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Welcome to Nuxeo

If you're new to Nuxeo, to Enterprise Content Management (ECM), or both, then this page is for you. Nuxeo is an open source platform for ECM enabling architects and developers to build, deploy and run the best content-driven applications in an easy way. If you want to know more, keep reading.

Who is Nuxeo?

Founded in 2000, with offices in New York, Boston, Paris and the Silicon Valley, Nuxeo is a global software company serving an amazingly diverse array of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) needs for an equally diverse array of organizations.

Nuxeo provides a modular, extensible, Java-based open source software platform for ECM software development that includes a set of packaged modules for document management, collaboration, digital asset management and case management.

Designed by developers for developers, the Nuxeo Platform is designed to make building content applications efficient, easy, and fun. Even more importantly, the content applications built on the Nuxeo Platform are robust and can scale for the long term. The platform scales up - we believe that no other ECM platform can handle the volume that the Nuxeo Platform handles in routine testing scenarios. It also scales lean and skinny, and you're welcome to read some customer use cases that demonstrate why this is important, and why only the Nuxeo Platform can manage this type of situation.

With a subscription program offering software maintenance, technical support and customization tools, Nuxeo is organized to deliver success for your content application initiatives.

What exactly is Enterprise Content Management, anyway?

For those new to ECM, a simple way to explain it is to use AIIM's official definition:

"Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists."

More specific examples of the above would include:

  • document management
  • digital asset management
  • case management

and more. More ambitious readers are welcome to read that entire AIIM document, which discusses additional issues related to all of the above, including collaboration possibilities, legal compliance issues, workflow tools and much more.

What is Nuxeo Platform?

The Nuxeo Platform is a Java-based software platform, that provides the technical infrastructure and high-level services needed to build customized ECM applications. While there is extremely detailed documentation on the architecture of the Nuxeo Platform, the following graphic should give you a general idea of how individual ECM products are constructed on top of the Nuxeo Platform:

As you can see, the common Platform component is used as the basis for actual runnable "modules" by simply adding package-specific code above the foundation.

Finally, all of the above requires a certain software infrastructure below that, including:

  • A Nuxeo-approved Java development suite, such as Oracle's Java 6 or OpenJDK 6,
  • An application engine, such as the JBoss application server or the Tomcat servlet engine,
  • A Nuxeo-approved underlying database, such as PostgreSQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, and
  • An operating system that supports all of the above, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.

The Nuxeo Platform comes as a single downloadable software, on which you can install modules. Based on the choice of underlying technology, you will generally have to choose what particular packaging you want for the Platform, such as:

  • a standalone, Tomcat-based Zip file working for most operating systems,
  • a standalone, Tomcat-based Exe installer file optimized for Microsoft Windows operating system,
  • a .deb-format file for Debian/Ubuntu installation.

Finally, for those who simply want to test out the Platform or one of its modules, Nuxeo provides OVF-format, Ubuntu/Tomcat-based virtual machine (VM) images that can be run within either VMware or VirtualBox. These VM images are also available from the Nuxeo Platform download page.

Other packaging can be made easily if needs be.

In short, because the Nuxeo Platform is fully Java-based, you have a great deal of flexibility in how you can set up a Nuxeo application. (Readers interested in the significance of the choice of the word "platform" here are welcome to read our ebook on Content Management Platforms).

The current Nuxeo modules

At the moment, there are four primary Nuxeo modules (all sitting above Nuxeo Platform) that you can install on the Platform and immediately start to run:

  • Document Management,
  • Social Collaboration,
  • Digital Asset Management, and
  • Case Management Framework.

All of these can be installed from the Platform startup wizard or the Admin Center.

Apps and the Nuxeo Marketplace

Nuxeo offers the ECM industry's first application store, the "Marketplace." The Marketplace is a solution catalog offering a range of packaged modules created by both Nuxeo developers and Galaxy partners, and gives Nuxeo Connect subscribers access to an ever-evolving range of applications, plug-ins and feature extensions to enhance their content management experience and enable quick deployment of new packages.

You're welcome to read more about Nuxeo Marketplace here, and you can peruse the current offerings at the Marketplace here.

Customizing your Nuxeo application and becoming a Nuxeo developer

Unless you're perfectly happy with your Nuxeo software right out of the box, you'll probably want to customize your Nuxeo installation (Document Management, or any other Nuxeo module) to some extent and, in many cases, this can be done via that product's built-in "Admin Center". But if you want to go further than what is available through the Admin Center, you have a number of options of increasing power and complexity.

First, the Nuxeo Platform was designed from the beginning to be extremely extensible and comes with numerous "extension points" that give Nuxeo users the ability to quickly and easily add "plug-ins" to their installation, to either change existing behavior or add entirely new functionality. Explaining extension points in more detail is definitely beyond the scope of this beginner's page (they're covered in detail elsewhere) but extension points are the fundamental feature that Nuxeo provides to allow users to extend their software.

Thanks to the extension points architecture, users and developers can rely on simple tools like Nuxeo Studio or Nuxeo Marketplace to easily customize and extend their application.

For the truly ambitious, since the Nuxeo Platform is fully open source, it's always possible to download the source code itself and make fundamental changes to that code, after which you can rebuild your application to see the effects. This is what Nuxeo refers to as becoming a "core developer," and people who choose to do this are welcome to share their work with others and even contribute it back to Nuxeo in the spirit of community involvement.

Nuxeo's commitment to open source

From the beginning, Nuxeo believed that building on the model of fully open source software was the clearest path to developing the best technology, the fastest innovation and the strongest and happiest user communities, as more and more of today's software companies are now discovering. Nuxeo does not view open source as an ideology, a marketing trend or a business model but simply as a software development model and a legal framework that is open, fair and respectful of all the community players.  But Nuxeo doesn't stop there.

In addition to being open with its source code, Nuxeo is entirely open with its entire development lifecycle, giving interested users access to its source code repositories, its development and testing tools, its compiled software artifacts (plug-ins, Java JAR files and so on), as well as its JIRA bug-tracking and issue reporting database. Developers from any organization are welcome to use any of Nuxeo's development tools to design and build their own applications based on Nuxeo technology, just as they're free to participate in other activities such as testing, bug fixes and documentation.

And, finally, because Nuxeo relies so much on a number of open source technologies, various company members also actively participate in, and contribute to, some of those projects, such as Apache's OpenCMIS "Chemistry" project.

Nuxeo support and subscription programs

While, as described above, Nuxeo embraces a fully open source software development model, it is still a commercial organization whose goal is to be profitable for its shareholders. Nuxeo's business model, which is entirely consistent with its commitment to open source, relies on deriving revenue exclusively from support, maintenance and value-added services. Nuxeo bundles these services in a subscription program called Nuxeo Connect, available either directly from Nuxeo or from any of its "Galaxy" business partners.

Customers subscribing to Nuxeo Connect are assured of service level agreements for problem resolution, certified patches and fixes according to our maintenance policy, value-added design, configuration, monitoring and management tools, as well as product updates and Quality Assurance on all of the supported packages. Customers can also subscribe to additional services such as unlimited support, access to the entire Nuxeo Studio and Nuxeo Connect infrastructure for easy setup and configuration of the system, or simply professional services such as training, consulting and deployment assistance.

Finally, Nuxeo's subscription model in no way locks the user into the software. By definition, Nuxeo users are never paying simply for the use of the software. Rather, Nuxeo users can choose to purchase a subscription for whatever level of consulting and support that is appropriate for them.

Getting help

In addition to Nuxeo's official support and subscription programs, there is a wealth of online information, including:

as well as the top-level Nuxeo resources page.

In addition, for those developers interested in tracking the latest development, enhancements and bug fixes, there is the publicly-accessible JIRA issue tracker.

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