I am thrilled that two developers will be joining our UK office to provide support in our bespoke work for our customers around the world. Their tasks are not only bespoke applications but also e-form plug ins to assist with more complex form based work flows and processes.
The exciting parallel development is that we are scheduling long term visits from our core outsourced team into our UK team as well. This will produce a healthy cross fertilization of best practices and closer cooperation, with the UK team also helping with tighter core product specifications to go back to the core team.
At the same time we are decoupling some of our core intranet applications to allow them to be developed more rapidly than the 3 or 4 releases per year of Claromentis core code. At least one of these applications, Sales Manager, will be taken over by UK developers to increase the efficiency of customer feedback for this important application.
While this is all great – I would be really interested in hearing from anyone who has been through a similar process of combining in house developers with offshore development of complex products.
Services
bespoke development, intranet development
Pudsey the bear took a trip to the Claromentis office in Brighton this week as part of a fundraising campaign run by our client CareUK.
Pudsey traveled a total of around 450 miles on his trip to Brighton, and was reported to be suffering from tiredness at the end of it all.
Pudsey Bear said “It was a long trip, but I’m glad I took it. The Claromentis Intranet Software is a great application framework and I’m pleased I was given the chance to see where it comes from. I’m really tired after the trip, but to watch the sun going down over the South Coast was an amazing experience and I’m glad I did it”.
Claromentis looks forward to Pudsey returning again sometime in the near future.
Pudsey Visits Brighton
Partners
brighton, charity, Claromentis, fun
We have recently released major applications - Quality Manager for Policies and Procedures and Project Manager for Project Management Software.
Although this is exciting - new applications get us to new markets and are great fun for us all -I am reminded that some progress is incremental, and benefits from our continual flow of customer enhancement requests.
A case in point today - I was reviewing Claromentis 5.5 and saw the latest format of the notifications that are sent when information has changed that is relevant to the recipient.
Now I can see in the notification itself, sent to my email, exactly what has changed, what the version is, and one click to review the actual information - the application file or any other object. In previous versions this worked, but was not so elegant or convenient.
Intranet Notifications
These kind of incremental improvements do not get shouted from the rooftops, but collectively make a significant difference to our intranet software suite and we do indeed recognize their importance!
Products
Intranet functionality
We have seen video files used in several areas within Claromentis intranet systems – here are some examples with comments.
1. The corporate talking head. This is common in certain more corporate Marcoms solutions - where departments see these are a way to get the management story across in a more friendly way.
2. Training videos. We have manufacturing customers that use videos to show agents and distributors how to perform various hardware tasks - highly effective. Pictures here really do speak a thousand words. Especially if the audience is not always English speaking.
3. Software training - short animations of people using the software demonstrate how to perform various tasks. Becoming easy to produce and very low cost.
There are some problems, in my opinion, with use of videos on corporate intranets.
For example a user will get very irritated once they have seen any talking head animation more than once. So the idea of promoting a departmental home page using a manager discussing the departments goals and contributions is fine – providing it does not play unless I click on it. Before it plays – I should see something else in its place. In general this is a good example of where the phase 1 system might need replacing with phase 1.1 very soon after launch!
In general this idea of “information before I play it” can be extended – it is much better to have a gateway page describing and cataloging videos on the intranet – preferably using universal metadata as used in Claromentis to optimize relevancy and speed of searching – so that a user is well informed before they select a video to watch – rather than surprising them with possibly irrelevant animations on an otherwise useful resource.
Similarly make sure the files are optimized and delivered for fast access. In fact – some useful media files need no image at all – for example on people profiles why not have an audio clip from the user about their interests and current activities – or perhaps in global corporations have an audio file of how to properly pronounce their name. Effective, personal and simple.
Prod-Intranet
intranet, multimedia files
I posted an article on my personal blog today, and then I thought that perhaps a similar discussion should be on the company blog.
In summary I was commenting that clients often don’t give nearly enough emphasis to the effort involved in actually creating content - deciding the appropriate delivery mechanism for each type of content - and to getting that content moved across to the new solution.
It is as if there was some kind of time lag - they seem concerned whether intranet vendors like Claromentis have some technical feature, whereas it is almost always the case that not only do we have it, we now have multiple solutions for the same requirement – and the client needs to invest time in deciding which one to use for each business need.
We now offer a service to actually migrate intranet information to the new Intranet solution – Claromentis – and we should encourage all new clients to consider this service to maximize their intranet projects chance of success. The solution we offer provides business consultancy, technical delivery, content migration and documentation to ensure intranet projects have the maximum chance of achieving the desired return on investment – in an acceptable time frame.
Services
intranet content
We have talked a lot about project success factors, what company expectations should be – how these can be phased, how intranet return on investment can be measured.
But at the end of the day we sometimes don’t pay quite enough attention to the individual employees of the client that have a role to play – as a general advocate – or as departmental editor/content generator.
At a personal level these people need to be engaged with, planned for, mentored, coached and trained. They need to have what to us are relatively basic concepts – like permission dialog boxes – demonstrated and explained until they are very comfortable. When that is achieved they are more than capable of pushing their department forwards.
Sometimes, on both sides – the intranet software supplier and the client – the individuals a level below true system administrators, but those who really understand what is important to make a departmental area more efficient – get poor attention in our shared excitement to deliver against client management goals. But these are the foot soldiers that make things happen in intranet projects, and we should recognise that and encourage their informed participation.
Home
intranet software
I spent a couple of hours with a potential new customer yesterday – and I had a lot of sympathy for their situation.
They really resent their current intranet supplier, to the extent that they are seeking approval to move to a new intranet technology partner in the next budget cycle.
This is despite the fact that they have many thousands of pages and files to move across - they still feel that the account management approach, and indeed the software functionality with the existing supplier has just broken down so far as to be impossible to continue.
It is so hard for new clients in this situation – to be reassured the new relationship with Claromentis will be better, and that the information migration will be dealt with. As our technology increases so very fast, it is no longer about what we can do – but how can we do it? How can we prove that we are the best intranet supplier to work with ?
Well – it is fun trying! Because we honestly have the aspiration to be the best intranet supplier around. But I can understand this companies fear completely – it is the natural worry that they will move ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’.
To help customers in this situation we now offer an intranet content migration service, which takes place as soon as the proof of concept is signed off and delivers all the deep structure, menus, content, document sand interfaces needed – before the upgrade to the full commercial license.
Home
changing intranet suppliers, intranet content migration service
I am currently working at a client site for consultancy work. This morning I came to the client site and spent a frustrated hour cleaning up my mailbox, as I have yet again reached my email quota, and could not send any more emails before I do some cleaning up.
So I set up a small rule for myself. Sort by subject, and if there are any attachments, delete everything by the latest one, that way, hopefully I would end up with the “latest” version…
It never ceased to surprise me how large companies (and my client is one of the largest blue chips in the world) still do not take advantage of Document Management software or Online Collaboration tools. The irony is that these companies bought various tools and software, however they are disparate, IT driven, too complicated to setup, and ended up not being used. And people end up with the frustration of losing files, version confusion, same document duplicated all over the network, and full mailboxes..
Home
document management, online collaboration
