ESSENTIA RELEASES NEXT GENERATION OF FLAGSHIP PRODUCT FOR BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES

Powers New Communities with EssentiaESP, Commercial Open Source Platform

San Francisco – OSBC 2009 – March 25, 2009 – Essentia, a developer of software platforms and solutions for online communities and commerce, today announced the availability of the new version 2.5 of EssentiaESP, a community building platform designed specifically for commercial open source.  Leading commercial open source companies like Jaspersoft and Openbravo have worked closely with Essentia on these advanced capabilities to strengthen their communities.

“This new version dramatically improves our capabilities for managing open source projects, community development and commerce through our innovative Java+PHP duo-architecture, best-in-class tools, modern user experience and integrated best practices,” said Gopi Ganapathy, founder, president, and CEO of Essentia. “The recognition among our customers that communities are business-critical and need enterprise-grade infrastructure and best practices have driven the significant improvements we are releasing today.”

The new version of Essentia’s flagship solution features an impressive range of enhancements including support for Mercurial distributed version control and Mantis BT collaborative tracker with Twitter Support; enterprise search for large distributed repositories as well as integration with Google Search; single sign-on; community metrics and user activity via Google Gadgets, RSS, and personal pages; as well as numerous user experience and functional enhancements.

“Jaspersoft is excited about the next generation capabilities of EssentiaESP, which will bring sophisticated capabilities to our Jasper forge community,” said Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing, Jaspersoft. “We continue to work closely with the Essentia team on their best-of-breed community software to meet the specific needs of commercial open source companies.”

“We have worked very closely with Essentia and with the new version of EssentiaESP and have been extremely pleased with the entire experience and the results we have achieved,” said Josep Mitjà, COO of Openbravo. "The combination of EssentiaESP's social capabilities and advanced development tools were critical to selecting it as the platform to support Openbravo's community, which is central to our company's strategy. Essentia has proven to be an extremely flexible partner, but more importantly, a partner that has constantly had the core needs and requirements of the global Openbravo community as their driving force.”

Open Source Software Development

Integrating MantisBT and Mercurial, a distributed version control system popular among well-known projects like Mozilla and Open Solaris, as well as UTF-8 support makes EssentiaESP well-suited for open source projects that have a very large, highly distributed global community. Plug-in management is provided in EssentiaESP to manage the development, distribution, and integration of value-added plug-ins around the core software projects through a central plug-in repository and release environment.

Community

EssentiaESP 2.5 introduces Site and Project RSS feeds for community metrics like Most Active Users, Active Projects, Top Downloads, Hot Topics, Latest News, Latest Wiki Pages, Latest Forum Topics, Latest Replies to Forum Posts, Issues, Bug Reports, and Latest Commits to the code repository. Google Gadgets provide information portability so these activities and can be viewed on the site or used externally on an iGoogle page. The new version of EssentiaESP also introduces Twitter support, starting with the tracker. The Activity Gadget tracks statistics, members, projects, blogs, and forum posts. The Project Activity Gadget tracks project activity, downloads, forum posts, and bugs. The Gadgets can be viewed in EssentiaESP and added to any iGoogle page. Community participants also get a choice of best-in-class tools like WordPress available in the new version of EssentiaESP.

Enterprise

Enterprise support for search and single sign-on provides closer integration between the communities and corporate .com sites, internal knowledge repositories, and enterprise business systems to ensure seamless access to desired information across community and enterprise boundaries. Essentia’s security and access control framework handles user, data, project and site-level security and administration around search.

At OSBC 2009, Essentia will publicly unveil the new version of EssentiaESP demonstrating the company’s commitment to redefining community engagement technology and platforms for the open source community.

Availability

The new version of EssentiaESP is available immediately in standard, premium, and unlimited configurations for both hosted on the cloud and on-premise deployment with an annual subscription. All subscriptions include full access to source code, regular product updates, and 24x7 email-based technical support for installation and production. To learn more, please contact sales at (800) 573-9137, sales@essentia-corp.com, or visit www.essentia-corp.com


About Essentia

Essentia, the leading provider of solutions for commercial open source software communities, was founded in 2006 by experts in open source and collaborative software development who have delivered, deployed, and managed many of the most significant first-generation communities like OpenOffice.org, Java.net, and Subversion. Essentia is a global company based in San Francisco, CA and Chennai, India with offices in Houston, Texas; London, UK; and Malaysia. Essentia customers include Fortune 500 and emerging companies. More information is available at essentia-corp.com.