Jadu (company)


Jadu is a software company based in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. It is also a proprietary web experience management platform used for non-technical management of web-based content, data and electronic documents.
Jadu also develops web applications related to document management, search and publishing. The company's global business is based in the UK under Jadu, Inc. based in Chicago, USA and a business based in Australia servicing the Asia Pacific region.

Company history

The company was founded by Suraj Kika and Richard Chamberlain in 1999. The system was first developed for the Department of Trade and Industry for the UK consultation portal for Oil and Gas and Renewable Energy.
The software developed for the Offshore-SEA website, an environmental portal managed by geological and oceanographic specialists Geotek, then became Jadu Content Management Engine Version 1 — and was implemented for scientific organisations in the UK as a means to publish complex electronic documents generated in MS Word and PDF formats.
In 2001 the system was redeveloped in PHP and MySQL and a Version 2 was deployed for UK Government and Local Authorities. Based on the e-GIF standards, and using XForms, the system was deployed at the beginning of the first acceptance and adoption of open source platforms within Government. Jadu as a company has a cross platform approach, preferring to develop its software to be agnostic in terms of operating platform and development framework.
In 2008, Jadu launched a.NET compliant binary of the Jadu CMS supporting IIS, MS SQL and the.NET 2.0 framework using the Phalanger which compiles PHP to CLR effectively enabling any PHP application to run natively under the.NET framework.
Jadu have funded and are supporting the development of Phalanger, including leading the development of VisualStudio.NET support as well as other upgrades to PHP support in.NET. With this new framework under.NET 2.0 and.NET 3.0, Jadu CMS can be extended in C# or any other.NET compiled language using Visual Studio.
Using the Phalanger compiler, Jadu CMS and the front end web templates are compiled down to two DLLs. - bringing together two fiercely competitive programming disciplines together - making PHP interoperable with the.NET framework.
Jadu's Head of Design and User Interface Lee Pilmore was the designer responsible for Lichfield District Council becoming the first UK Local Authority to win a Webby Award Official Honoree status and The City of Edinburgh Council website, which was awarded a top 4-star rating for three years running, as "the best Local Government Website in Scotland" by SOCITM.
In 2007, Jadu's design for Kettering Borough Council was nominated a finalist for the CSS category in the SXSW awards - for "pushing the boundaries of CSS coding technology, bringing together top-notch design and content with standards compliant and accessible code"
In 2008, Jadu launched Manchester City Council's website using the Jadu CMS, which won the BT Online Excellence award as the Best Local Government website in Britain.
In January 2011, executives from Jadu were invited to a private round table discussion with UK Prime Minister, David Cameron to consult with Jadu over barriers to business growth in the UK
In October 2011, the company announced the 'Weejot' Mobile web app publishing service. Described as a network for easily developing and publishing mobile web apps to handheld mobile and tablet devices in real-time using HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery Mobile.
In February 2012, Jadu announced that their 'Jadu Universe Cloud' service, a platform for SaaS CMS, forms, search and mobile products was selected as a preferred supplier into the UK Government CloudStore. On its website, Jadu stated that Jadu Universe Cloud services can be purchased by public sector organisations without an Official Journal of the European Union tender process, which represents a significant step change in UK Government procurement. Chris Chant, the Cabinet Office Executive Director confirmed that the Government was "making it easy for the public sector to buy a vast range of services – and so easy that they can try things out at nominal cost before taking it on for a whole organisation."
In the Spring of 2013, the Government announced that the G-Cloud has sold over £18.2m in products and services through the Cloudstore. Jadu were listed as 13th most purchased services with sales approaching £250,000 in just three months.
In March 2013, Jadu announced a partnership with PayPal to deliver mobile payments using the Weejot.com service, starting with mobile donations. Jadu, PayPal and The Alzheimer's Society co-launched 'Weejot Donate' a weejot.com template that enabled fundraising teams inside any charity to use the weejot.com mobile service to deploy mobile donations apps.
Jadu launched a re-designed Manchester City Council website using its Jadu Universe Platform on 1 May 2013 as a result of a collaboration between the council's web team and Jadu. The site was designed by Jadu's in-house using Responsive Web Design, reflecting Jadu's 'mobile first' vision for delivering web content to all devices.
In 2015, Jadu announced it had spun-out Spacecraft and created a new creative design company 'Spacecraft Digital' so that it could focus on creating an ecosystem of channel partners and other agencies that could benefit from using Jadu products and technology.
In 2020, Jadu announced 'Spacecraft Digital' was changing its name to 'Jadu Creative'.

Move to Continuous Delivery

Jadu collaborated with the Department for Communities and Local Government and Coventry City Council Chief Executive Martin Reeves to launch its move to Continuous Delivery, which the company said would save its Local Government customers over £2.5m in costs per year. Early in 2016, Jadu renamed the continuously released platform 'Continuum' as part of a global re-branding programme. The company now releases its platform every 2 weeks, launching a new Integrations Hub in 2017, which is designed to make integrations with back office cloud and on-premise applications non-technical and faster for its customers.

Products

Jadu Continuum CMS (Web Content Management)

The company's core product, Jadu Universe CMS, is a suite of non-technical web-based content management application which covers publishing, directories, search, productivity and workflow, HR, e-payments, retail store management and e-forms.
In December 2008, Jadu launched the 1.8 version upgrade to the Jadu CMS, which includes Semantic Web frameworks and a public API called 'MyJadu API'. The new version upgrade also introduced the concept of social 'directories' enabling structured data records to be either mass imported into the system and/or submitted by users of sites run by the Jadu CMS.
In April 2009, Jadu announced a social media module for the Jadu CMS which provides integration to the Twitter micro-blogging social network. The Jadu Twitter client provides content management with drafts and workflow approval for corporate tweets.
In April 2010, Jadu in collaboration with some of its customers, released an Election Results plugin for the Jadu CMS to its government user base to promote the use of Opendata in government. The plugin makes election result data available as RDFa.
Jadu Content Management System itself is a proprietary system, although the company has Open Sourced many of its tools, including its User Interface Design System, '' which was introduced in a continuous release. The Jadu Continuum architecture is cross platform and runs in Windows and Linux and is provided both on-premise and hosted.

Jadu Galaxies (CMS deployment system)

In 2006, Jadu developed the Jadu Galaxies content management system. Galaxies, provides the ability to clone CMS systems in real-time, creating a multi-tenant Software as a Service architecture and allowing customers to deploy their own CMS cloud services.

Jadu 'XFP' Continuum Forms (Forms deployment system)

Jadu XForms Professional provides a non-technical framework for complex forms development. XForms Professional connects to back office systems and e-payments systems to enable accessible transactional forms.

Jadu 'CXM' (Cloud based Case Management and CRM)

Directly as a result of the experience of working successfully with the Ministry of Justice, Jadu launched the 'CXM' cloud service - a Case Management System designed for real-time collaboration on cases. The service is designed to help large organisations solve cases for customers, encouraging retention, but has its foundation in legal case management. The service combines 'instant chat' functionality with Case Management enabling real-time conversation to become case notes. Jadu developed the product as a multi-tenant cloud service, making the Continuum Platform a hybrid cloud product.
In 2016, the CXM service was adopted by The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead as a direct replacement for their legacy CRM system. Just one year later, having launched the CXM service in mid 2016, the council announced it had made significant progress in transforming all its services to become digital. This marked a move in the Local Government market to replace CRM systems for 'lite' cloud based CRM and case management. Early in 2017 Jadu announced that a large number of large organisations has started implementing Jadu CXM, including Canterbury City Council, who stated it intends to provide 85% of its services online using the CXM platform.

Notable users

Jadu's customers tend to be substantially sized organisations. Recently, Jadu announced the University of Leeds, who have signed a 10-year agreement with Jadu to deliver the Jadu CMS and Galaxies deployment system across the University, starting with the Leeds University Library. The largest user of the Jadu Continuum Platform is Birmingham City Council, the largest Local Authority in Europe. Following implementation of the Jadu platform, Birmingham City was recognised in the 2017 Webby Awards as an Official Honouree. Also notable are The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors., The Alzheimer's Society, Manchester City Council and the Edinburgh City Council.
Socitm, an organisation which tests and benchmarks Local Government websites for usability, accessibility and functionality, selected Jadu to implement their website, online forms system, online product management and integration to back office systems.
Directgov, UK government's digital service for people in England and Wales announced that it was using the Jadu XFP online forms system to implement accessible online forms within the Directgov website.