Many thanks to all the customers in our beta service for sharing their feedback and ideas.  We're looking forward to announcing additional features and enhancements to the service over the coming weeks.

Up until now, the service has been available on an invitation-only basis, but following a successful first month of beta trials, we're opening up the service to more users and you can now apply for a network by signing up at elgg.com.

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.

You can set up a Channel, invite colleagues or followers in, and then hold Conversations or share content such as documents, videos, etc. with only the people in that Channel.  You can even filter your view of Conversations in order to see just the content relating to the Channel.  It's a great way of working with specific groups of people and ensuring you get to focus on the Conversations that matter to you.

Check out the video guide below to see how Channels work.  You can also try it out in the Demo site at demo.elgg.com.  

We've already had thousands of organizations pre-registering for a beta invitation, so invites are being issued on a first-come-first-served basis . We're still taking registrations and will accelerate the volume of beta invitations over the Summer, pending a full launch in the Autumn.

In the meantime, you can try out a Demo of the service at demo.elgg.com.  This site showcases many of the powerful features you can expect when you sign up for your own network, including the new Conversations tool and the ability to filter or restrict content amongst specific groups of users via Channels.  Note that because it's a public Demo site you can't configure the tools or theme it as you would with your own network.  We're also purging the data from time to time to stop it getting too cluttered.

IEC provides education around leadership development and executive coaching in the Asia-Pacific region.  Its programs offer professional coaches a mix of pre- and post- training exercises, as well as face-to-face training. IEC was looking for a way to extend client engagement at the pre- and post-training stages of their programs and encourage participation with other learners. They engaged Headshift to create a series of customised community platforms based on Elgg. 

The project was a huge success, resulting in:

• Increased visibility and community participation;
• Greater rapport between delegates, enabling them to work together more effectively at the face-to-face training sessions; and
• Improved transparency and accountability through the online community, which ultimately led to an increase in course completion rates.

Further details can be found here.  It’s a great example of how Elgg can be used to foster collaboration and improve engagement and participation in the e-learning space. 

Many thanks to Anne Bartlett-Bragg and her team at Headshift for sharing this great news with us. Do you have an example of a great Elgg implementation you'd like to share on this blog?  If so, get in touch!

In short, he’d experienced an issue not only with customer service when trying to retrieve his account, but also with the fundamental matter of ownership and control of data and the customer relationships that are key to his business.

It raises important points for the growing number of organizations looking to use social networking to communicate, collaborate and build their brands. Whilst many quite rightly take steps to exercise corporate governance by managing risks, nurturing customer relationships and protecting their brands, all this can break down if they entrust their data and marketing effort to social networking sites who can do pretty much what they want.

If you’re an organization of any kind – be it a company, educational establishment or even government-related body - it makes a lot of sense to run your own core social network and then feed information out to services like Facebook as you see fit. You can do this very effectively with open source platforms like Elgg.  Indeed at Elgg.com you'll be able to have it hosted for you, whilst retaining full ownership and control of data as well as being able to use your own branding, all for less than the price of a daily cup of coffee.

I believe organizations will increasingly look for more robustness and control in their social environments, especially as enterprise-wide social networking becomes core to internal and external communication, collaboration and brand development. 

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

I recently joined Elgg in a business development capacity. Having followed the project for a while, I'm excited by its potential and am looking forward to further developing the open source business opportunities that are available.

Over the past couple of weeks I've spoken to a number of current and prospective Elgg users, from small educational groups right through to large organisations. The feedback has been very positive and is really helping us to refine and shape our services for businesses and organisations. I look forward to updating you further on this over the coming weeks!

If you are interested in using Elgg within your company or would like to talk about our business direction, please get in touch: richard@elgg.com