Last year, Rivet Logic won the 2008 JBoss Innovator of the Year Award with our Kaplan implementation utilizing Alfresco and JBoss. Can we do it again this year?

JBoss notified us earlier this month of the terrific news that we had been selected as the category winner for the 2009 JBoss Innovation Awards for Optimized Systems for an Alfresco/JBoss implementation we performed for Harvard Business Publishing. But can we repeat what we did last year and take the overall Innovator of the Year Award again? The judge of that will be left up to the voters, so place your vote for Rivet Logic!!

The winner for the 2009 Innovator of the Year Award will be announced at this year’s JBoss World held in Chicago from September 1 - 4. We will be participating, so if you find yourself there, drop by and say hi!!

Today eXo Platform, a leading European open source company, announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with JBoss Portal to create an open source portal platform.

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.

According to eXo Platform CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, “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.”

“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.

What does this new portal product mean for other open source portal platforms like Liferay and Plone? Should they be worried? They may want to keep an eye out as eXo is contributing 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”. Could this be seen a threat to other portal platforms which lacks the robust content management features that eXo JCR will bring?

It would be interesting to see how the new JBoss eXo portal platform fares with enterprises in their choice of portal and collaboration software.

Last week, Red Hat launched their third annual Innovation Awards, which will be presented at the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held in Chicago later this year in September.

“The Innovation Awards were created to honor individuals and companies who have forged new ground to demonstrate innovative solutions through the use of Red Hat and JBoss products and technologies.”

There are a total of six categories, including Management Excellence, Optimized Solutions, Superior Alternatives, Extensive Ecosystem, Carved out Costs, and Outstanding Open Source Architecture.

“Five categories will each recognize two winning submissions, one from Red Hat and one from JBoss, and the Outstanding Open Source Architecture category will recognize one winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. From these category winners, a Red Hat Innovator of the Year and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting and announced at the awards ceremony.”

Last year, Rivet Logic was honored with the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award for our Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions implementation, www.kaptest.com.

We look forward to participating in the Innovation Awards again this year!