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Archive for the ‘Resources-Technical’ Category

Claromentis extends LDAP support beyond Active Directory

April 29th, 2011

I am pleased to say that as part of Claromentis 6.1 ( currently in Beta ) we have significantly improved our intranet support for LDAP beyond the established support for Microsoft Active Directory that we have had for many years.

The difference between LDAP servers is in the way how they store users accounts and groups information – different servers use different attributes (properties) to indicate record type “user”, “group”, account state etc., a different property name that stores username and some other things. Plus Windows uses “domains” which are not really a part of LDAP.

Previously we had all these properties hard-coded so they match the ones used in Microsoft Active Directory. Now they can be defined in our config file. Currently our support documentation contains configuration options valid for AD and for Novell (as these are two servers that we have production tested in Claromentis 6.1), but it is architected to correctly communicate with other LDAP servers such as OpenLDAP or Samba LDAP server.

This fits very well with one of our core values of choice and cross platform support, and is a very positive development for those companies that require an intranet single sign on but do not use active directory!

Intranet-Extranet, Resources-Technical, The Framework , , , ,

The Claromentis Team

September 23rd, 2010

I often ask myself how Claromentis continues to deliver quality solutions and meet deadlines that appeared impossible from the start. It’s only when I’m traveling and “outside the box” do I realize what it really takes to achieve the seemingly unachievable….

Here are the golden rules I see work for us at present:

1. At Claromentis, we refer to our staff collectively as “The Team”. We work together as a team; sharing delight, happiness, frustrations and success in all that we do within the workplace (and regularly outside of work also)

2. Every member of the Claromentis Team brings something different to the table, and everything brought to the table is considered as equal value – regardless of the weight or longevity behind the person presenting it. We are all equal.

3. We each share our opinions freely and contribute to tasks, discussions and problem solving that occur day-to-day – regardless of our direct involvement in the subject. No-one’s opinion is ignored, no opinion is ever incorrect/wrong.

4. We praise each other. If someone does something we like, we tell them. Praise creates a positive attitude and a sense of achievement. We all like positive feedback and rewards – so don’t ever hesitate telling someone they’ve done a good job

5. Freedom – Freedom of speech, creativity, flexibility and respect. Say what you feel, throw those wild ideas out there, throw-in an objective opinion, get involved with some scribbles/art/design on one of the 7 whiteboards, introduce something new to the way we work, go get a haircut outside of your lunch-break, respect the peace if someone needs it, be considerate of others (share sweets/chocolate and ice-cream etc)….

6. Conversation is crucial. We talk to each other throughout the day. We discuss projects, life, technology, jokes etc. This helps creative an atmosphere that everyone is comfortable with… a place that feels more relaxed, despite pressures of looming deadlines.

7. Ask questions – “If you don’t ask, you won’t get” – “If you don’t ask, you might deprive someone of the opportunity to help you”. We all ask questions; even if it’s something that we should know ourselves… just don’t ever be afraid of asking questions. We all do this at Claromentis, and it’s something that helps bring us together and create a sense of value.

8. If you don’t agree with it, challenge it. Claromentis allows anyone to challenge the things we do, the way we work and how we go about our business. A challenge is only “attacking” if it’s received like so. Without a challenge; an alternative opinion; you may never see or believe of a better way of achieving a goal.

9. Don’t stop learning, don’t stop teaching, and don’t stop sharing…. Claromentis pushing everyone to achieve things that might not believe he or she can/could/ever could. We encourage our staff to push their boundaries and extend their skills. This is beneficial for the individual as well as the company, and keeps minds active.

10. Support each other – Despite us all having our own domains to protect and serve, all Claromentis staff have an open ethos on helping others. Regardless of the topic, the time, the pressure of our own projects, we will always try our best to support a colleague in need.

These are just some of the things that keep our team culture alive and healthy (I could have gone on). All the points above give us a sense of belonging and value – something that I believe is crucial to creating a successful team; a successful organization.

So while I prepare for my second day of training in Calgary, Canada, I can sleep comforted by the knowledge that I have a team of highly skilled individuals backing me.

If I log a few issues with them tonight, I’m 100% confident that they’ll be resolved by the time I wake up tomorrow morning. This confirms to me that we have an unbeatable team…one that continues to grow, and one that will continue to strengthen.

Resources-Technical

Using ANSI Style SQL

September 5th, 2010
As a software vendor supporting MysQL, Oracle and MS SQL, it is often a challenge to get our developers to write consistent SQL calls for our database abstraction layer. How do we make sure that our queries will work for all 3 databases, easy to read, easy to understand and ultimately easy to support.
A lot of developers choose to work with the old Theta style when writing queries, as it is simpler to understand to begin with, for example
SELECT e.name, d.dept_name, r.region_name
FROM employee e, dept d, region r
WHERE d.id=e.dept_id
AND d.region_id=r.id
AND r.region_name=’EMEA’;
In ANSI style, this is equivalent to
SELECT e.name, d.dept_name, r.region_name
FROM employee e
INNER JOIN dept d on d.id=e.dept_id
INNER JOIN region r on r.id=d.region_id
WHERE r.region_name=’EMEA’;
I took me a while myself to become an ANSI style convert, but once I am used to using it, I can see that ANSI style offers many advantages.
Absolute CLARITY when performing outer joins.
I have worked with databases for close to 19 years, and I always get confused when using (+) in an outer join. An outer join uses a (+) on the side of the operator where we want to have nulls returned of if no value matches (now who can remember that?) ANSI style outer joins is so much more intuitive.
– When t2 might have no value matched
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON t1.col1=t2.col1;
– When t1 might have no value matched
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
RIGHT JOIN table2 t2 ON t1.col1=t2.col1;
– When no value matched could be on either table
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
FULL OUTER JOIN table2 t2 ON t1.col1=t2.col1;
ANSI makes you think and write better queries
it makes you think about how you want the database engine to process your query. Rather than just stringing all your tables in the FROM clause (like FROM table1, table2, table3, table4) and hope for the best, it makes you think which one is your base table, what filtering you want applied to this table, and then whether a particular join functions as a filtering, or more as an enrichment. In the example below, I am interested to find the skillsets owned by an employee with the name SMITH who works in SUPPORT. So the way to write this query, is to as quickly as possible filter out the data that we do need from the EMP/DEPT table, prior to joining with the SKILLS table.
SELECT e.first_name, e.surname, d.dept_name, s.skill_name
FROM emp e
JOIN dept d ON d.id=e.dept_id and d.dept_name=’SUPPORT’ and e.surname=’SMITH’
JOIN SKILLS s on e.id=s.emp_id ;

Resources-Technical

Take the Tour

July 15th, 2010
I have been asked to review the new “Take the Tour” for Policy Manager

For quite a while now, Claromentis has provided a place for visitors to have a play with Claromentis applications through our demo site. This works really well for some products, such as Intranet/Extranet manager, where features are intuitive and straightforward for users to try out. For other products though, not so straightforward.

I was therefore quite excited to be ask to review our first attempt to produce “Take the Tour” to explain about our Policy Manager product.

Here are some comments that I can share, please feel free to agree or disagree.

  • Loading Time – I first attempted to review the tour from a pub in our local village, via iPad, and found response times quite slow when loading the diagrams within the page. Even though in this occassion, the one to blame is the poor 3G reception, I think it is worth noting, though, that visitors would be discouraged if the tour takes too long to load.
  • Navigation within the Tour – The next thing which strikes me was where to start. Where should I begin, top left corner? In this toour I was presented with a well laid out screenshots of the application, with explanations about different components within each snapshot, however I am stil lost. As a visitor, I would like to be guided with simple numbering which would give me the assurance that I am navigating correctly, and would guide me through a logical order of explanation of the relevant features
  • Videos – If we need to add videos in order to explain some features better, keep each video as concise and short as possible, and no music, please ….

Prod-Quality, Products, Resources-Technical

MySQL Workbench – cross platform MySQL GUI

May 5th, 2010

mysql-workbench

As we  all know MySQL is the most popular open source SQL database available until today. If you’re like me – not comfortable with command line SQL – then one of the most popular GUI tools is phpMyAdmin. a MySQL adminstration application which is written in PHP.

Oracle provides an alternative that allow you graphically work with MySQL databases which is called MySQL Workbench. It is a cross-platform GUI tools available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Anyone has some experience using this tool ? if so please share…

Resources-Technical , ,

News Channel “Cloud” Component

December 15th, 2009

Recently, I was working on a news component to generate a “cloud” of News Channels in our Intranet to allow our users to navigate our news articles with ease. The “first draft” worked nicely – It generated a list of news channels from the system based on a users permissions and put them into a styled infobox – nice.

Having put this into the Claromentis Component Library, it was suggested by Nigel that we take this one step further… to modify the component code, allowing users to add in some additional parameters and generate a more commonly known tag cloud, including randomization of the results returned, with varying font sizes depending on the most popular channels – now we’re talking!

After some code changes and some input from Dan at Claromentis, the component was modified to generate something that looks a little something like this:

Random = TrueRandom = False

The view can be changed by editing the user parameters on the component code as mentioned above.

To view a full description of the coponent and how to implement it, see here: http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/components:news_cloud

Until next time,

Craig

Intranet-Extranet, Partners, Resources-Technical ,

Claromentis Developers Community

November 25th, 2009

Developer Community
We are pleased to announce that the developers community is up and running, with a code repository for sharing components, plug-ins, and even applications.

A summary and instructions are on the WIKI, please do provide feedback as to how we can make the community valuable and easy to interact with.

Resources-Technical

Google Chrome OS

November 22nd, 2009

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 , ,

New Claromentis Intranet Components

November 4th, 2009

As Claromentis continues to grow in the scope and range of products and applications, the framework is being actively developed and enhanced by the use of components to provide flexible, configurable functionality for clients wishing to use them.

Just in the last week the following very useful components have been added :

Anniversary Intranet Component

The Anniversary component gives you the ability to summarily compare dates attached to users profiles within Claromentis through the use of metadata.

Once configured, not only can you change how far in the future you’d like to list events – up to one whole year from today, but also how many user anniversaries you’d like shown.

This anniversary component could be useful for anything from showing birthday information for employees, to listing anniversaries of employment with your company – there are lots of opportunities for configuration of this component.
 
File Review Intranet Component

The File Review component also through the use of custom metadata allows you to configure multiple options for ensuring that you always know what review dates are coming for your files.

This component allows you to change how files are listed and also what scope of listing to give. For example: you can also attach a reviewer to the component, and it’ll list also for the reviewer of the file; you can show review dates to everyone – ideal for a departmental vi.  The major advantage of this component is how configurable it is, you can show due dates to all, or just the reviewer, or just the owner, or even both the owner and the reviewer; on top of which you can change how far ahead it is looking for document review dates, and it will make it really clear to the viewers when something is overdue for review!

intranet_components
 
RSS Reader Intranet Component

The RSS Reader component makes reading news or events easy, be it from an external source such as the BBC or using your own internal RSS feed.

The component allows two modes of reading, one is a fixed feed experience – designed for when you want a feed readable by all without them being able to customize where it is reading from; the second makes use of custom metadata, allowing your end user to configure where the news is coming from, so that the component is always personal to them.

Interested clients should contact us – we have these components available on our development WIKI and we are currently considering if they should be included in the core distributive.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Resources-Technical ,

Document Permission Report

October 27th, 2009

There has been many post on the subject related to permission lately, and I want to show a hidden ‘gem’ in the admin panel of Claromentis Document Management which is going to help us monitor and manage permission better.

Complex Permission System

Claromentis Document Management System has comprehensive permission system, which means you can define permission by extranet area, role, group down to individual users. The permission can also inherited from the folder above as well as applied on the individual file itself.

Access Report

When you logging in to the system of course you can only see the document that you are allowed to see, but as you know from admin you can see all files.
As a document administrator you may be asked by your manager to create a report showing what a particular user can see or not see on the system.

They might be a business partners or contractors, while you want to make sure they have access to the information they need, you want to make sure there is no permission leak. You don’t want the corporate sensitive information exposed to this type of users.

What’s new in Claromentis

We created  a new functionality called  “Document Permission Report” and it is available from admin panel from Claromentis 5.6.3 onwards.

Under utilities in Document Panel click on “Document Permission Report”
Where you can select a user and get the permission report instantly, you can also export it to CSV format.

Screenshot

document permission report

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Project, Products, Resources-Technical , ,