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

“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

Interesting video demo of highly-anticipated Google Chrome OS. It looks like all of your information will be stored in the ‘cloud’. The boundaries between what is local software and online software has become blurred. I have not yet to see this will be adopted in the corporate world anytime soon. But should we care? It shows the potential future of web-apps, software or application should be easily accessible, deployed through an internet browser regardless the OS or type of browser.

Check demo video below:

Resources-Technical os, software, technology

Almost all of our potential and current clients come to us with some kind of existing technology based view of the software and solution world.

What varies massively is their attitude to – and internal understanding of – their own perspective.

In our case they are about to influence their company’s decisions and approaches to intranets, workflows, collaboration platforms and document management systems. With other software partners they will potentially bring the same perspectives to bear on very different projects.

It does seem to me that in most cases the perspective – or bias – as that is what it amounts to in practical terms  – that they bring is not thoroughly evaluated in an internal sense.

So basically potential clients might indeed understand their preference for certain approaches but they have almost never, as far as I can see, worked out whether these barriers are internally acknowledged but something they would like to explore the possibilities of escaping from – or a philosophy to which they are embedded for the long term because they have made fundamental decisions in favor of it on the basis of cost savings, recovery strategies or any other framework for increased efficiency or ROI.

When you think about it, this is quite extraordinary.

The most forward looking  companies are always looking for ways to break out of the technology perspectives that might in any way constrain their capacity to innovate. They want to break down barriers.

The bias that a company imposes on an IT selection process are in the new world increasingly far reaching.

As an example in the past the decision might have been purely on the type of database, because the back up and DR strategy favored one over the other or because of the availability of internal trained DBA resources. These are purely internal but highly justifiable reasons.

As the internet based software world changes and solution suppliers like Claromentis respond to this rapid progress, and it is certainly progress, we need to deal with the fact that a single supplier can now offer :

•    Mash up services
•    Database abstraction layers to support any database you need
•    Complete cross platform deployment from Linux to windows
•    Relatively low cost rapid development of complex internet based software
•    A choice of cloud based computing or perpetual licenses
•    Open source extendable commercially supported solutions
•    Complete independence of the branding layer over the business logic

So what value a technology bias of any kind in this brave new world of customizable solutions on any platform in any pricing and deployment model?

Old fashioned bloated solutions are on the way out – COTS solutions and open source extendable frameworks appeal to the modern way of leaving your perspectives on the doorstep, increasing innovation and delivering completely unconstrained value to the business.

Intranet-Extranet Add new tag, technology

Built-in content management module (codename: Publish) in Claromentis is used in several products such as Intranet & Extranet Manager, Document Manager and Enterprise Content Manager.  In version 5.6 we are going to introduce brand new multilingual content management capabilities.

Old days:  Folder solution

Until now web-page contents on the Intranet are limited to one language, although our interface supports complete localization, which means you can have Claromentis interface in Japanese but the content you’re looking at are in English.

We have managed to get around this situation by setting up different folder in Publish, one for each language, for instance we can have folder named “English” for English content and “Japanese” for Japanese content. It make sense right? not quite…

Complexity and Problems

Wait until you have to combine with Departments for example you may have set your folder structure by Departments for example “Marketing”, you may have a page called “Branding” under Marketing.

Imagine the complexity that you may forced to have 2 marketing folder one for each language. It’s hard enough to look after one folder now you have 2 in separate location, not to mention about a company with offices worldwide deploying more than 5 languages.

Multilingual content in 5.6

In Claromentis 5.6 we are going to introduce built-in multilingual support in Publish. It is so simple to setup, in fact you don’t need to setup anything,

Language Bar

You’ll see language bar displayed when you editing a page to add new content in new language just click “add language” and existing content will be automatically copied ready to be translated.

Know your language

Content based on your preferred language set in “my settings” will be automatically displayed.  For example you may have set your language to “Spanish”, if there is no “Spanish” content of the page you want to see you will be automatically presented with “default language” which in most cases will be “English”.

Unified URL

Say you speak English; you can send a URL of a content page in English to your employees in Japan, when they open it, they will relevant page in Japanese.
Example screenshot below and feel free to give us feedback

Prod-Content 5.6, Claromentis, collaboration, internal customer communications, technology

Over the past few years there has been tremendous noise about the benefits of cloud computing, but in reality many businesses are still struggling with the idea.  From what I heard there are 3 main concerns:

Where is my data?

It’s a human nature that we still pretty much need physical contact. The idea that our data will be located among millions of others somewhere which we don’t know exactly is scary.  Some might still think our data is equivalent of piece of paper stored in unknown place with millions of other papers.

Security

We all heard the benefit that could computing in a managed infrastructure will guarantee security, from the latest patches of the OS up to cross-continental back-ups. Most organisations are still concern about security of cloud computing even though it is a safer than leaving it in your office and you find out the next day the office was flooded.

Change

One issue related to cloud computing is the concern of IT Downsizing. As more and more services related to IT become outsourced and centralized many IT jobs will become obsolete. Some says cloud computing will flourish in current economic situation but in the other hand businesses are facing difficult decisions.

Share your thoughts
Do you think cloud computing is suitable for your organisation? Share your thoughts and read more about claromentis model of software deployment.

Solutions cloud computing, development vision, intranet, intranet consultancy, software, technology, web 2.0

As you might noticed, Claromentis Intranet Manager uses BBCode in some of its applications such as Forum Post and News.

BBCode was devised to provide a safer, easier and more limited way of allowing users to format their messages. Programmer convenience was certainly another factor, as BBCode is very simple to implement.

Some implementations of BBCode have suffered problems mainly user interface, Intranet users have already become accustomed using WYSIWYG editor.

Claromentis 5.6 introduces new way to handle with this situation from the programmer point of view there is no drawback, it is still an old BBCode but users get a WYSIWYG interface.

Check out our screenshot below:

Resources-Technical Claromentis 5.6, Design, intranet news, technology, user interface

Aurora

This week Mozilla labs took step to open up its idea factory asking for community help to develop next big ideas for the future browsers.

They said, “You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program,” says the announcement. “Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open-source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.”

It’s the design, mockups, prototypes time for everyone who are welcomed to contribute. It looks like Mozilla not even worried if their major competitors would tap into the ideas gathered.

Solutions browser, development vision, future, technology