*About this guide*

{docbook}
<abstract>
<para>The intended readers of this document are users using eXo Platform. This user guide explains all the basic and advanced features of eXo Platform by providing a series of in-depth examples and clear explanations which help users easily benefit from the eXo Platform capabilities and features. </para>
 <para>This documentation is divided into the following chapters:</para>
        <itemizedlist>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Introduction">Introduction</link>
              </emphasis> provides you basic information of this guide, eXo Platform, and browser compatibility. </para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Get_started">Get Started</link>
              </emphasis> gives you a list of glossaries commonly used in applications of eXo Platform, interface of eXo Platform 3.5, and how to manage your accounts and language.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Manage_Organization">Manage Your Organization</link>
              </emphasis>shows you how to manage users, groups and memberships in eXo Platform.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Manage_Your_Portals">Manage Your Portals</link>
              </emphasis> is a collection of a portal-based actions, allowing you to manage permissions, sites/portals, navigation nodes, pages and applications.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Organize_Content">Organize Your Content</link>
              </emphasis> gives you how to structure your content, manage content, newsletters and workflows.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Collaboration">Collaborate With Your Colleagues</link>
              </emphasis> shows you actions to enhance communication and collaboration through emails, address books, chat and calendars.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Knowledge">Organize Your Knowledge</link>
              </emphasis> shows you how to build wikis, forums, and FAQs.</para>
          </listitem>
          <listitem>
            <para>
              <emphasis role="bold">
                <link linkend="Platform_User_Guide.Social">Build Social Network</link>
              </emphasis> covers actions on managing your profiles and spaces, building networks and following activities in your network.</para>
          </listitem>
        </itemizedlist>
</abstract>
{docbook}


*About eXo Platform* {anchor:id=Platform_User_Guide.Introduction.About_eXo_Platform}

eXo Platform is the first and only integrated, cloud-ready user experience platform for building and deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and creating gadgets and dashboards. eXo Platform lets companies leverage their existing Java infrastructure, while accommodating to the changes of user behavior driven by the consumer web technologies, such as social networks, social publishing and forums. 

{docbook}
<para>
<citetitle>
<emphasis role="bold">
Architecture of eXo Platform 3.5
</emphasis>
</citetitle>
</para>
{docbook}

eXo Platform 3.5 can be deployed in various ways, depending on your aims. However, most applications integrated into eXo Platform are arranged in certain patterns.

The following illustration shows the overall architecture of eXo Platform 3.5.

{docbook}
 <para></para>
{docbook}

!images/PLFIntroduction/Architecture_PLF3.png|align="center" width="100mm" fo:scalefit="1" html:scalefit="0"!

The foundation of eXo Platform 3.5 is an *enterprise portal and content management system.* This provides a powerful set of REST-based services for rapid website development, content management and gadget-based development and deployment. eXo Platform 3.5 is a combination of the following features.

* An enterprise portal serves as a powerful framework for developing portlets and other web-based user interfaces, and is based on the open source GateIn portal project co-developed by eXo and Red Hat.
* Web Content Management extends portal-based applications, allowing you to build dynamic and content-rich websites.
* Document Management for capturing and organizing documents and unstructured content, with content storage in the built-in Java Content Repository (JCR). 
* xCMIS is an implementation of the full stack of Java-based CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) services, so eXo-based applications can integrate with existing content management tools.
* Business Process Management (BPM) from Bonita Open Solution enables you to define workflow processes with automatic actions for web content, documents and more.
* Cloud-ready features allow eXo Platform 3.5 to run in multi-tenant environments, so social intranets and websites can take advantage of the benefits of private and public cloud platforms.

With eXo Platform 3.5, you can customize and extend your portal-based applications with user experience services to  build social intranets and extranets.
* Enterprise social network features allow users to connect, collaborate within dedicated spaces, and publish real-time updates in activity streams. Support for OpenSocial provides a framework for building gadgets that can display and mash up activity information for contacts, social networks, applications and services.
* Collaboration & communication tools let you build a more productive and interactive dashboard for social intranet users. Intuitive Mail, Chat, Calendar and Address Book functionalities can seamlessly extend your portal-based web applications.
* Knowledge management features, including Forums, Answers, FAQs, and a complete enterprise wiki, can transform an extranet into an interactive online community and valuable knowledge base.
* Custom development in the web-based IDE is an intuitive web-based development environment where you can build, test and deploy client applications, such as gadgets and mash-ups, and RESTful services online. Offering the ability to extend eXo Platform online, eXo IDE instantly publishes applications which can be created and deployed immediately in your portal-based solutions.
* CRaSH is an open source tool to view and query content within a JCR server at runtime. It enables you to browse JCR trees, and serves as a shell for executing JCR operations easily, such as importing or exporting data securely. You can now extend the shell by writing the Groovy commands, without recompiling easily.
* Native mobile applications for iPhone, iPad and Android allow users to easily and securely access their personalized intranet dashboards, activity streams, documents and more.


*Browser compatibility* {anchor:id=Platform_User_Guide.Introduction.Browser_Compatibility}

eXo Platform 3.5 is designed to work within an Internet browser, and we have made every effort to make eXo Platform 3.5 compatible with as many of common web browsers as possible.

This product has been thoroughly tested on the following stable browsers:

* Internet Explorer 7, 8, and 9
* Firefox 3.5, 3.6, and 4

Unfortunately, we have not been able to make this product compatible will *ALL* browsers. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use the browsers listed above.
In case of any questions, please contact your administrator.

