Intranet Management Software Blog

Innovation and integration have long been identified as  two areas where IT can help companies in their drive for growth.

For both of these permissions are extremely relevant. Innovation needs partnerships with external parties to maintain growth through sharing expertise and essentially bringing back to the center innovation where it can be used to drive the company forwards. Similarly integration needs permissions to facilitate the sharing of expertise and ideas across organizational silos.

Permission

When involved in setting up the actual permission systems for some of our customers I am often convinced that they are lost in the details, and not thinking about either innovation or integration – they are instead lost in a world of command and control vs. open access.

Some publishing workflows “must” for example have two levels of approval. This is a current requirement for us with a very large company. As an intranet vendor with a consultancy practice perhaps we should be more open, and just ask “Why”? Instead we will deliver exactly what the customer needs.

Of course in certain areas absolute quality of information is extremely significant – one would not want to allow an earnings report to be published with the wrong data, or the Chairman’s annual statement to be released to employees with obvious spelling errors.

But both innovation and integration require powerful collaboration across disparate participants – and the earnings report is relevant to neither. What is required for many companies is an accurate enterprise wide analysis of what is to be gained from what kind of integration or innovation between what groups of stakeholders  – and then a similar analysis of how open each type of collaboration should be. Only then can an Intranet and Extranet permission system be designed to drive growth in these challenging times.

Home intranet software, permissions

It continues to amaze me how many businesses, both big and small, rely on spreadsheets and emails to report on their business. A time sheet here, a KPI there, right through to budgets - all done in a spreadsheet and passed on through the business via email.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly fine for small companies (and by small, I mean less than 20 employees) but any more than this, a basic e-form application can deliver immediate benefits to both the user and the business.

Take for example a recent client of ours. They are required to keep stringent records on all communications with their customers, no matter how trivial. However, rather than having a central storage area, this information was shared around by email. It was of no real surprise then, when a critical piece of information went walkabout, so did their client.

E-forms are perfect for such applications, and can quickly be measured by both increases in customer AND staff satisfaction.

E-form Services process manager

I had an interesting dialog today with a very significant US company that was worried we were a corporate intranet, whereas they ‘already had one of those’ – and they were looking for a way to “enable collaboration and growth of knowledge capital within our immediate team”

Having had a look at Claromentis their immediate reaction is that we “are not looking for enterprise scale systems at this time”. These are direct quotes.

This I think raises great challenges for our company. How can we encourage dialog with guerrilla teams in large corporations desperate for a better collaboration system to achieve their own goals, at the same time deliver on objectives for owners and IT staff in small enterprises – but also communicate effectively with the global companies that absolutely do deploy Claromentis as a corporate intranet?

This is just a marketing challenge - because the truth is that we are all of these things. We are a sensibly priced open source extendable framework that for a small team can fit within their departmental budgets for just a few users to collaborate – but we can and do deploy multi-language portals for hundreds of thousands of users – with onsite consultants and significant license costs. And everywhere in between.

We are naturally proud to be working for some of the worlds largest corporations – and indeed for governments. But we have so many exciting relationships with SME companies, charities and not for profit organizations. If half a dozen people need to collaborate we can deliver the required system at an appropriate budget.

Which brings me back to the beginning – if this significant company already has ‘one of those’ corporate intranets – but this particular team couldn’t collaborate and grow their intellectual capital – what kind of corporate intranet product are they using?

Products

Intranet software has become so powerful as we move into 2009 – it is certainly exceeding the capacity of the average company to absorb it.

This brings into the limelight once again the discussion about the limits of intranet software, the role of consultancy and putting some kind of scoping controls over an intranet deployment – at least in phase 1.

At first glance this all seems counter intuitive from the point of view of the purchaser : here’s a few scenarios.. from the potential customer ..

1.    If I am selecting and intranet supplier I need the highest number of applications so whichever one I pick will end up having something like someone eventually decided I needed. Even if I don’t know how to define what ‘an application’ is..

2.    I don’t know quite what I want yet – so help me select a partner with loads of functionality. Then I cant pick the wrong one before I know what I want.

3.    Apparently it is really good if every user can take total control of their environment – I read this in some business magazine - if they want their local weather in the top right hand corner and their Claromentis application menus to be in pink then we really must recognize that need. To encourage collaboration. Apparently its part of web 2.0.

mmm..

Here’s a few truths .. and questions ..

1.    If you want Claromentis experts to help you then you need to engage with them. On their level, and they are experienced. Helping you create a professional, meaningful road map is not a free task.

2.    Claromentis has clarity as its highest core value – what is yours?

3.    If a business doesn’t know where it wants to go then how is an intranet supposed to facilitate the journey?

4. Putting a blog out there is not going to transform your business.

This all comes down to the nature of partnerships – being really clear on where you business is , and in the permissioned internet world where it needs to get to. Such early clarity is very rare, in my experience.

What is my point? It is simple. You should think about using our expertise to help build a road map of how permissioned collaboration frameworks can augment or transform your business.

As intranet software has progressed, so have our services to support you. If potential customers would only start their projects by engaging our services to help  them, rather than throwing a half baked tender or intranet requirements document to a few randomly selected vendors – we could help them in ways they just have not even considered.

We really can transform your business..

Honestly …

Services intranet software

During an interesting meeting with a major potential client today – considering deploying Claromentis for 300,000 staff around the world –

Process Management

I was struck the most by the reaction when we showed InfoCapture – the central application of our Process Manager Product for form based workflows and processes.

What was so interesting is that they assumed you would need a technical DBA to implement the database structures behind each project that InfoCapture users are designing a solution for. But InfoCapture automatically generates all the database tables and relationships you need – even for the most complex workflow projects. And it does this for MySQL , MS SQL or Oracle – just like all of Claromentis and in line with our fundamental values of giving customers choice.

Just 12 hours before this a client purchased InfoCapture in the USA to maintain contact records – in that case the idea of  DBA had never occurred to our new client – they just needed a solution for a very simple, but ultimately important, problem.

I think that in reality that’s the unique power of InfoCapture – it can be as transparently simple or as complex as you need it to be. It just can do anything that form based workflows require you to do – without a whimper and without a DBA.

Prod-Process process manager

I had an interesting conversation today with a potential client in Minnesota and I was reminded yet again of the potential for confusion, even about such a basic concept as a contact database.

•    We have a contact system in our people application
•    We have of course complex contacts – territory and permission based, in our Sales Manager software

But interestingly to meet this requirement – to store contact data per permissioned group of users, allow them to input new data, search, filter and review their own contact data - and allow head office to review all contact data - the simple solution was to use InfoCapture – the main application in Process Manager  - our form based workflow solution.

Contacts

This is on the one hand surprising – why isn’t such a simple requirement best delivered by one of our main applications? But then when you stop thinking about forms, and think of the data in the form – you realize the power of Process Manager to provide exactly what a simple requirement like this needs.

It is a mental leap though – it is hard enough for our own staff to think about what Process Manager can do within an intranet environment – imagine how hard it is for a potential customer who has never used any of our applications, and is still trying to develop an understanding of what they need.

When they are looking for a contact management system they would look to our applications that contain contact management – which in this case was the wrong place to look.

Prod-Intranet Prod-Intranet

I posed the question on a Knol by Abigail Lewis-Bowen about the possibility of using Tagged corporate intranet information combined with group or role membership to locate possible mentors within your organization.

The answer was very relevant and can be seen here.

The comment that I find intriguing is the use of activity streams to identify what you really are doing at work, as opposed to what your job title or direct responsibility is. I want to explore this further, as it ties directly into the current vision of Claromentis 6.0 and we have had some interesting debates about this concept – we did not call them ‘activity streams’ but I think the concept is perhaps similar.

With Claromentis 6 we will embrace URL based tagging irrespective of the underlying object. It doesn’t matter if it’s a document, a persons profile, an admin panel, Wiki, web page, customer profile, policy  or anything else. The point is that if that URL has been tagged, you looking at it tells us useful information about your interests and so contributes to your ‘consumer side’ Tag cloud.

The debate we had was that this is not how the wisdom of crowds normally works – that concept of course involves getting participation from the user by some concept of voting, or ‘digging’ – and aggregating votes to rate the article. More popular information sets can then float to the top of searches, or be found be specific questions seeking them out from increasingly massive information stores.

In Claromentis 6 conventional participatory crowd sourcing will be adopted – but in addition we will use the simple viewing of information to reveal something about what you find interesting, and therefore enable you to explore, if you wish, potential relationships with other people across the extended enterprise.

Why?

Because we don’t want to emphasize in the corporate world the fact that some people are just more comfortable spending time to vote, create tags and visibly participate – we want to also just find out what you frequently look at.

crowd sourcing

I should point out that each of our clients can chose to just turn all this off – this is not Big Brother – it’s a way to try to reveal potentially interesting relationships based on common interest without needing you to take time out to vote on something – just read similar tagged sets frequently and I am sure we can work out what you are looking for and currently finding interesting.

I will be really interested in how our clients embrace this.

In particular I will be fascinated how this is adopted internationally, given the different legislation, cultural issues and position in the technolgy adoption curve of various countries and communities. Will our USA clients be much more inclined to implement this in their Claromentis systems when compared to the UK for example? Will certain industries never see value in this, will others always embrace it?

Home intranet software discussions, online collaboration

Once again today I was talking to a potential intranet customer and I was asked “how many applications do you have?”

This is a challenge we have met many times, and that I think we will continue to face.

One of our core values is clarity – so we are re-launching our website tomorrow to be as clear as possible about our products – the fact that we now offer our intranet clients a choice of 7 major products that address the following significant pure open source extendable areas of functionality:

• Intranets and Extranets
• Processes
• Sales
• Projects
• Quality and compliance
• Content management
• Document management

So what does this mean for a client trying to understand what collaboration framework to invest in?

I think that once again it is all about clarity. We have to explain that having a pre packaged form for staff to order a cheese sandwich is not an intranet application – it is a tiny customization. We have to engage our potential customers at the appropriate level where we can make a difference to the achievements of their company.

Unfortunately it is a hangover from the understandable local software world of “what exactly do I get for my money” and “feature comparisons” that understandably some customers still adopt this mindset when looking for significant business impact from a powerful and customizable collaboration framework like Claromentis.

Our challenge at Claromentis as always is to be transparent, clear and engaging with everyone who has an interest in how we might be able to impact their business.

The challenge for our potential customers is to see the process of ordering a cheese sandwich for what it really is – a simple match between users and a temporary object of desire. This requires about 5 lines of code and a database table.

Is this an intranet application?

Is this a major software application that is going to make a significant difference to my business?

No it is not …

… Easy to say when you aren’t hungry.

Prod-Intranet Prod-Intranet

We have completed the initial testing of our new extension of InfoCapture e-forms onto PDAs and Mobile phones.

Previously, although you could enter data to start an automated Process Manager workflow from your phone, you were basically using a browser and had to have an internet connection.

We now have a downloadable application solution for both the  mobile windows and Symbian platforms, to enable users to enter data into forms that start the workflow process.

The user no longer needs to be connected to the internet – they can keep collecting data and as soon as a connection is available the data is entered, the issues reported to the server and the workflows take over.

Process manager data entry

This is a significant enhancement to the Claromentis process manager solution.

Prod-Process e-forms, process manager