Founded in 2003, eXo Platform SAS is headquartered in Paris with offices in Ukraine, Vietnam, and Tunisia. Visit http://exoplatform.com.