eXo is introducing a new hosted collaboration solution for the enterprise named Cloud Workspaces, dubbed as  a “user experience platform-as-a-service.”

The concept of an enterprise social network designed to help workers leverage the social tools within the office is nothing new, and Cloud Workspaces seems to come with all the standard features. It includes a built-in wiki-like tool, calendars, special ‘communities’ for even more sharing options and other things too, such as activity streams and a document app.

At the same time eXo’s differentiating its offering with a few more interesting tidbits. For one, it supports both Android and iOS, and has a custom IDE added for the sole purpose of integrating BI applications into the platform. This can be used to offer functionality such as more centralized access and various alerts notifying an employee of a given change on-the-fly.

In addition, scaling seems to be fairly flexible. eXo provides clients with the ability to port their data from its data centers to an on-premise version, which could come in handy in any number of growth scenarios.

Here’s an overview of Cloud Workspaces from the release. The software is currently available freely as a public beta.

“Adoption of social enterprise technologies has created a serious power struggle between end users and IT,” says Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “With eXo Cloud Workspaces, we remove that tension. We give users the freedom to self-serve in the cloud, and the robust collaboration tools to be productive. At the same time, IT can maintain centralized access to enterprise information, with the opportunity to scale horizontally, either on-prem or in the cloud.”

The eXo team even spent an extensive amount of time testing their own product, finding that the addition of activity feeds and wikis actually increased user engagement and connections.  The result is improved productivity, enabling people to get more done in a more efficient manner.

eXo’s new Cloud Workspaces comes at a time when social enterprise is a growing priority amongst businesses today.  Collaboration is becoming an increasingly virtualized mechanism for daily workflow, and we’re seeing a number of social enterprise tools being layered on top of storage and file-sharing services such as Box, SugarSync and YouSendIt.  eXo’s worked from the opposite direction, starting with the business sector and its diverse end user needs in mind.

Services like Box and Yammer, for example, already suffer from certain limitations like poor metadata search, Mestrallet explains.  With little integration on the backend, an employee departure “could become a nightmare for IT,” as they still have access to documents that have been shared through their private email.  eXo’s holistic approach offers the entire kit and caboodle for a self-contained collaboration network, circumventing the myriad of problems that come with mixed-bag solutions.

And the social enterprise space only continues to grow. Last month we had another social enterprise update from Jive, which is implementing gamification via a new partnership to enhance its platform’s usability.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher