Intranet Management Software Blog

Image Credit: Disney & Wikipedia

I’ve just got back from watching Tim Burton’s remake Alice in Wonderland in 3D. What a visual masterpiece with amazing attention to details. It feels like immersing into an art form created by 20th century design technology.  I couldn’t believe that original animation, which I watched in my childhood, was created in 1951; even more amazing the story was first published in 1865!

You might be asking, what this movie has to do with Intranet Blog?

Before the Internet

Well the idea of internal communication is not new, since the beginning of civilization people are gathering and exchange knowledge, ideas and collaborate in many forms.  Remember pen and papers?

Your first Intranet

Your first intranet might be old fashioned by today’s standard, you might hate it, It is slow, looks ugly and doesn’t do what you wanted to do. Updating information is painful and there are many more.
But hey, this is a milestone just like the first Alice movie for the first time words comes to live, we may not have 3D technology just yet but hand drawn animation does the job!

Your Intranet – “Remake!”

Fast forward today the Internet is now teaming with real time collaboration, social networking, web application to do almost anything you can think of, computing power, cheaper storage, faster broadband, multi-touch and portable devices, which blur the boundaries between PC, laptop, & phone.

Claromentis is currently developing cool new communication tools with codename “innovate”.  We will be launching this application with an exciting release of Claromentis 6, leveraging what’s possible in web technologies.

Just like the visual masterpiece of Alice in Wonderland, perhaps it’s time to make your Intranet a communication art form.

Products Claromentis, Design, fun, intranet, intranet 2.0

As someone who helps set the vision for a leading intranet software company, I feel that the decisions we need to make are becoming increasingly fascinating and challenging due to 6 main factors:

1.    Intranet providers like Claromentis have pushed the boundaries of what is usefully deliverable as an intranet application into a space few would have believed possible just a few years ago. Companies, vendors and procurement processes are still trying to adjust.

2.    Modern web based technologies that Claromentis leverage have themselves leapt forwards, transforming what is possible within the constraints of a browser based system.

3.    User expectations have quite rightly moved inline with the ubiquitous availability of modern devices with clean, efficient and beautiful interfaces, an obvious example being the i-phone.

4.    Modern development practices are still evolving towards a reliable method for rapid deployment of web based applications that balance speed of deployment with the goal of exceeding client expectations.

5.    Client management teams are themselves trying to plan their route through information management, compliance, marcomms and innovation issues when planning software acquisitions in the corporate web space.

6.    Our software has become a true platform, rather than a set of products.

What a great place to be!

Home intranet priorities

It is common to find an organization to put document management as the core of  its intranet, and to encourage the different team to collaborate,separate workspaces would be assigned to different business areas. And when you arrive at any of workspaces, you will find a windows explorer look alike folders, underneath the shared documents reside. If you know what you are looking for, then you are in luck, otherwise, you might have to spend more time looking.

If an organization is taking the step to implement an intranet to encourage collaboration, to improve knowledge sharing, why go backwards at the same time by choosing to implement it to look like the old method of knowledge sharing via a network drive?

An intranet should not only allow the sharing of information, it should also provide the vehicle for users to easily identify the right information that they need, and the right communication channels to allow the barriers between isolated teams to be broken. Intranet should allow everybody from every part of the company to efficiently and effectively collaborate.

Corporate social networking should be recognized as a platform for employees to meet, to collaborate, to nurture new ideas and to innovate. Organizations which fail to grasp this need risk productivity and creativity drain.

Bring on  Claromentis 6.0 - Innovate, enterprise social media delivered inside the boundaries of your corporate information.

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We had a really interesting client meeting today. The discussions were all about leveraging the very considerable interaction and engagement they had achieved from the phase 1 launch of a Claromentis intranet. This has been very successful and has generated  considerable momentum to move on now to phase 2, building on the success achieved.

We discussed some of the Claromentis solutions for interaction and engagement – including of course the upcoming Innovate application – and one of the surprising comments was that they were initially worried that Innovate looked to complex. ‘We have to make it easy’.

The reason being that some of the users are outreaching social care workers who only received company computers a year or so ago.

How often have I heard that. Make it easy. Of course it is a focus of ours in terms of usability.

What occurred to me in the meeting today was that the most frightening thing of all for intranet users is a completely blank page. We have to guide them, give them confidence to express themselves – then they are off.

Staring at nothing is just paralyzing. The dreaded first page of a book. Micro blogging works because it is a simple, highly manageable, open space set within what is in fact a tightly constrained and structured application. It allows freedom without the capacity for procrastination. The small space for your input focuses you in a way that freedom without limits does not.

Many things will work for intranet users – giving them a blank page is absolutely not one of them.

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Recently there are many discussions among our existing clients and partners about possibility extending granularity of the permission in Document’s folder within Claromentis.

This is our current standard permission where having “Edit” rights to a folder means you simply have rights to add and edit both documents and sub folders.

Some of our clients think that current “edit” permission is not flexible enough, they would like to split simple “edit” into sub-folders and documents.

After digging into our enhancement request database, I discovered that this is just one of the many request around the same subject.
Some says that having permission to view content of the folder should be different from permission to view folder’s properties and audit of the folder (usage statistics).

Others want to have flexibility where not all users with edit permission can run workflow on the same folder.

For a second I thought, “Hey this is getting ridiculous!”  Let’s mock-it up and see what happen if we accommodate all of them:

Can you see something is definitely not right, usability has been compromised to accommodate more granular permission, causing complexity to perform simple task which in most cases we just want simple “Edit”.

This issue raise a philosophical question, “Are we all so stupid so everything has to be over protective?” What’s wrong with a low-tech solution called “discipline”.

My niece is going to celebrate her 1 years old birthday next week. She starts cruising, walking short distances from object to object, she falls often and has many bumps and bruises, but she learns very quickly.

Aren’t we always told that allowing one or two bumps is a good thing?

Solutions Design, document management, fun, humor, intranet software discussions, user interface

As a web development company we still get involved in numerous projects where the likely engagement or traction of an idea is overestimated by our customer to a significant degree.

This is surprising given the economic climate we are fast becoming used to operating in, but perhaps it is just the nature of certain types of entrepreneurs to believe those columns of excel data which based on simple projections extend ever higher  over time – reaching total world dominance in just a couple of nimble tabs.

As a contrast those of us that work in intranet projects know how hard you have to work to capture and retain users, and how easy it is to disappoint them and lose them for long periods of time.

Both as users and as customers we are increasingly demanding and sensitive – if we cant find exactly what we want with minimum effort we will just go to where we can – without leaving a trace in a project that tried hard to work out what we might be looking for, but didn’t get it quite perfect.

My question is why some people are so optimistic about the external world but so realistic about the likely behaviour of our colleagues. Perhaps this is nothing more than replacing some idealized version of a dissatisfied and excited consumer with reality, having got to know our workmates over extended periods of time.

But perhaps the workplace constrains both our imagination and our behaviour – it places us in a routine where we will simply not respond and change only because we did not do that yesterday.

If that is the case then intranet project teams need to bring a dose of external optimism into their projects, work hard to deliver exactly what their colleagues need and not let old practices continue to constrain both behaviour and innovation.

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We’ve been working on this feature for several weeks and now I am delighted to reveal what is “Discuss” to you all.

Discuss is chat feature built right in the Claromentis Intranet Manager. There is no additional configuration or chat client install like Yahoo, or MSN, it just works straight on your browser.

Simply click discuss bar to initiate Discuss and then choose the person you wish to have a chat with. You can hide the discuss window if you want to carry on working.

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Great to review and use the early releases of Discuss over the last few days.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting a series of blogs about this innovative intranet chat application to promote the ability for users to fire up real time 1 to 1 or conference chats with anyone online in the corporate intranet.

We have the first client review shortly and that is a great milestone - but both in its own right and as a platform for the upcoming major Innovate Application these are certainly exciting times!

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We now support Flash Videos directly in Intranet Content Managed publish pages.

The player is built-in.

This is available with the current build of 5.7

Prod-Content content management, flash, flv

Claromentis has been a fully localizable and multi-language system for a while now, but continuing my posts about incremental features in 5.6.5 it is great to see that the intranet news system, with all the channels and tagging features - is now also completely multi-lingual.

Multi Language Intranet News

In exactly the same way as the CMS system works in Claromentis, the identical URL will detect the users preferred language and if the news exists in that language display it for the user.

If news exists in more than one language the user can switch between them using the automatically generated flags.

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