Based in Columbia, South America, Nivel Siete delivers e-learning and other web-based solutions for the corporate and higher education markets. The team brings an impressive track record, having served more than 130 customers across 10 countries, including a number of global brands such as Mazda and Bayer. Nivel Siete's appointment will enable it to market and deliver Elgg consultancy, support and customized social networks for customers with the assurance that it is accredited by the company behind the Elgg software. You can read more about the announcement here.

We will be expanding our network of partners as the year progresses and I look forward to announcing further appointments over the coming months.

This will be based on the forthcoming Elgg v1.8 and will include a number of options that will enable users to upscale and customize their networks.  I’ll keep you posted on developments and the evolving feature set as we near launch. Head over to elgg.com if you’d like to register an interest in the service and receive updates about what’s on offer.

In parallel, the Elgg team has received many enquiries over the past few months from people looking for help with planning, customizing and implementing their in-house Elgg networks. We’re a fairly small team, so it’s not been possible to provide assistance in all cases, especially given the geographical diversity of the projects. But the volume of requests has focused our minds on the benefits of establishing a global network of Elgg partners who can meet the growing demand.

We’re keen to make sure this is executed carefully and properly, so we’ll start by appointing ‘Community Partners’ who have a track record of contributing to the Elgg community and who demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the further development of Elgg in the future.  Later on this year we’ll be looking at ‘Commercial Partners’ who will be fully accredited by us to offer Elgg-related commercial services to clients.  Drop me a line if you’d like to find out more about partnership opportunities.

That’s it for now.  Get in touch if you’d like to discuss our services in more detail or would like to talk about using Elgg within your organization: Email me.

As a result of this feedback, we’ve refined the services available on elgg.com so they better meet the requirements of customers.

We have now separated out the components of the service into a menu of options, including:

- Support for Elgg-powered networks
- Our Managed service, where we host the infrastructure and provide full support and upgrades
- Consulting and training services to help customers plan and implement an Elgg network

We’ve also looked at our growing and popular range of Extensions such as ElggMulti, which are particularly suited to larger networks, and have decided to make these individually available on an annual subscription basis, which includes support, updates and upgrades.

We will be launching ElggExpress over the coming weeks. This builds on the former ‘ElggLite’ service and offers a one-stop solution that includes all the features of Elgg, hosted in a cloud-based environment so you can be up and running within minutes. It comes with a range of capacity, user and pricing options and even includes a free 30-day trial period.

Finally, ElggCampus has become our ‘turn key’ solution for larger organizations that want to implement a social layer into their technology stack. It’s particularly suited to businesses, academic institutions or government bodies that want to run large networks or a series of networks/sub-networks.

Further information is available on the site www.elgg.com.

If you’d like to discuss these services and solutions in more detail, or would like to talk about using Elgg within your organization, please get in touch: richard@elgg.com