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Filed under: elgg

What's New in Clearvale?

via cvc.clearvale.com

Broadvision continue to improve Clearvale, their Elgg-based enterprise social networking offering. This recording of a recent Webinar covers current updates to the platform and there are a number of features worth highlighting:

  • How tasks and actions are incorporated into the activity stream.
  • Integration with Outlook that allows users to move email conversations into Clearvale.
  • Widgets to display Salesforce reports in Clearvale.
  • Analytics to support adoption.

Their adoption metrics are based on the concept of network usage and assess the value of contribution, using three measures: connectivity, activity, popularity.

Elgg - Better than SharePoint My Site?

We’ve recently profiled MITRE’s social networking site, “Handshake,” as one of the best that we’ve seen. The name “Handshake” alone conveys the intention of MITRE to create an online experience that mimics those we have in person. CEC members, you can dive deeper into the case study and learn why it works better than your average SharePoint MySite or other clunky technologies.
via cecinsider.exbdblogs.com

Interesting comment, on a post about how MITRE measures the impact of its internal social nework. I've blogged about it before, as like Broadvision's Clearvale platform it also runs on Elgg.

Unfortunately the detail for this comment is behind a membership paywall, but based on my experience of Elgg and SharePoint I would caution against assuming this means Elgg is better than SharePoint as a whole. Elgg's architecture is built around people primarily, where as SharePoint is built around information and data. The nuances are important and could well justify the original comment, but not against either platform being better than the other.

MITRE wins a gold International Intranet Innovation Award for Handshake, using Elgg

What is Handshake?

Handshake is a business networking prototype run by the MITRE Corporation, created to support valuable relationships between current employees, industry, vendors, academia, sponsors, former employees, and other FFRDCs. Handshake helps MITRE bring the best talent to bear on sponsor problems of critical national importance.

via handshake.mitre.org

Along with some of our other preferred social computing platforms, we've also done a fair bit of work with Elgg at Headshift in the last few years. But I'm particularly pleased to see Elgg gaining increasing recognition. From a software architecture perspective its quite unique and won't suit every situation, but it does deserve to be counted as an open source option that has great potential for enterprise application.

Clearvale, BroadVision's new Elgg-based social-network-as-a-service

Old skool portal and e-commerce vendor, BroadVision (remember them?), has caused a bit of a stir with the launch of its new social-network-as-a-service, Clearvale. You can use Clearvale to create closed (intranet), restricted (extranet) or open (Internet) networks.

I created a free Clearvale account so I could take a look and was immediately greeted by what is a reasonably customised, but instantly recognisable, as an Elgg site. Actually, this was a pleasant surprise!

Clearvale

Unfortunately, while ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch were off comparing Clearvale to Socialtext, Jive, Ning, Salesforce Chatter, and Status.net neither of them quite joined the dots on this one! It would be nice to see some analysis of what this means for the Elgg platform itself.

Headshift has used Elgg on a number of projects, both here in Australia and also in the UK. If you aren't familiar with Elgg, from a software architecture point of view it is a really interesting and very sophisticated people-centric (rather than being document- or content-centric) platform. The out-of-the-box Elgg interface is really a special set of plugins that run over the core Elgg engine - so in theory you can take the Elgg engine and build an entirely customised application running off it. It also comes with an API (although RWW say Clearvale are building an API, which may mean they are in fact customising it for their implementation of Elgg). However, most people work with the engine and the default front end. At this level, you customise Elgg using plugins that hook into different functions, views and a widget framework - this makes it very modular. Heavy or deap customisation of Elgg can actually get complicated, because its not a case of simply hacking PHP code - you actually have to understand how Elgg works.

So with that in mind, and without fully testing the Clearvale customisations, on first look it does appear they have done a good job of selecting and integrating a number of customisations to create a good set of core tools for people to use. This includes supporting some basic theming options, which isn't something Elgg offers fresh out of the box - so you can add your own company logo and pick from a selection of colour themes. However, unlike hosting your own Elgg you can't add your own plugins or theme plugins (although there is a hint from TechCrunch that they might create a kind of 'app store', which might provide a controlled method for doing this following the Apple model). This also limits your ability to change the overall information architecture, to suit the needs of your project or organisation. One thing I did notice is that site doesn't automatically default to HTTPS, even if you choose to create a closed network, but it does appear to work over a secure connection.

Incidentally, Clearvale aren't the only people playing in this space. Elgg themselves also have a hosted service, currently in beta that might also be worth looking at.