Explore Fund is a global network created by The North Face with a mission to help kids discover nature’s playground.

It’s a global initiative by launching 7 sites in 7 countries simultaneously across Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) and North America (Canada, US)

Their goal is to inspire and enable the next generation of explorers by funding non-profit organisations that are working to re-connect children with nature. We believe in the physical, emotional and social benefits of a healthy, active outdoor lifestyle, and that a strong connection with the outdoors will lead to greater support and protection of our natural landscapes.

The Explore Fund will support organisations that encourage youth outdoor participation, focusing primarily on creating more connections of children to nature, increasing access to both front & backcountry recreation, as well as providing education for both personal & environmental health.

Find out more from these sites below:

ExploreFund.eu (Europe)
ExploreFund.ca (Canada)
ExploreFund.org (USA)

Custom Development, Services bespoke development, Case Study, Design, environmental, Social Networking, web 2.0

A  Claromentis team will be testing their legs, feet and willpower over 100km of the south downs on September 17th, through the night and onto the 18th in an attempt to raise £2,000 for children with Cerebral Palsy. There is an outside chance we will still be going on the 19th and late for work so if you cant buy anything or get any support that day please bear with us, and send out search parties with lots of sticking plaster and beer. Or Burgundy..

It’s a great cause, and certainly for all 3 of us in the team a heck of an ask, as none of us have ever done anything like this.

Nigel and Charlie on the South Downs - in slightly more relaxed mode

Hannah in Intensive Training

Hilda in a rare moment of glory..

You can find descriptions of the event here

We are really excited about trying to give something back to such a deserving cause. Hannah has already started sleeping more, Hilda has bought a pair of socks and Nigel went out for a rigorous stroll after Sunday lunch this weekend – then had a good lie down. So the training program is going really well.

If you would like to help us raise money every pound / dollar or anything else that can help these children would be so much appreciated.

You can find our team and individual charity pages here :

The Claromentis team

Hilda

Hannah

Nigel

It’s just great for us to get out there and fight our lack of self belief to see if we can do this, and help such a great cause. If you can donate anything at all please do – as I write this we already have 40% of our £2,000 target and that’s super – but we would really love to get to our target!

Thank you so much!

Intranet-Extranet charity, Claromentis

Within an intranet the use of blogs allow for informal, easy to generate and time sequenced content to be generated by relevant staff – and for interested user to be able to comment – in a very similar way to the use of blogs in the public internet space.

Some key differences are :

• The community is already created for the author
• Intranet permissions allow particular blogs to be  revealed to relevant readers only
• The reputation of the author ( CEO for example ) exists separately from the authors ability to generate interesting content.
• Blog participants are much more likely to adhere to conduct and ethical standards required by their organization

Intranet blogs are often generated by executives or the management team as a way to communicate thoughts with their staff and to communicate strategy in a way that employees might be more likely to absorb than more traditional alternative methods.

They can also be used as an interview process with key staff to capture their thoughts on how they achieve results, or by departments to encourage participation in various key initiatives.

Claromentis allows for permission based news channels to be styled as blogs whenever needed, and for those blogs to be seen as components on the home or departmental pages or directly accessed from the internal menu systems.

Commenting and interaction can be controlled with each post on a blog – alternatives are

• No commenting
• Instant publishing of comments
• Approval of comments required
• Anonymous commenting enabled

In general we recommend that commenting should be instant – as that is what participants expect and employees normally adhere­ to reasonable standards­ of language and content – or completely anonymous where ‘the truth’ is sought from the targeted audience without fear that expressing their opinions might jeopardize their careers.

Claromentis also offers corporate social networking through the new Innovate application, that provides features similar to Facebook and Twitter within the corporate intranet. For many clients this newer enterprise 2.0 application is complementing, extending and even taking over the informal collaboration requirements for which blogging and wikis were the only solution before social networking became such a mainstream technique.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet

You are probably familiar with 4Ds methodology frequently implemented in the web-design and web-development company.

Define, Design, Develop, Deploy

A classic waterfall approach which is very easy to understand but in practical this is hardly the ‘right’ process. The biggest drawback with the waterfall process is there is no room for changes and everything has to be perfect from the beginning to guarantee a project success, which is something that almost impossible to achieve in the real world.

The requirement is always ‘hazy’, it’s incredibly hard to visualize final product, there are too many factors to consider and business & technology and budget may change.

Familiar Project Cartoon

Image credit: projectcartoon.com

When it comes to the question “what is the right process?” we always get the lawyer answer, “it depends”.

A good project manager will realize that every project is different and need different methodology.  How about “Agile?” are they good?

The terms of “Agile Methodology” has been greatly abused and there are just too many different variations which sometime company adopting it for the sake of adopting it. “Yes we do Agile!”.

For us the ‘right methodology’ is an evolving process, we understand that we have to think from the customer point of view. We have to welcome changes!

“We shouldn’t put anyone to the dreadful task reading 200 pages of specification and hoping they can sign it off.

We have learned that we shouldn’t put anyone to the dreadful task reading 200 pages of specification and hoping they are having enough understanding to sign it off.  We all know pictures and models are better way to help us understand complex problem. We want the client involve in the process every step of the way, it is not just for us but good for them.  We want to put things into rigorous testing and not turning them into beta-tester. We want to make the entire process fun and constructive.

And we came up with this!

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet agile, bespoke development, development vision, fun, humor, internal customer communications, software

“Some things are just better together”

For quite sometime now Claromentis supports Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP to provide seamless Single Sign On to the Intranet. With the rise of Google Apps for enterprises and many organisations are migrating to Google Apps, it is about time that we shake hands with Google.

How we did it?, We start by giving a technical team less than 2 days to complete the challenge and we are now proudly announce that we do have single-sign-on solution for Google Apps.

“it is about time that we shake hands with Google.”

Claromentis Intranet users will be able to connect their intranet account with Google Apps account and login seamlessly between two systems.  For instance, checking email in Google Mail, jump in to read News in the Intranet, navigate away to Google Docs to work on documents and back to check latest status updates in Claromentis with no login interruption.

For the external partners who aren’t part of Google Apps users can simply log-in as normal by using username and password.

It is a first step for more exciting future enhancements, we have start investigating how user details and group can be sync between two system and pushing and pulling information between Claromentis and Google.

We view this partnership with Google as a major step toward the future of enterprise software. Our vision is to build seamless integration of cloud services into your corporate Intranet, making it a truly central hub for information and apps!

Google Single-sign on will be available in Claromentis 6.2

Intranet-Extranet 6.2, Google, intranet development, online collaboration, technology, web 2.0

I have decided to write a series of posts around how we can map the potential contribution of Claromentis as a web platform for your business, against the original components of a value chain as defined by Michael Porter in 1985.

To refresh our memories Mr. Porter described the following Support Activities :

• Infrastructure – Finance, planning etc
• HR Management
• Technology Development – R&D
• Procurement

And the following Primary Activities :

• Inbound Logistics
• Operations
• Outbound Logistics
• Marketing and Sales
• After Sales Service

As the significant building blocks for a value chain, they define the activity in a delivery system which creates margin for the owners of a business.

Back in the mid 80s the main approaches were looking at each of these components, and either seeking to drive down costs without compromising quality – or trying to improve quality without increasing costs.

In general terms the former led to outsourcing and the latter to total quality management.

These early models are still valid, and with technology moving so fast and web platforms like Claromentis able to contribute to so many of these areas, I thought it would be interesting to post on our recent experience in each of them.

My first one this week is likely to be R&D – as it is very much on my mind with our new Innovate 1.1 release.

Thanks also to a strategy handout from Roger Martin-Fagg, provided by Vistage – for prompting the idea of this series of posts.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Prod-Sales, The Framework business model, Claromentis, value, web platform