Components and Smart Objects
During an intranet training session today that was focused on design, it really dawned on me how functional components and smart objects are becoming in the intranet software world.
As an example - in our own sales management we use Process Manager to manage our inquiries, until we open up a Sales Manager opportunity – with just one click.
Now on our sales publish page in our intranet staff get a live view of the incoming leads and their status – a simple Process Manager component gives a window onto that project that is always and instantly up to date, with direct access to every individual lead. The page also shows the live sales documents folder through a smart object.
We are also continually enhancing our components – for example the ‘most popular document’ (or pages) component is now being enhanced into a new version, at the request of a new client – so it displays on the intranet home page the most popular document for each user.
In fact I struggle to see what can limit the usefulness of this growing library of components and documents. Just today we decided that a most viewed topic in a forum can turn an administrator populated FAQ into a genuine FAQ – as it continuously reacts to show the genuinely most popular questions in any FAQ board.
