Intranet Management Software Blog

Well, I’m sure the title is not original, but in the context of Claromentis, this is definitely a first!

Claromentis has always had a powerful news system, ensuring that Intranet Administrators can create, manage and deliver news articles to their users. With nearly all of our customers forcing the intranet homepage upon their staff whenever a browser is opened, the news is always an important detail of the intranet content, not only as a means of delivering company and market related information, but also a means of ensuring levels of interest is kept high. Like all web related content, it’s vital to ensure the information is always up-to-date and relevant. Static information becomes unattractive very quickly, particularly in a world that is focusing on the dynamic and creative content in Web 2.0 implementations. So what relevance does this have to blogging? It’s just a news system you say?? Well not any longer….

In Claromentis 5.4, we have introduced the ability to make use of the already proven news management application to allow users to blog also. Whilst still ensuring a strong permission system is upheld in the back-end, users now have the ability to create news articles within individually controlled news channels, effectively creating a blogging platform that all users can use.

The creation of the news channels remains under the control of the news administrators, but users have the ability to subscribe themselves to individual or group blogs, as well as commenting on blog posts, or even managing their own blog.

Not only is this a great step forwards for the Claromentis framework, pushing it closer to the idealism of Web 2.0, but this is a fantastic opportunity for our existing clients to encourage more interactivity within their intranets to increase the distribution of the management for the homepage content. This ultimately makes the homepage content more attractive, more dynamic, and richer than ever before.

Combine this with Smart Objects(coming soon), and the blogging capabilities within Claromentis will be almost endless.

For more information about the Claromentis News and Blogging system, visit our website or contact us at info@claromentis.com

Products intranet blogging, intranet news

A significant trend has been happening over the last few years here at Claromentis, as our technology – and the space in which we operate - continues to mature and evolve at bewildering rates for those not used to the evolution of web based software.

I have given two specific high level presentations recently – and also redesigned from scratch a proposal document for a significant global company based in the USA – and I realised that neither the presentation or the proposal – for separate companies – included any details at all about our intranet software!

We keep a gallery of our web presence over the years, in fact this post by Michael is in interesting in this regard, and of course we can retrieve and review proposals we delivered to a range of companies looking for intranet solutions over the last 5 years.

There is a quite remarkable sea change here, obvious in just a surface scan of the relevant documents. In previous years we would always discuss features and functionality – because the general web space was moving so fast and every ISV, not just Claromentis, needed to continue to demonstrate that our solutions contained the functionality that our prospective clients needed.

In 2008 we have instead discussed our track record, our client base, global presence, our levels of customization and the fact that we are a PHP intranet framework that is commercially supported and open source extendable – all strategic issues that reflect our ability to partner with a new customer over the 5 year time frame to deliver their own as yet unplanned requirements. We are engaged in portals now for such critical issues as Competitive Marketing Intelligence, Sustainability portals, and managing Policies and procedures in a new online way to produce dramatic improvements in legislative compliance.

No-one is that interested in the details – yesterdays intranet peaks have become today’s functional commodities. Our discussions have genuinely moved back to where the requirements originated, and not on how they will be delivered in technical detail. And our conversations are more and more at board level. Long may it continue – it is about time the collaboration platform world delivered on its hyped up promises of yesteryear.

Solutions intranet software discussions, intranet software proposals

With clients now upgrading to Claromentis 5.4, we will have the fist opportunity to gain feedback on a significant new application – Quality Manager.

This application has been sponsored by one of our largest companies and provides important functionality for the management of policies and procedures.

It moves Policies and Procedures onto a truly online world, and away from our previous solution of using Document manager to provide version controlled online files.

The new online Quality Manager means:

• Procedures and Manuals will be automatically updated when included procedures change, radically simplifying the business problem of maintaining a complex information layer
• Compliance will be simpler
• Online Policies and Procedures can be exported to many formats
• Printed copies can be marked automatically as outside the quality management system
• Different business units will automatically see the same content with their own brand – but there is only one Policy to maintain.

We are now working on the extension of this application to provide an enterprise level environment for the management of ISO or other legislative Audits – these two applications working together will provide the complete solution for Quality Managers.

Prod-Quality policies and procedures, quality management software, software

E-mail Standards Project

Most of us are aware of “web standards” and its affects on creating “user friendly web based intranet software“, but it is very hard to say the same about the “e-mail standards“. Are the newsletters and announcment mails you send properly displayed on all e-mail clients? If you would like to know about it more, you can visit Email Standards Project website.

You can find very detailed information from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, From Google Mail to Yahoo! Mail and other web based e-mail clients. There is also a blog for this project.

Resources-Technical e-mail standards, web standards

Today we agreed to launch an intern program, as following our move to central Brighton we can have a lot more involvement with the rich pool of young digital talent that surrounds us, and can take the chance to provide really valuable work experience in 2 main areas of our business:

Marketing – we have so much to do and some very interesting vertical sector and competitor profiling to do. We are working on many marketing initiatives that are important for the success of the business.

IT Support – we offer a very interesting environment for IT support students. We have to support many browsers, Operating systems and databases – and we have a client base that is truly global and divers. With an active client support portal and our won internal tracking systems this would be a valuable experience for any IT intern.

We will make an announcement on the site in the next few days, and contact the local universities with the requirements for the roles we have.

Personally I look forward to working with talented and ambitious young people in Brighton who are passionate about what the internet can do for our commercial clients, as well as the global pool of PHP developers out there.

Home internet intern program, web intern

Document Commenting

Document Commenting is coming in Claromentis 5.5.

This feature allows user to add comments or notes to a stored document and build threaded discussion based on the version changes.

This is particularly useful for our clients in construction, engineering and architecture where individual CAD files are potentially very large and edited directly only by specialists.

Prod-Document 5, Claromentis, new features

I just wanted to share with you a challenge we have.

We need to make sure our Linux client base, who have leveraged our APIs and the open source community to produce great bespoke intranet applications, are well aware of what we have to offer - without offending our very valuable Windows server customers for whom we also offer a very strong intranet solution - in fact the same core code.

You can read my short explanation of this marketing problem here.

Solutions Old - Open Source Intranets

It’s hard to imagine what those with colour blindness are seeing. As we all know colour blindness affects a significant amount of the population. It is mostly caused by genetic condition but there are certain circumstances such as brain or nerve damage which also potentialy cause colour blindness.

Designer uses colour to convey various messages, it is an efficient communication tool.
From colour-coded background, traffic lights, status indicator, icons. It is very important to pick the right colour to ensure these messages can be communicated clearly.

Colour Blind Comparison of Claromentis Web Page

Claromentis Intranet Solutions page as seen using Colour Blind Web Filter

Want to see your website as seen by colour blind ? Visit Colour Blind Web Filter

Services Design

Designers are independent. In work, mindset and lifestyle. Yet in this Web age aren’t we losing independence? For most designers the first tool to start designing from is the Adobe suite, a quite impressive set of tools that help us to make our work easier. But don’t we rely too much on Adobe? For years people have been watching how Microsoft dominated the market. We lament that its applications are bloated and criticize its efforts to wipe away competitors. But instead of taking a stand, we continue to buy its products and we continue to moan.

We always have options. And in the design process we have them too. At the moment we don’t really know to what level open source applications can compete with Adobe. But with support, with independent minds and strong community involvement, the open source movement can grow. Competition is a part of the progress and so is the choice. We need to maintain a competitive arena in design. And we need good open source alternatives for the tools we use. Independent start-ups are the lifeblood of the industry and the breath of fresh air we all need.

But apart from Microsoft, Adobe and the latest computer system to run these applications, you may have problems setting up a professional open source environment which would perfectly meet your needs. We need better open source applications for designers. And we need to work together to produce them and then use them. Just think for a second: how many young designers can afford Adobe anyway? Do we not need a platform that supports us while we support it? Doesn’t open source represent the true spirit of design?

Nick Pretorius,
[Source]

Solutions Adobe, Design, Microsoft, open source

2005

• Designed for 800×600
• No CMS
• Semi static websites

2006

• First CMS Implementation
• Designed for 800×600
• Dynamic PHP pages
• Horizontal Drop-down menu navigation

2007-2008

• Designed for 1024×768
• First to introduced “Product Motives” diagram
• Table-less design
• CSS Menu
• Mid 2008 - SEO Implementation

2008-2009 (Concept)

• Designed for 1024×768
• Non drop-down menu navigation
• Rich footer

Services Claromentis, Design, Logo