Following on the heels of the release of Bluenog's award-winning flagship commercial product, Bluenog ICE 4.5, the company plans to contribute back the enhancements it made to numerous open source projects during its development phase.

Bluenog, an enterprise software and solutions company, has been a long-standing advocate of open source. The company leverages open source projects extensively in its software development and professional services offerings and actively supports the community. Yesterday, the company announced Bluenog ICE 4.5, the only Enterprise 2.0 application development platform built on pre-integrated open source collaboration, content management, presentation and reporting projects. ICE 4.5 aggregates functionality from over a dozen popular open source projects into a single commercial product, with additional integration and features all supported by Bluenog.

Initial contributions will center on the enhanced functionality developed in the area of collaboration. This includes extensions to the popular, JSPWiki, which adds support for wiki and page level permissions. The entire wiki also runs as a portlet with a persistence layer that supports JSR-170. Additional functionality includes support for multiple wikis in a single server instance, with the ability to maintain context while switching between wikis. Enhancements to Bedework include a new group calendaring portlet with an improved user interface and more Ajax-compatible point and click controls. Bluenog has also added a permission hierarchy that enables secure, restricted access to calendars based on a user's role, as well as improved administration features including support for aggregate calendar groupings into views. Enhancements have also been made to several other open source projects including JetSpeed 2, Hippo CMS and Eclipse BIRT.

"Many of the enhancements Bluenog will be contributing back deliver functionality from the ICE 4.5 product development roadmap," said Suresh Kuppusamy, CEO and co-founder, Bluenog. "Our contributions will make it easier for the open source community to use projects such as JetSpeed, Apache, Eclipse and JSPWiki and leverage the expertise and production-ready enhancements Bluenog has developed. This will help shorten development lifecycles and improve the quality and reliability of applications based on these projects."

Bluenog is also announcing plans to launch their online community, NogExchange(TM), later this year. NogExchange will serve as a forum in which developers can download and post a wide range of source code, and will include portlets built by Bluenog as well as the Bluenog development community.