DreamFace 2.0 Brings Social Networking and Mobiles Services to Enterprise 2.0 Applications
by Bill Ives
DreamFace 2.0 provides a comprehensive open source widget-based toolset to build, use, and distribute enterprise Web 2.0 applications and mashups, including start pages, interactive dashboards, social applications, collaborative enterprise applications, and business intelligence applications. They recently announced DreamFace 2.0, the latest version of the company’s Web 2.0 application platform. I spoke with Olivier Poupeney, DreamFace’s CEO, Susan Haimet, The COO, and Thierry LeGrand, VP of Research and Development.
Susan went over the three main components to this release. First, there is the DreamFace Widget Platform. It enables developers to create Web 2.0 applications from diverse information sources and technologies, both inside and outside the enterprise. The DreamFace Widget Library provides pre-built widgets that may be customized by developers. Business users can customize Web 2.0 applications delivered by IT or create their own applications by combining these widgets, personalizing them, and creating interactions between them using the DreamFace Interaction Editor. Here is a screen shot of the interactions function.
DreamFace widgets can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructures and can seamlessly embed Ajax, Flex, and any other Web technology that can be displayed in a browser (including other frameworks’ widgets and gadgets). DreamFace widgets or widget-based applications can run anywhere, including on the desktop, on Web sites, on Web platforms, such as Facebook, SalesForce, or MySpace, and on mobile devices, such as iPhones and Android phones.
We discussed the characteristics and benefits of widgets from their perspective. Thierry said that widgets are small, but complete, applications that can communicate with other elements on a precise task. One benefit comes from the ease of reuse of these components. DreamFace widgets allow for multiple interactions between data sources to offer more versatility than traditional widgets. Here is the Share widget.
Olivier offered the example of call center that had multiple, disconnected applications. I have been there before and can certainly relate to this. DreamFace widgets were able to pull data from the different apps and create a common single app to make the call center staff’s job much easier. This can come through client side integration and provides a new way to visualize the back-end data. The widgets will also know the user profile and access rights. It can integrate with the company’s LDAP and single sign-on. I wish I had this capability in some of the call center implementations I was involved with in a past life.
Susan said the second major component is the DreamFace Social Networking Framework. Each DreamFace user has a user profile. DreamFace compliments the existing enterprise identity management system by providing a new set of information about the user, contained in the user profile, which ensures authentication and privacy, manages preferences, and enables single sign-on. Access to enterprise data is managed by identity and role, enabling compliance with established corporate authentication and security policies.
Like consumer social networking platforms, DreamFace enables users to find and link with other users and to define groups of users. Each user has a “Wall” that lists contacts’ activities and other messages. DreamFace also supports other Web 2.0 activities, such as the tagging, rating, searching, and sharing of widgets and applications. The DreamFace framework enables users to group digital assets, such as documents, photos, widgets, videos, contacts, or applications, into user-defined asset categories and to subscribe to other users’ or groups’ categories so that each user only sees the information from another user that interests them.
The third component is DreamFace Mobile Services. DreamFace 2.0 provides live broadcasting or publishing to mobile devices, providing faster access to critical, dynamically changing information. The platform also provides a mobile device micro payment infrastructure. DreamFace leverages the Sybase 365 mobile messaging platform for SMS, MMS, and micro payments.
DreamFace allows a company to pull its legacy applications and data into today’s enterprise 2.0 capabilities by putting a Web 2.0 style front end to established data sources. It can support SOA but can also operate in other architectures. This allows companies to bypass SOA for now and still get Web services and then come back to a SOA transformation later. DreamFace gives several open source options for companies wanting to get into enterprise 2.0.
