Intranet Management Software Blog

As we continue to work on the definition of what will become Claromentis 6.0 I feel that it is important that we ensure ideas can migrate without effort between applications. For example they mature from initial idea shouts on collaboration walls to collaborative exchanges and onwards to execution as a Project.

collaboration

As an intranet software supplier we are always driven to ensure each application is intuitive and fully functional -  but in the post 2.0 world an important aspect within an integrated framework like Claromentis is to make sure that the transition between applications is effortless, and does not require regeneration of information already captured and exchanged.

In some areas we are strong, but in general I feel we need to have more  awareness of the living evolution of a single idea into something that can be executed by an identified team. We are strong for example at making sure a Project in Project Manager has integrated forums, document management and resources – but not so strong in enabling with a single click the creation from a forum or blog an actual project, as an idea moves from collaboration to execution - with no loss of information.

Solutions intranet ideas, Prod-Intranet

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

Solutions intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

I want to make the relatively simple point that on many occasions the concept of context for a particular question, request for a solution or recommendation can, if we are not careful – remain uncertain – when often it is the most important aspect of any such debate.

What do I mean?

Lets consider a relatively simple example. As part of a large scale implementation of an intranet solution for a very large company we might be asked ‘what would it cost to implement a procedure for submitting purchase order requests?’

The context should include analysis of the following : “Who is asking, and what authority do you have to change an existing project?” “Do you know if your request might conflict with come other stakeholder in the business?” – “What expert knowledge do you have for the correct procedure for submitting PO requests across the business?” “Do you know the scope of the intranet project?” “Do you know what departments are included or excluded as authorized participants for the intranet project?” “If some departments or stakeholders are excluded do you know what the cost would be is we allow two systems to control such a fundamental process?” “Do you know what the cost is of potential errors if we allow multiple systems to coexist?”

Possibly most importantly : “Should I include the cost of establishing if this is a valid request within the context of the established road map for this intranet project?”

These are just a few very trivial examples of what can go unanswered if the context of the question is not established.

One of the Claromentis core values is Clarity, and that means we must make sure when any client asks a question our staff are very aware of any possible misunderstandings due to the context of that question not being clear.

We have a valued reputation as a consultative intranet solution provider. That means we absolutely must be responsible for thinking about context – as the client will very often not be sensitive to this, and expect a short term answer that is valid, but from our point of view too simplistic – and therefore dangerous.

Providing we are sensitive to context all such questions are welcome, interesting and often lead to hitherto undiscovered return on investment for our client. Without Claromentis staff taking full responsibility for establishing context we might inadvertently mislead a client, which is understandable but unforgivable!

Services

Recently a lot has been written about project based collaboration, ranging from thought provoking articles about their position in open/closed vs. flat/hierarchical analysis to simply promoting one tool over another. Vendors have really struggled to meet the varied requirements of different projects, while preserving all the advantages of a single information layer and a truly integrated application stack.

With Claromentis Project Manager the company has leveraged everything in the framework to really bring a user selectable range of deeply functional applications to bear on any project, all through the flexible and powerful permission system.

Project Manager Portal

It will be fascinating to watch developments here – as the company now has two flagship products that have extraordinary potential – InfoCapture and Project Manager. Both are related – indeed InfoCapture projects can be integrated in any Project within Project Manager, to report anything within a project and control resolution through any workflow.

With plans to make InfoCapture an integrated complex workflow engine for any Claromentis objects, and Project Manager providing such a deep range of project based functionality, it is a tough call as to which will become the flagship product for 2009.

Workflow illustration

Maybe they both will.

Prod-Project collaboration, e-forms, Prod-Project

The title of this blog could have been a question, but I prefer it to be a heading.

We had a corridor conversation a few days ago, Mike and I, and I mentioned  that I wanted him to think about how we might extend InfoCapture so that we can report Process Manager issues on a PDA, those processes to upload to the Claromentis server as soon as it is connected. A great many processes in certain industries start with PDA input of initial data, and then complex work flows need to take over. For example office surveys, certain types of audits.

Within the context of my chat, I was expecting some kind of possibly in 6 months, what version of Claromentis – series of discussions. The normal priority setting of what should make a Claromentis release, and what should miss out.

It is now a few days later and he has the application installed on his Nokia  phone, with the developer now coding the mobile windows version.

We have never met the developer – Mike just put out the work on an open source developers recruitment platform, and it’s done. No fuss, no headache – minor investments and great functionality.

What an amazing leap in our software, from talented people unconstrained by any limitations.

The heading of this Blog could not have been a question – because it doesn’t have an answer.

Products open source

As the Claromentis reseller in Australia, R&D Knowledge Services have the privilege of talking to many interesting and varied companies. A recent discussion with a pharmaceutical company brought up the issue of not only how companies go about creating new documents, but also about how the software is compliant with FDA an TGA regulations.

We all know Claromentis offers exception capabilities in regards to document management (audit, version, granular permissions, roll back, searching etc etc) but in these highly regulated industries, the complainace and validation of such systems is of equal importance.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Australian TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) require manufacturers to comply with stringent conditions to ensure integrity of the drug approval process. 21CFR is of particular importance, and we are currently working to ensure Claromentis passes these tests. More to come as we tread down this validation path.

Partners fda, tga, validation

The recent development plans for the Project management application are extremely thought provoking.

We are now delivering a true collaboration hub, where individuals defining a new project can very easily select powerful collaboration tools that are appropriate for their requirements. These elements form the collaboration hub.

They may select from a Gantt Chart based approach because task management is critical, or version controlled document management, news channels, forums and form based work flows for any conceivable set of requirements. The Claromentis framework provides all of the permissioned access required to ensure users have exactly the access they need, without becoming cluttered and overloaded and that clients can engage with staff, suppliers and partners as required.

This is truly exciting – we are delivering collaboration hubs within a programme managed framework. Every project has an overview area, and each user can specify their preferences for receiving information by email when information changes in the project. Because the Claromentis framework is so comprehensive we can assemble for anyone involved in collaboration exactly what they need, with a very deep functionality set that extends across all areas of customised information management.

Prod-Project online collaboration, Prod-Project

As being a provider of an intranet software and its side solutions; we develop, deploy and deliver.. an intranet software… Recently one of our clients requested a quotation for an enhanced social networking platform to enable a possible collaboration of their consumers and staff under a single social networking platform. Personally, I think this is a great idea! Specially in an internet age, I can not think of any better solution to improve your public face than this. But there is one small problem… Our software was not developed while keeping the social networking platforms in mind. In other words, we are not the providers of a social networking platform. So how should we answer the client?

To find an answer to this, we did have an internal meeting today to narrow down our solutions and decided the following options:

1. Find a reliable third party social networking platform software, buy the software, customize it for the client and resell it.
2. Create a partnership with a third party company delivering social networking platforms and work on their software together with the owner of the software and deliver the result to the client. Consider the possibilities of learning the social networking platform development and combine it with our own product.
3. Develop our own bespoke social networking platform and deliver it to the client.
4. Say no.

The first three options have their pros and cons, while the 4th option is something we don’t like to go for, therefore I am going to focus on the first 3 options.

We found a perfect software delivering exactly what the client has asked for. It ticks almost every boxes based on the client’s requirements sheet. The software is open source and can be acquired with different pricing structures; starting from free up to good amount of money; depending on the package. In my opinion, the most expensive package, which is still relatively cheap based on its functionalities, is the one we should go for. The main reason behind my defence for this software is it works perfectly, delivers exactly what the client is asking for, the software itself is open source so we can modify it the way we want it, customize it to suit the client’s needs and deliver it to the client. The client gets what they want which works and we are happy to exceed the client’s expectations.

However there were several concerns about this option. The main concern, which is the main reason I am writing this article for is the software is actually an open source software. Some of our team members considered this as a negative point, because you may not get any support for the software. However what was forgotten in this concern was actually the provider of the software is releasing the core code of the software and any additional plug-ins (which we will need all of them) costs money. What took my attention was the word ‘open source’ made them think that this software may be unstable or developed by a student in couple of nights for fun and may well be forgotten by its provider. What I find strange is this thought would have never come to mind if the software was released by companies like Apple, Google, Sun or even Facebook or Digg team, just because they are a well known company and/or charging millions for it… For example, Mozilla may well stop supporting Firefox if it was not financially possible for them to keep the development of it.

But there were some other points which I found logical. Up-to-date, we delivered our own software which we know inside out. We are able to answer every question about it because we developed, deployed and delivered it. We are responsible to support our clients for the software they bought from us. What if something goes wrong with this third party software? OK, we have our own developers who can fix many problems, but to address a problem may take 5 minutes if the problem is occured on our software whereas it may well take 5 hours to address the same problem on some other software, if you are not familiar with it, and we are not talking about couple of hundred lines of code. This third party software is huge, so its’ codebase.

The other unspoken concern, which again I agree with, was the feeling we will have from the result. If the client loves this third party solution and sends their greetings to us, we would not feel the same level of satisfaction and proud as much as if they did the same for our intranet software, because simply what we delivered is NOT ours. We may have done a good job on finding the correct solution, customizing it and deploying it, but these are not actually what the client is requesting. These are expected standard results whereas the capabilities of the software are the requirement itself.

The second option is creating a partnership with a local social networking software developer and work on the actual software itself together. By doing this, there will be a mutual level of knowledge sharing. On our side, we will be learning how to deal with social networking management and implementation of these kind of platforms on corporate environments. And so many other stuff that I am not able to share with you for the moment. Because this will be a partnership, the provider will be reachable, therefore it will be possible for us to mash both of our solutions on one platform. Our client is already using our intranet solution and they are happy with it. Rather than giving them a complete new solution, which does not have the same look and feel as our own software, may be seen confusing to them (which is what may happen with the first solution, but again it is an open source software, so we should be able to customize it).

There is already one company we are considering to have a partnership for this project and we are in talks with them. I can not give you more details about this for the moment.

The third solution is a less likely to achive in a timescale given by the client. Our own software has years of experience and development history and as I said at the beginning of my article, it was not developed as a social networking platform. The strange thing is our software can do many of the client’s requirements on an individual basis, but was not designed to use these features on a public website with social networking ideas in mind.

You are probably asking “So, which option did you go for?“, well, we are still considering these and other  options and there are no decisions as of now. What I wanted to share with this article was what may be thought when we hear the word “open source“.

Can/should open source be considered as professional? How far professional and successful it can go? Can commercial products be open source and if they are open source, are they still commercial? Is open source turning out to be a marketing term because of the success of Mozilla Firefox?

Probably harder questions to answer than the meaning of life.

Solutions Old - Open Source Intranets, open source, Social, Social Networking

I have recently been working on one of our large clients intranet deployment in the USA and I wanted to write how amazed I am when I see a client finding different ways of customization our intranet software to suit their needs.

As of Claromentis 5.4, we have developed a new feature called Smart Objects. This feature helps Claromentis users importing content to their intranet pages from different sources within Claromentis, such as News, Forum messages and Document lists. No longer will users have to navigate to separate areas to see application files as opposed to web based content, for example. A dynamic view of disparate content and objects is possible from just one location.

This company is part of one of the worlds largest clothing manufacturers, and they are using our software to improve the communication between different departments within the organization, as well as simplifying the process of managing documents securely, all within one instance. Departments varies from variety of sources, such as Sales, Finance, Warranty, RD&D, EMEA and more… Without a doubt, a web based intranet solution like Claromentis was the best choice for an international company. Having its employees across the world makes the importance of communication and document management through the Internet was an appropriate choice.

Because Claromentis is permission based intranet software, it is possible to hide your content from different departments using the same intranet software. You simply create groups and roles within Claromentis and identify your content (documents and news) to be shown to a certain number of users.

As you can imagine, a company like this literally has tens of thousands of documents stored within the software, so making these files to be found easily is not an easy job. That’s where the Smart Objects feature is going to make this process a lot easier than our competitors’ solutions.

Let me explain how different parts of Claromentis can work in collaboration to solve complex intranet problems. In this example, I would like to share a document folder containing financial sales targets of this month and a list of products needs to be highlighted during sales campaigns. I would also like to share news belonging the sales department and I need to show all of the above content visiting the Sales Department home page.

In the above example, I am actually aiming to solve my problem by sourcing the content from the following corporate solutions.

• Document Manager
• Content Manager
• Permission Based Intranet Management
• Permission Based News Management

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Smart Objects enables you to show contents from different parts of Claromentis, and this is exactly how this client actually solved this complex collaboration issue.

1. Define Groups and Roles (SALES > Sales Managers | Sales Team) and assign users to the appropriate level.
2. Using Document Manager application, store my files into one folder created for the special sales campaign.
3. Change the permissions of all my files and make the “financial sales targets” viewable only by Sales Managers and the remaining files viewable by people belonging the SALES group.
4. Using Web Based Content Management Solution, create an intranet page and fill up the content areas, such as TITLE, SUMMARY, GOALS, REWARDS.
5. Using Smart Objects, embed the document folder containing my files into an appropriate space within my intranet page.
6. Again Using Smart Objects, embed the Sales news (blogs) channel.
7. Save the page and share the web address of the page with my staff.

What will happen is people who has an access to view the page I just created will only need to remember one web address (which can be pasted into an e-mail message) and when they click on that link, all of the information they have a permission to see will be visible to them. Remember that we have embedded one single folder containing both financial targets as well as documents containing products need to be highlighted? Because I set the permissions for my documents, Sales team will only see the files they need to see and managers will also be able to access the financial target documents, even though they are in the same folder and I have embedded that folder into my Intranet Page.

All within one single page. How Smart is that?!

Resources-Technical complex intranet management, document management, intranet, intranet blogging, news management, permissions, Prod-Intranet, smart object

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy