With the Beta Programme well underway with clients, I thought it would be fun to look at the newest Project Management code - dealing with Resource Allocation Management.
I experimented with manual allocation of resources according to task skills - and I have to say that I was impressed with how easy it is to define tasks skills and allocate resources accordingly.
Claromentis 6.0 is all about getting the best from web 2.0 and social networking, and moving it into the enterprise network through appropriate data visualization and the concept of “corporate communities”.
Claromentis Innovation Lab for 6.0 platform.
The concept of corporate ideas moving from initial expression seamlessly through collaboration to execution is also fundamental – as are design philosophies that will provide the ultimate corporate 2.0 cross platform user experience. As well as many other features the platform includes walls, moods, i-phone support and URL tagging and rating. It is a platform designed for innovation.
We will be making available a lab for interested developers and designers to participate in this venture : here are some of the key areas that we will provide support for and encourage both the open source community and commercial developers to participate in:
• developing intranet 2.0 components and widgets
• developing methods of measuring user connectivity and interaction
• designing data visualization techniques to express corporate web 2.0 interrelationships
• providing alternate design concepts for all aspects of our code
• interrogating the data volume to produce metrics for executives
• individual expression in a corporate environment
Interested participants who are not developers or designers will also be welcome to interact with ourselves and the extended Claromentis community – either as consultants or providing core expertise on any aspect of facilitating innovation through applying web 2.0 techniques to corporate communities.
The lab will be available from May 1st 2009 – everyone interested is encouraged to contact Claromentis using info@ to ensure you can participate in this cutting edge venture.
We are really excited by the concept of the Claromentis Lab and the corporate community platform in general – and look forward to working with a wide range of talents to ensure this is a significant innovation platform applicable to a wide range of businesses around the world.
Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Industry News, Open Source Intranets, technical
In some new content on our site this week we stressed the fact that when you purchase Claromentis to deploy a collaboration framework you are buying much more than proprietary software that might lose its value over the coming years.
Instead Claromentis is a true intranet framework – in essence 
what it creates is a standard set of interrelated web based content, processes and application files that are formed and configured into a collaboration structure to suit your requirements.
With the extensive customization possibilities in all Claromentis products, the open source extendable nature of the system, the API and Process Manager plug-ins this really is a world away from buying software and hoping it will suit your needs.
We point this out on “7 good reasons to consider Claromentis” – it is a theme that is becoming increasingly important as customers look for increased choice, flexibility and value.
Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Open Source Intranets
An Intranet specialist Toby Ward has recently published his webinar about the future of Intranet (so called Intranet 2.0), highlighting how web 2.0 and social media is changing the corporate intranet. Interesting…
General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Open Source Intranets, intranet applications
It has been fascinating to watch the gradual shift of collaboration platforms over the last 5 or so years in particular, as
These three factors are in my experience combining to create a new agenda for our clients and ourselves.
The previous focus on IT, HR and Marcomms systems that were largely driven by content and obsessed by command and control has been replaced by a new engagement that is refreshing, inspirational and challenging to us all. The legacy remains, and is still valid - but is now a necessary substrate on which true value is built rather than a goal in itself.
At Claromentis we we see in our most engaging clients that are achieving high ROI on their investments a focus on:
Collaboration agenda
This is a space in which Claromentis has been able to gain considerable market share as our major products and PHP based platform is proving an ideal environment for this new way in intranet and extranet deployment.
We are able to foster innovation and facilitate the rapid generation of highly focussed open source applications within our framework, with the code either the property of our clients or available to all depending on the aims of our customers.
It is an exciting time in our company and we look forward to learning more from our most innovative customers, and to helping them discover new ways to interact and innovate.
Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Open Source Intranets
This article below is written by Rob Reith our Country Director in Australia which I found it intereting although in some deployments Claromentis can indeed co-exist with Microsoft SharePoint.
Claromentis over SharePoint
While there are many reasons why a company would want to select Claromentis over SharePoint, we have produced this handout to highlight the critical differences between the Claromentis and SharePoint Knowledge Management solutions. In the context of this handout, a Knowledge Management Software system covers the following functionality;
- Intranet software;
- Extranet software;
- Content Management software;
- Document Management software;
- Customer Relationship Management software;
- Project Management software; and
- Electronic Forms software.
Did you know that when you are dealing with Claromentis, you deal with the owners of the business? As part of the original team to build Claromentis, our clients have direct access to the owners and developers of Claromentis. This allows clients to have a direct say into the development roadmap. This is in contrast to SharePoint resellers who have no vested interest in the software and are unlikely to be able to contact Microsoft for urgent changes.
Work with the owners of Claromentis, and be confident that your voice will be heard at the top
Did you know that Claromentis only works in the field of Knowledge Management? We live and breathe knowledge management and are active in knowledge management conferences and forums. This is in contrast with many SharePoint resellers, who offer a wide range of software solutions, and will not have the degree of specialty as Claromentis.
Work with the Knowledge Management specialists and get better results
Did you know that over and above the Document Management, Intranet, Extranet and Content Management features, Claromentis also offers Project Management and Customer Relationship functionality where SharePoint does not offer either?
Work with the Knowledge Management software that offers more
Did you know that Claromentis runs on Windows or Linux giving you flexibility whereas SharePoint runs on only their own proprietary server and code? This means you have complete control over your IT environment and ensures your Total Cost of Ownership remains low.
Work with software that puts you in complete control
Did you know that Claromentis offers an International Standards Organisation (ISO) compatible and integrated electronic forms module where with SharePoint it is optional? In our experience, forms are critical for any size company, and that’s why we include them out of the box.
Work with the company that understands business
Did you know that while Claromentis offers a fully integrated and advanced searching feature, SharePoint charge separately for their search engine? Image 1.11 shows the complexity of the SharePoint solution (notice the multiple components that have different licensing conditions) which can cause budgeting and resourcing issues as your organisation grows.
Work with a company that keeps it simple and scalable
SharePoint Pricing Structure
Claromentis around the world, Clients, Communities and Case studies, Open Source Intranets, Products
The title of this blog could have been a question, but I prefer it to be a heading.
We had a corridor conversation a few days ago, Mike and I, and I mentioned that I wanted him to think about how we might extend InfoCapture so that we can report Process Manager issues on a PDA, those processes to upload to the Claromentis server as soon as it is connected. A great many processes in certain industries start with PDA input of initial data, and then complex work flows need to take over. For example office surveys, certain types of audits.
Within the context of my chat, I was expecting some kind of possibly in 6 months, what version of Claromentis – series of discussions. The normal priority setting of what should make a Claromentis release, and what should miss out.
It is now a few days later and he has the application installed on his Nokia phone, with the developer now coding the mobile windows version.
We have never met the developer – Mike just put out the work on an open source developers recruitment platform, and it’s done. No fuss, no headache – minor investments and great functionality.
What an amazing leap in our software, from talented people unconstrained by any limitations.
The heading of this Blog could not have been a question – because it doesn’t have an answer.
Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Open Source Intranets, intranet applications
As being a provider of an intranet software and its side solutions; we develop, deploy and deliver.. an intranet software… Recently one of our clients requested a quotation for an enhanced social networking platform to enable a possible collaboration of their consumers and staff under a single social networking platform. Personally, I think this is a great idea! Specially in an internet age, I can not think of any better solution to improve your public face than this. But there is one small problem… Our software was not developed while keeping the social networking platforms in mind. In other words, we are not the providers of a social networking platform. So how should we answer the client?
To find an answer to this, we did have an internal meeting today to narrow down our solutions and decided the following options:
The first three options have their pros and cons, while the 4th option is something we don’t like to go for, therefore I am going to focus on the first 3 options.
We found a perfect software delivering exactly what the client has asked for. It ticks almost every boxes based on the client’s requirements sheet. The software is open source and can be acquired with different pricing structures; starting from free up to good amount of money; depending on the package. In my opinion, the most expensive package, which is still relatively cheap based on its functionalities, is the one we should go for. The main reason behind my defence for this software is it works perfectly, delivers exactly what the client is asking for, the software itself is open source so we can modify it the way we want it, customize it to suit the client’s needs and deliver it to the client. The client gets what they want which works and we are happy to exceed the client’s expectations.
However there were several concerns about this option. The main concern, which is the main reason I am writing this article for is the software is actually an open source software. Some of our team members considered this as a negative point, because you may not get any support for the software. However what was forgotten in this concern was actually the provider of the software is releasing the core code of the software and any additional plug-ins (which we will need all of them) costs money. What took my attention was the word ‘open source’ made them think that this software may be unstable or developed by a student in couple of nights for fun and may well be forgotten by its provider. What I find strange is this thought would have never come to mind if the software was released by companies like Apple, Google, Sun or even Facebook or Digg team, just because they are a well known company and/or charging millions for it… For example, Mozilla may well stop supporting Firefox if it was not financially possible for them to keep the development of it.
But there were some other points which I found logical. Up-to-date, we delivered our own software which we know inside out. We are able to answer every question about it because we developed, deployed and delivered it. We are responsible to support our clients for the software they bought from us. What if something goes wrong with this third party software? OK, we have our own developers who can fix many problems, but to address a problem may take 5 minutes if the problem is occured on our software whereas it may well take 5 hours to address the same problem on some other software, if you are not familiar with it, and we are not talking about couple of hundred lines of code. This third party software is huge, so its’ codebase.
The other unspoken concern, which again I agree with, was the feeling we will have from the result. If the client loves this third party solution and sends their greetings to us, we would not feel the same level of satisfaction and proud as much as if they did the same for our intranet software, because simply what we delivered is NOT ours. We may have done a good job on finding the correct solution, customizing it and deploying it, but these are not actually what the client is requesting. These are expected standard results whereas the capabilities of the software are the requirement itself.
The second option is creating a partnership with a local social networking software developer and work on the actual software itself together. By doing this, there will be a mutual level of knowledge sharing. On our side, we will be learning how to deal with social networking management and implementation of these kind of platforms on corporate environments. And so many other stuff that I am not able to share with you for the moment. Because this will be a partnership, the provider will be reachable, therefore it will be possible for us to mash both of our solutions on one platform. Our client is already using our intranet solution and they are happy with it. Rather than giving them a complete new solution, which does not have the same look and feel as our own software, may be seen confusing to them (which is what may happen with the first solution, but again it is an open source software, so we should be able to customize it).
There is already one company we are considering to have a partnership for this project and we are in talks with them. I can not give you more details about this for the moment.
The third solution is a less likely to achive in a timescale given by the client. Our own software has years of experience and development history and as I said at the beginning of my article, it was not developed as a social networking platform. The strange thing is our software can do many of the client’s requirements on an individual basis, but was not designed to use these features on a public website with social networking ideas in mind.
You are probably asking “So, which option did you go for?“, well, we are still considering these and other options and there are no decisions as of now. What I wanted to share with this article was what may be thought when we hear the word “open source“.
Can/should open source be considered as professional? How far professional and successful it can go? Can commercial products be open source and if they are open source, are they still commercial? Is open source turning out to be a marketing term because of the success of Mozilla Firefox?
Probably harder questions to answer than the meaning of life.
Clients, Communities and Case studies, Intranet Development and API, Open Source Intranets
For those of you that don’t already know, LAMP is an acronym for Linux - Apache – MySQL - PHP. It’s a collection of software that can be used to run servers and dynamic websites. It’s one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft, and according to statistics provided by netcraft.com not only is Apache holding around 60% market share in the delivery/presentation of websites, but it’s thriving on the open source platforms and continuing to grow and compete (successfully) against Microsoft. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that any piece of software that can even compete (let alone lead) in its market against a super company like Microsoft has to have something special about it. Well, it’s no secret why the LAMP solution is so popular, it just works, it works well, it’s reliable, it’s robust, it’s resilient, and it’s free.
Without going into all of the nitty-gritty debates about why you should and shouldn’t base a corporate solution on an open source platform (there are enough of these debates on the Internet already), it’s not hard to realize why Claromentis run all of their development on the LAMP platform. The LAMP platform allows the development team to manage all aspects of their programming environment without relying on Microsoft to ensure the stability of that environment. Depending on who you talk to, avoiding Microsoft can be complete suicide, or a dream come true. Personally, I’m a believer in the statistics, and if 60% of the websites are running on Apache, my money is on that platform to deliver the best of everything. And I’ve never met a PHP developer who programs on anything else.
However, Claromentis doesn’t believe in limitations, so we let you decide which platform you wish to run the applications on. The Claromentis framework is compatible with LAMP, Windows, and ORACLE, so it works the way you do, integrating easily with your existing IT infrastructure.
For more information about Claromentis and the platforms it can run on, please contact sales@claromentis.com or call us on 01273 666 355
Open Source Intranets, Services, Technical Support, intranet applications
I just wanted to share with you a challenge we have.
We need to make sure our Linux client base, who have leveraged our APIs and the open source community to produce great bespoke intranet applications, are well aware of what we have to offer - without offending our very valuable Windows server customers for whom we also offer a very strong intranet solution - in fact the same core code.
You can read my short explanation of this marketing problem here.
