SocialOX is a set of features in Open-Xchange to make management of personal information a seamless experience, regardless of how distributed a person’s data may be.
Managing heterogeneous sources of personal information like address data on Xing or LinkedIn, birthdays on Facebook, various brands of calendar software like Google or Exchange or Lotus etc. make the daily lives of office workers more cumbersome.
Open-Xchange unifies all these sources of personal information -- enabling users to easily define rules to manage such data, and then to automate the daily maintenance of their personal information.
Personal data, regardless whether it comes from external sources or the user’s own system, becomes a well-controlled resource.
SocialOX features turn Open-Xchange into a new breed of collaborating collaboration software. Different from conventional collaboration software, SocialOX can interact with other personal information managers, as well as with other instances of SocialOX. The boundaries between different personal information management solutions vanish.
A user can tag (markup) all his private contacts as eg. “private,” all contact information subscribed to from LinkedIn.com as “linkedin”, and all his business contacts as “mycompanyx”. On top of these classifications another tag “important” could mark all the contacts the user wants to replicate to a mobile phone.
The contact list for the mobile phone will not disrupt the categorization of other contacts.
Another aggregate of contacts could be generated to contain all contacts from “linkedin” that are not part of “mycompanyx”, all contacts from “mycompanyx”, and all the “important” ones out of these could be selected to get replicated to the mobile phone.
While the first example only demonstrates the advantages of tagging, the second one shows the power of recursive selection of sets as aggregates into feeds.
Data can be dynamically selected, also based on events that seem like unrelated: people coming into a company or leaving it, while still being listed on business networking sites.
(tagging and filtering are under development and will become available later this year)
A user can subscribe to a public holiday calendar available from somewhere on the internet. The user can also define calendars of black out times for personal and professional events. The user can separately maintain a travel schedule as a calendar.
Social OX then allows for aggregates of these calendars to be published.
Other users can then simply make appointments at times that meet the user’s requirements and constraints, or also build aggregates on top to (re-) publish them as aggregates containing requirements and constraints of more than one person.
Scheduling of group meetings becomes a simple matter of the more scarcely available persons making a selection in this aggregate.
This example also shows how times can be flexibly omitted from being scheduled -- whether they conflict with personal or professional times of unavailability.
Data can be dynamically selected, based on normally out of scope events like people’s calendars shifting on a third party Social OX server or resulting private constraints with other parties resulting from such shifts.
The difference between Social OX and conventional collaboration environments is the capability to manage distributed ecosystems via distributed heterogeneous systems over many layers of dependencies. Without any need for the user to oversee all the complexity involved.
(Publication and subscription of calendars will become available later this year)
Open-Xchange, from Version 6.10 onwards, supports dissemination of data via a simplistic combination of html, and OX specific tags used to identify OX semantics. Because Open-Xchange can read and digest such output, dynamic interaction of any number of Open-Xchange instances gets enabled.
Detailed specifications will show up at oxmf.org soon.
HTML carrying semantic mark up used to exchange data between applications, starting with Open-Xchange.
A version of Open-Xchange with Semantic Publish Subscribe capabilities. Planned for version 6.10.