JackBe Takes Page from iPhone App Store for Mashups 
JackBe is taking a page out of the Apple iPhone App Store to make it easier to create, publish and share enterprise mashups. JackBe’s Presto 3.0’s latest tools and features will let developer and non-developers make mashups for portals, Microsoft SharePoint, iGoogle and even mobile devices.
JackBe is taking a page out of the Apple iPhone App Store to make it easier to create, publish and share enterprise mashups. JackBe’s Presto 3.0’s latest tools and features will let developer and non-developers make mashups for portals, Microsoft SharePoint, iGoogle and even mobile devices.
JackBe Presto has helped users aggregate and compartmentalize application data into consumable chunks of information that can be delivered in different ways to various platforms. The “App Store” approach delivers out-of-the-box capabilities that allows end-users to quickly discover useful applications or augment them further to suit their own needs.
Presto 3.0 puts powerful App-building tools in the hands of tech-savvy business users and ultimately gives them tremendous freedom to find and share enterprise information safely whenever, wherever and with whomever they work," John Crupi, chief technology officer at JackBe, said. “Enterprise App Stores are the next frontier of business user productivity and self-service empowerment,” he added.
JackBe’s Presto 3.0 enterprise mashup environment features include:
Presto Wires (enhancements). JackBe’s popular Web-based visual mashup composition tool makes it even easier for technical and business users to build mashups, discover and use valuable data and services, and even reuse mashups already created.
The key is the use of an intuitive visual environment that avoids complicated APIs or coding. Combining data from disparate sources lets users build mashups that deliver a more complete picture of a financial, operational, or market situation. Presto 3.0 upgrades let users ‘loop’, average, count, mash SharePoint, transform data and more. Also, there’s a feature that allows users to create their own custom block.
“[JackBe’s] Enterprise App Stores are the next frontier of business user productivity and self-service empowerment.”
John Crupi
Chief Technology Officer
JackBe
Mashboard. JackBe’s Mashboard is a no-code visual assembly and wiring tool. Mashboard allows users to ‘wire' apps together to create groups of sophisticated apps. It features a ‘drag-and-drop’ builder for collecting and connecting enterprise apps, allowing organizations to let users visually collect Enterprise Apps into dynamic dashboards – without coding.
Mashboard aims to let business users assemble mashups to solve their ad-hoc, situational business problems,, and allows experienced devs to ‘wire’ together Apps into composite Apps.
Mashup Sites for SharePoint. JackBe built this feature as an advanced SharePoint add-on for Presto 3.0 that mashes SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts. The features let users:
- Combine SharePoint Lists with enterprise solutions from Dynamics, Oracle, SAP, etc.
- Share mashups to SharePoint communities as native WebParts.
- Share mashups with non-SharePoint users through Excel or other user-facing technologies like Oracle WebCenter, IBM webSphere, or the Apple iPhone.
To help Presto community of user leverage one another’s knowledge, JackBe has also built social capabilities into Presto 3.0 through what they term the Hub. This allows for users and developers to find, share, rate, and comment on mashups and Apps. It acts like a combination of a Facebook Wall and Apple’s App Store with added security and governance to meet enterprise needs.
Early reaction to JackBe Presto 3.0 has been positive.
Bill Ives from the App Gap, a blog on the future of work, said in a review, "Presto 3.0 builds off the Apple concept to provide a place to share mashups and find the components for new ones. This is yet another of the recent examples of the consumer market driving innovation in the enterprise market. The Presto mashups can have widget interfaces that can be embedded in other apps increasing their flexibility and the range of applications. The Enterprise App Store is targeted to help both users and developers."
An early customer, Mirko Minnich, CTO and SVP of Elsevier Health Sciences, said: “The [Presto 3.0] App Store accelerates innovation through quick-to-market App offerings and allows employees and customers to customize the way in which they use information products.”
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