The Ixxus Social Content Platform enables web developers to implement an Alfresco-based content management solution that is tightly integrated with social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

The rich API’s that these websites provide have allowed the team at Ixxus to treat social data as a first class citizen. The architecture of the solution allows rapid extension, and also enables Alfresco developers to make immediate use of social data in their own business logic. There’s no social-specific silo of the information we pull in, everything is treated as a common Alfresco object, ready to be used in whatever application a web developer requires.

Simple to use and integrate

The web script framework of Alfresco has also allowed us to develop a number of web services that are very useful in querying, retrieving and creating the information that we store and collate. Add to that an intelligent scheduling solution that allows users and developers to control when a piece of content goes out, and just as importantly in the social world, how often the data about it comes back in, and the solution becomes very simple to use and integrate.

For social networks that are not yet supported (or without public APIs – Google+ anyone?), we have a query, retrieval and transformation service that allows new connectors to be added with ease. If you want your obscurely encoded video content to stay in its original format, but to be converted on-the-fly to Vimeo when you publish out, the SCP is happy to handle custom transformers and publishers.

Complete control of your social presence in one place

Our social-specific workflow walks each piece of content through an identical set of steps: Creation, Preview, Approval and Publishing. Transition between these steps is handled by the robust set of services we have developed on the backend to get your Alfresco-hosted content ready for publishing to the heterogeneous set of networks that exist outside your firewall, each one with their own content rules and formats. Once transformed and published, content is then tracked, with all responses coming back in to the Social Content Platform dashboard, giving you up to the minute summaries of the world’s reaction to your content, and also allowing you to drill-down into the detailed post-by-post replies that your content has provoked.

Customise your Social Content Platform to suit you

The scope of both the opportunities offered for customised development and also standalone deployment is exciting. Out-of-the box, you’ve just given your company the ability to organise, publish, manage and interact with social networks in the same way (and with the same accuracy and control) as they’ve been doing with their internal content. You’ve also given them a way of instantly gauging the mood and content of the reactions to any content they want to publish out. Even better, as a developer, you’ve also gained access to all of that data, stored right there on your Alfresco nodes.

If you choose to customise, you’ve got one, single point of reference for any business logic you want to implement, from driving business decisions based on content popularity to more tightly integrating your employees social interactions. Depending on your content types, you have a number of different options for storage and publishing: do you publish links to content hosted on your company’s infrastructure, do you want to put it into the cloud with services like SoundCloud and Vimeo. As different types of social network pop-up, your opportunities to interact with the world around you increase, and with it, your relevance to your customer base.

At Ixxus we are really excited about the new insights that this social platform will allow us to add to both existing and new developments, as well as a management ability that I think is second to none.