École Centrale Paris

Connecting People and Projects: A Social Portal for Collaboration

The Ecole Centrale Paris (ECP) is an elite engineering school whose graduates are the business leaders, executives, managers and technical culture experts of France and the world. Founded in 1829, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious engineering schools in France.

The Context

The engineering students at ECP manage an average of 10 projects each, per year, and the school needed to provide a platform to capture not only the content, but also the connections and interactions between students, professors, researchers, alumni, and enterprise advisors.

In 2010, the ECP launched a project to build a social portal with the Nuxeo Platform to provide a project-centric view of content, integrating people, communication and interactions in community-focused workspaces. The three main objectives for this portal were defined as: "Federation, Community, Collaboration."

A requirements assessment was conducted with different groups at the school: teachers, students, researchers, staff, alumni, industry partners. Two major needs were identified: document sharing and online project collaboration.

The main objective for deploying a document management system at the school was to provide stakeholders a solution in terms of document sharing and collaborative workspaces. In the context of cross-functional projects, involving students, institutions, researchers and enterprises, the platform was to offer a place to share, communicate, and work on the innovative projects that take place at the school.

In addition, the platform should provide tools to facilitate, accelerate and improve various internal processes at the school.

The Solution

The new extranet portal, with its unique focus on social and collaborative project management, is pivotal to the cooperation and sharing of knowledge between our many different communities of students, teachers and researchers.

 -- Mustapha Alouani, research engineer, and manager of the Research and Development Department, École Centrale Paris

ECP considered several out-of-the-box solutions, but none of them completely met their needs. All the technologies they researched would require the integration of additional functionality. In the end, the choice of technology was focused on Nuxeo for the following reasons:

• The modularity and scalability of the platform, which allows room for change and growth in the future.
• It is an open source platform, accessible to all with no additional per- user license fees. This is essential for the ECP, because the number of users is expected to grow. A simulation over three years showed that Nuxeo provides the best cost control.
• The opportunity to work together with Nuxeo on an innovative solution that fully meets project requirements.

Phase 1: Prototype

The project was developed in several stages. The first phase was done in collaboration with representatives from the Documentation Center, Academic Programs Management, the Research Center, and student representatives, and culminated in the deployment of a prototype of Nuxeo in its DM 5.3.1 version.

This first pilot validated the integration of Nuxeo within the IT infrastructure, and offered a variety of traditional document management features.

Phase 2: Social Portal

Phase 2 was slated to provide the features that meet the functional objectives of the project: facilitate information management and collaboration in a social portal with a simple and intuitive interface.

After meeting one of the major project objectives with the establishment of collaborative workspaces, the next step was to address the issues of federation and community management.

Working in conjunction with Nuxeo, the ECP helped build the specifications for a social content management environment. Functionality was developed for the Nuxeo Platform for managing user profiles and communities, relationships, activities, shared applications (gadgets), social portal authentication (through SSO) and authorization for content applications (gadgets).

Results

The collaboration between ECP and Nuxeo enabled Mustapha Alouani, research engineer, and manager of the Research and Development Department at the École Centrale Paris, to deliver a social project management portal on time, and within budget. The extensibility of the Nuxeo Platform facilitated the integration of functional innovations, and the ability to quickly build a prototype encouraged valuable user feedback early in the development process.

Leveraging the valuable use case and the solution, Nuxeo bundled the social feature set and now offers it as an optional Social Collaboration module with the Nuxeo Platform.

This module is a response to an issue of collaboration not only within institutions of higher education and research, but more broadly within any type of organization. The architecture of the solution allows for custom configuration of the workspaces to adapt to the needs of the user or the community. In addition, the Nuxeo Platform is designed to enable future evolutions of the application while maintaining cost control.

More Innovations to Come

Building on the success of the first two phases of the project, ECP already has work in progress for the next evolution of the application. In the first half of 2012, a group of students will study community-oriented gadgets and will offer proposals for developing gadgets specific to the environment of the ECP.

This social portal is only the cornerstone of a larger structure to design and invent in collaboration with the users.