Intranet News

News is an extensive application which allows administrators to create, categorise and publish topical news articles to a wide audience within Claromentis. Internal communication is critical for any company and an efficient method of making appropriate news available to a permissioned user base is a fundamental part of any strategy. The more relevant the news is to each user the more interest and participation the news will create. Long gone are the days of having to email the whole company or have notice boards scattered around the building. The intranet provides full functionality to manage and distribute news throughout the corporation.

There are two types of news, Headline news and announcements. Both are permission based, and both are displayed in different locations on the intranet. It is common for headline news to be displayed in the centre of the Homepage and announcements to be displayed within one of the outside columns.

News Channels Summary

Because all companies have a requirement to publish news that all users will see, there is a default news channel that all users are assigned to.

This default news channel cannot be changed or removed, and should be used as a master news channel if you wish all your users to view the headline news article that you are creating. Claromentis also provides a mechanism for user to easily subscribe to the news they want to see, as well as being presented with default news articles when published.

This division of news into information streams that can be easily permissioned is the concept of 'channels' in intranet news. To provide news channels to the users they should be created from the news administration panel prior to creating the relevant news articles.

News Channel Structure

Users with the required access can edit the permissions of any particular news article by clicking on the Edit link under the Permissions column. You can add users to news channels and assign different permissions to different users by responding to the easy to use universal permission dialog.

News is delivered through templates, these can be edited for each news channel by clicking on Edit link under Template column. There is a concept of default layout templates if no special layouts are required for a channel.

Headline News

Headline news is the news that is commonly displayed in the centre of the home page - however this is entirely customisable by the designers and information architects that design your Claromentis interface.

Although headline news is generally news that is relevant to all employees of the company, it is possible to define which users can view each headline news article. Headline news can be assigned to a News Channel, so that the news articles are only displayed to the relevant people. The users can choose to subscribe to the news channels that they feel are appropriate to them.

Announcements

Announcements are in essence news items that are displayed in another location in the interface from the main headline news.

In this way they can become for example health and safety alerts, social announcements or any other kind of information appropriate to your company, and presented in an appropriate format. Publishing announcements is extremely easy and intuitive - define a date they should be posted, define the users that should see it and enter the text of the announcement.

News Configuration and Archive

Configuration allows you to define how many news items are displayed on the Home page. It is also possible to define how big the news images should be. Setting just a fixed height or width will ensure that the images are not distorted when the system displays then. It is recommended that only the Height or width is defined.

When a news item has expired or the list of published news exceeds the display limit it will be placed into the news archive for search and review at a later date. Simply click on the 'View all news articles' link to view the archive. The archive is fully searchable.

News Notification

When a news article is created, the publisher of the news can send a notification to all users with view rights.

This concept of notifications is used throughout Claromentis, when attention should be drawn to new or modified information within the portal. This is used when it is important to make sure users are aware of the news - the notification will be received by email or pop-up, according to the users preference.

Intranet Blogging, TAGs and Comments

The Claromentis news system is in fact a fully featured Blog, including tagging, commenting, related news, and auto generation of blogs for each month.

Where appropriate the interface can present the news channel as an intuitive to use Blog, encouraging participation by the relevant users. Blogs can be permissioned for any user group - for example a sales team Blog, and mounted within any publish page as an integral part of that departments presence within the portal.

As a further enhancement as part of 5.7 news articles can now have public permissions, enabling clients to maintain news across the public sites as well as the intranet / extranet.