It is a difficult concept to grasp for a non-technical person, yet without realizing it we’re been storing more data and ever in the cloud at work and at home. The big question is our data secure in the Cloud?

Google claims to have one of the largest and the most secure clouds in the entire industry, we do not often hear they’ve been hacked.

Google Data Centers

How does Google keep the data centers that comprise its cloud so safe and are they the gold standard in data protection?

Adam Swidler, senior manager for Google Enterprise, laid out how the company keeps its cloud safe at the Cloud Control Conference in Boston this week. The measures that Google goes through are quite thorough. For instance, no Google clients or federal regulators are allowed inside of Google’s data centers. When it comes to tough nuts to crack on the Internet, Google’s cloud is about as tough as it gets…. read more

In contrast relying your data entirely in the hand of mighty Google could have disastrous impact to your life. This is what happens exactly to someone’s google account. His 7 years digital life is now vanished and no one at Google can help him.

Something happened to Dylan’s Google account, and it’s been disabled. He doesn’t know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of his life is stored. Google doesn’t own Twitter, though (yet), and he has taken to Twitter to try to draw attention to his problem and urge anyone who will listen not to trust Google with their digital lives. read more…

Another news, which shocked the IT world, recently happened in Australia when one of the largest hosting provider Distribute.IT was hacked and around 4800 sites are gone forever.

4800 Aussie sites evaporate after hack

Maybe the solution is what the old saying that we should put all of our eggs in one basket. There is something comforting if you know exactly where your data is stored. Back in the old days to have our data stored in multiple locations just in case and always think of worse case scenario. Do you have good and bad experience with the cloud storage? Or you may have strong opinion about this topic please comments, we would like to hear from you.

Intranet-Extranet, Services cloud computing, development vision, Google, hosting, intranet software discussions, permissions, technology

We regularly post  about our permissions that enable rights to be allocated according to any combination of Groups, Roles, Extranet areas and individual users – as well as special permissions such as the public.

We have frequent workshops and implementation discussions around these concepts as we work with new customers to map these ideas onto their organizations and objectives. To elaborate using groups and roles – we will have many customers where groups and sub groups map to some kind of departmental or functional structure and roles cut across this matrix to provide a cross functional equivalence – “I am in a different department but I too am an engineer or a manager” would be simple examples.

As Claromentis continues to establish a strong solution in Business Process Management we are now intersecting this permission model with the concept of Business Process Owners : people responsible for implementing a process that cuts across this two dimensional layer with a form based workflow that touches many – and unpredictable – individual users as the process continues from end to end, across groups and roles according to the status and requests of the relevant process.

For any one process organizational groups, users and functions are given various rights at various stages in a process, and according to who requested the start of the process and to whom it is currently assigned.

We are currently implementing 8 processes for a global company and during a call today I was reminded as to what a challenge this is for any company to successfully implement. Such processes can indeed be effectively implemented using our BPM technology – but the company still has to establish the process and deal with all of the reasons that make such cross-company processes difficult to maintain. This cultural and organizational challenge for any business, large or small – is a subject that is well summarized by Brad Power at the HBR.

We greatly enjoy the collaborative nature of working with companies to analyze and implement such cross matrix processes – and have the greatest respect for companies that have the vision and staying power to ensure that once implemented  they are sustainable through all of the political, external and internal challenges that any business faces.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process BPM, permissions

As everything is about collaboration, and everything can be moderated – why don’t content editors give edit permissions to their own content more freely?

Everyone is keen to provide view rights, but protective of edit rights, even though this is precisely where new information would come from. Although in certain areas – like corporate policies and procedures for example – this would obviously not be appropriate – for many functions and processes increased contribution to knowledge should be welcome, even if it needs editing before approval.

Cultural openness is hard to achieve – even in collaboration platforms designed for exactly that purpose.

Prod-Quality intranet software, permissions

Innovation and integration have long been identified as  two areas where IT can help companies in their drive for growth.

For both of these permissions are extremely relevant. Innovation needs partnerships with external parties to maintain growth through sharing expertise and essentially bringing back to the center innovation where it can be used to drive the company forwards. Similarly integration needs permissions to facilitate the sharing of expertise and ideas across organizational silos.

Permission

When involved in setting up the actual permission systems for some of our customers I am often convinced that they are lost in the details, and not thinking about either innovation or integration – they are instead lost in a world of command and control vs. open access.

Some publishing workflows “must” for example have two levels of approval. This is a current requirement for us with a very large company. As an intranet vendor with a consultancy practice perhaps we should be more open, and just ask “Why”? Instead we will deliver exactly what the customer needs.

Of course in certain areas absolute quality of information is extremely significant – one would not want to allow an earnings report to be published with the wrong data, or the Chairman’s annual statement to be released to employees with obvious spelling errors.

But both innovation and integration require powerful collaboration across disparate participants – and the earnings report is relevant to neither. What is required for many companies is an accurate enterprise wide analysis of what is to be gained from what kind of integration or innovation between what groups of stakeholders  – and then a similar analysis of how open each type of collaboration should be. Only then can an Intranet and Extranet permission system be designed to drive growth in these challenging times.

Intranet-Extranet intranet software, permissions

I have recently been working on one of our large clients intranet deployment in the USA and I wanted to write how amazed I am when I see a client finding different ways of customization our intranet software to suit their needs.

As of Claromentis 5.4, we have developed a new feature called Smart Objects. This feature helps Claromentis users importing content to their intranet pages from different sources within Claromentis, such as News, Forum messages and Document lists. No longer will users have to navigate to separate areas to see application files as opposed to web based content, for example. A dynamic view of disparate content and objects is possible from just one location.

This company is part of one of the worlds largest clothing manufacturers, and they are using our software to improve the communication between different departments within the organization, as well as simplifying the process of managing documents securely, all within one instance. Departments varies from variety of sources, such as Sales, Finance, Warranty, RD&D, EMEA and more… Without a doubt, a web based intranet solution like Claromentis was the best choice for an international company. Having its employees across the world makes the importance of communication and document management through the Internet was an appropriate choice.

Because Claromentis is permission based intranet software, it is possible to hide your content from different departments using the same intranet software. You simply create groups and roles within Claromentis and identify your content (documents and news) to be shown to a certain number of users.

As you can imagine, a company like this literally has tens of thousands of documents stored within the software, so making these files to be found easily is not an easy job. That’s where the Smart Objects feature is going to make this process a lot easier than our competitors’ solutions.

Let me explain how different parts of Claromentis can work in collaboration to solve complex intranet problems. In this example, I would like to share a document folder containing financial sales targets of this month and a list of products needs to be highlighted during sales campaigns. I would also like to share news belonging the sales department and I need to show all of the above content visiting the Sales Department home page.

In the above example, I am actually aiming to solve my problem by sourcing the content from the following corporate solutions.

• Document Manager
• Content Manager
• Permission Based Intranet Management
• Permission Based News Management

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Smart Objects enables you to show contents from different parts of Claromentis, and this is exactly how this client actually solved this complex collaboration issue.

1. Define Groups and Roles (SALES > Sales Managers | Sales Team) and assign users to the appropriate level.
2. Using Document Manager application, store my files into one folder created for the special sales campaign.
3. Change the permissions of all my files and make the “financial sales targets” viewable only by Sales Managers and the remaining files viewable by people belonging the SALES group.
4. Using Web Based Content Management Solution, create an intranet page and fill up the content areas, such as TITLE, SUMMARY, GOALS, REWARDS.
5. Using Smart Objects, embed the document folder containing my files into an appropriate space within my intranet page.
6. Again Using Smart Objects, embed the Sales news (blogs) channel.
7. Save the page and share the web address of the page with my staff.

What will happen is people who has an access to view the page I just created will only need to remember one web address (which can be pasted into an e-mail message) and when they click on that link, all of the information they have a permission to see will be visible to them. Remember that we have embedded one single folder containing both financial targets as well as documents containing products need to be highlighted? Because I set the permissions for my documents, Sales team will only see the files they need to see and managers will also be able to access the financial target documents, even though they are in the same folder and I have embedded that folder into my Intranet Page.

All within one single page. How Smart is that?!

Resources-Technical complex intranet management, document management, intranet, intranet blogging, news management, permissions, Prod-Intranet, smart object

Sophisticated intranet and extranet permission systems that can control access in so many ways are rapidly blurring the traditional distinction between intranets and extranets.

It still remains true that extranets are different – we need to provide access to partners and the supply chain in a way the business can securely control and monitor – but actually with Claromentis key staff themselves are separated into access areas by role, group and individual permissions so there is indeed some overlap.

Here is the difference as we see it today:

• Extranet users need to be ring fenced from each other – we clearly do not want Partner A accessing pricing information for Partner B.
• Nor do we want users from Partner A being aware of the existence of users from Partner B.
• Co-branding must be automatic if required – the customer must with no effort be able to create a co-branded portal that provides the right environment for each supplier and partner.
• Hybrid access in terms of active directory or individual logon with a username and password. We must, and do, support mix and match access in terms of active directory automated intranet log-on for staff, and logon with username and password for partners.

Apart from these key differentiators, extranets are just one more permission bucket in Claromentis, which is exactly as it should be as the world flattens, and key users and contributors that can make a difference to any Claromentis customer might be employees of suppliers, partners or freelancers.

Products extranets, intranets, permissions