The eXo Platform is an open source integrated application suite providing commonly needed services, components and modules to programmers when building web based information portals.

A portal's purpose is mostly to consolidate access to information and integrating dispersed functionality, for example, within a company. We define a portal as a gateway to several dynamic information sources. A consolidated portal page is composed of one or more portlets which serve as independent views of information or give access to various types of functionality. Portlets are written and customized for your specific environment by programmers to i.e. enable centralized access to news articles from various corporate departments.

Currently, a key feature of the eXo Platform is its portlet container's certified compliance with the JSR 168 portlet API specification from Sun Microsystems. A portlet container is a server service which enables portlets to exchange information and access services such as user authentication or persistent information storage. The specification allows portlets to be interchangeable between portal servers as long as the portal server conforms to the specification.

The business value of implementing an eXo Platform based portal sytems from the infrastructure and many services already provided by the server. Reusing and customizing existing services and internal infrastructure increases speed to market, ROI and prevents duplicate efforts by the development team.

Two editions of the eXo Platform exist: express and enterprise. The express edition is intended for small to medium sized organizations without sophisticated information and integration needs while the Enterprise edition requires a Java application server and thus enables much more robust and extended functionality. Both versions are distributed under several licensing models all of which include the source code.