Nuxeo Platform 5.6 Focuses on Process, Mobile and Collaboration

Nuxeo, the provider of open source content management platform for business applications, announced the availability of Nuxeo Platform 5.6, a major upgrade to the company’s software platform. The Nuxeo Platform offers an integrated environment for building and deploying content-centric business applications in the areas of Content Management, Document Management, Digital Asset Management, Case Management, and Social Collaboration.

With this new version of the Nuxeo Platform, Nuxeo continues its strategic objective of providing a full-stack software platform and associated toolsets for purpose-built content-oriented business applications. This version further widens the gap with respect to competitor offerings by supporting customers throughout the full application lifecycle: from design and development to deployment and operation.

Nuxeo Platform 5.6 features an adaptive workflow engine specifically designed for case management applications and leveraging platform services for views, forms, business logic and APIs. Content routing is directly integrated as a core service of the Nuxeo Platform and features powerful capabilities for both end users and application developers. End users can adapt the route midstream, potentially defining ad hoc tasks, involving other resources, or handing the workflow task off to someone else. Solution designers and application developers benefit from a graphical, easy-to-use tool for workflow process design with Nuxeo Studio, enabling configuration of forms and views and business logic definition. As part of the core platform technology, this feature can be used with any content-centric business application, from document management to case management to digital asset management. Previously, workflow was managed by jBPM, which is still compatible. The Nuxeo Platform also supports integrations with third party BPM systems

“We’ve built on our experience with a case management solution to design this workflow engine and integrate it directly into the platform. Since we’ve designed the workflow engine for the platform, we were able to leverage existing services, and the combination opens the door for designers and developers to build innovative applications that are completely in sync with their business processes,” said Eric Barroca, Nuxeo CEO. “The flexibility and customizability of this content routing technology will both ease and accelerate the development process for our customers.”

Ease of customization and development continues to be a cornerstone of the Nuxeo offering. Nuxeo Studio, the configuration and customization environment, provides a set of new features supported by the Nuxeo Platform:

Tab Designer, for configuration of both the layout and content of each tab for a content object, using default and custom widgets, essentially providing custom business views of persistent repository content for the end user,
Hot Reload: improvements to the way the platform handles hot reload makes all changes from Nuxeo Studio hot reloadable, dramatically speeding the development time,
Complex Type Definition: it is now possible to create complex types (with nested properties) in the schema designer for content objects, and use those complex types in forms and views.

Nuxeo Drive for Desktop Synchronization — This new technology is a Dropbox-like client for bidirectional synchronization of the Nuxeo repository with the local desktop, with advanced features for metadata editing, custom versioning, and conflict resolution. Currently available as a preview feature, the full release of Nuxeo Drive will come later this year.

Multi-Tenancy — Delivering on its strategy to help customers build SaaS applications, Nuxeo offers both application-level and container-level multi-tenancy in the 5.6 release of the Nuxeo Platform. Application-level multi-tenancy provides one instance for multiple clients, with tenant-specific data such as users, groups, vocabularies, document types, and themes. Container-level multi-tenancy provides one code base for multiple instances (JVMs), enabling isolation of instances so that OS-level features for resource sharing and quotas (i.e. network bandwidth, storage, CPUs, etc.) can be leveraged.

Content Diff and Document Templating — This new version offers document management features to extend content tracking and reporting capabilities. The new document diff feature provides a visual report of the differences between content objects, including properties, metadata, and textual content. The document templating system generates reports formatted by a standard document template and fed by content data stored in the Nuxeo repository.

Activity Wall, Likes, Votes — The Social Collaboration module that was introduced in version 5.5 helps promote user engagement within the content-centric application. New features in version 5.6 include a new wall to automatically display activities and updates for the workspace or other content object, “like” & “vote” features to show support, and a follow action button to trigger notifications. These new features are designed to give quicker access to relevant information and foster collaboration in traditional business applications.

User Interface Improvements — Nuxeo continually monitors ease of use from the end user’s perspective, integrating feedback from clients, community, and its own employees, who use the platform daily as the company intranet. Interface enhancements in this new version include:

a more ergonomic content summary page with easily accessible information, representing a move towards a single page paradigm for content objects,
a customizable action bar displayed on the content page, with a default set of buttons such as “like,” share, follow, and the possibility to create custom buttons.

Mobile App Framework — A template for building hybrid HTML5 / native applications, the mobile application and framework for iOS and Android was built on Apache Cordova. It includes most commonly used content management features, such as search, browse, preview, marked documents, activity stream, and much more.
Nuxeo Platform 5.6 is currently available on premise or in the cloud. The Nuxeo Connect subscription is available to offer support, maintenance and an automated customization toolset with the option of a development-to-deployment environment in the cloud.

Visit the Nuxeo website or read the original press release.