I have been involved with the plans for Claromentis 6.0, with the consequent emphasis on collaboration, for a while now – and we have been consistently blogging about intranets and collaboration at Claromentis for over a year. Just this week we also moved some of our information and guidance information to a public facing intranet WIKI.

This has required a considerable and consistent effort in terms of time.

As we have now  also launched a successful social networking platform for one of major USA clients, I am becoming increasingly interested in the relative values of these various platforms if you are looking for information and expertise. I am however only interested in their use in the corporate space, not as an individual looking to expand my social network.

At the same time I have been a member of LinkedIn for quite a while. I have only extremely recently started to Tweet, and really have very little knowledge at all of this platform, but I very much wanted this to be in the mix of what role they would all play in helping me with a topical question connected with my work.

It is clear to me that the return you might get out of all of these platforms does indeed depend on the work you have put in historically – the value of your followers in Twitter or the likelihood of your Blog appearing in search results, for example. However they do also take very different amounts of time to participate in – and for me this is actually the point of this little experiment.

I find that I can consistently only create about 10 meaningful and relatively well written Blogs about Claromentis and intranet software in a month, whereas I can post a question in a forum in just a few minutes, and Tweet in a matter of seconds.  So my question is, for me, which platform is the best return on investment of my time? I realize that the short term is not the way to judge this, so I will consistently try experiments over the next 6 months and try to sum up anything I find.

My natural preference when looking for information has always been simply to Google it of course, and rely on the algorithm itself, with its own complex assessment of the relevance and importance of information to help me find what I need as quickly as possible.

I selected the following question as a simple initial experiment.

“What are the implications of Google caffeine for seo and twitter”

This is a question I am genuinely interested in, and would like to find the answer to. If indeed it is possible to find a definitive answer to such a question – I realize I may have to find the best opinions – but that again is somewhat the point of these platforms, so my approach seems reasonable.

6:45 Straight Google : Immediately I can find some relevant content, although the answer is not clear. From what I can see the algorithm is obviously changing, and some folks think social networking or at least some kind of complex links – rather than just straight keyword links from anywhere, might have implications.

I got distracted, read more about Caffeine in general, and went over to read what Matt Cutts had to say.

Ran out of my 15 minutes allocation with no clear answer.

7:00 Start a post on linked. I already belong to an SEO group, so I just posted the question :

“Does Google Caffeine in any way mean we need to pay more attention to Twitter?

We are an Intranet software company, not in any way an SEO organization – I am looking for information.

I am just curious as our own approach to our SEO is fairly conventional, creating well organized and fresh content, a Blog and now  WIKI – and I wonder if Caffeine is going to emphasize the importance of our online presence in social media in any specific way?”

Had a look through other posts there, but in fact these just seem to be posts by people that I suspect are just trying to get links themselves – there is in fact very little actual interaction at all. So a the end of my 15 minutes I was no further on, although there was some minor mention of Caffeine, but nothing that helped my question.

I have however of course posed the question in a relevant group.

7:15 : Tweeting this took just a few seconds.

“Does Google Caffeine in any way mean we need to pay more attention to Twitter in our SEO approach for marketing? Or is there no connection?“

7:20 : Started to post this blog. Amazingly this actually took almost an hour by the time I published it!

I realize that this is a very small experiment, and just the first one – but I will be interested if any of these approaches help me out in any disproportionate way, compared to the effort required by each platform.

I will post the answer as a comment in a week or so. I will also try a similar experiment in a few months as by then I should have much more experience of Twitter and may have managed to build up a network of people with similar interests which will make this more meaningful.

Intranet-Extranet intranet blogging, Social Networking

We all know interfaces can be challenging, I thought I would start a collection of examples where the best of intentions just goes horribly wrong.
So as my first post on this theme, here is me trying to cancel a squash court – what a daft pop up :

So I am trying to cancel, and it seems I have a choice of canceling or confirming. Should I ok the  cancellation or confirm that I want to cancel..? Or cancel my cancellation?
If simple things can go this wrong, what hope complex collaboration interfaces…

Services visual interfaces

When I first got involved with corporate software every vendor that sold products that cost anything more than a few hundred pounds produced user guides. ERP software user guides still need a fork lift truck to get them through the door.

With the drive for intuitive software and the focus on usability should a great intranet system like Claromentis even produce user guides?

Should they be replaced by access to specifications, WIKIs and even testing plans? Or known issues systems?

Basically users probably dont read user guides, so why do vendors of browser based software feel obliged to keep producing them?

I would be interested in any viewpoints at all, as we have recently had some lively debates at Claromentis about whether we should continue to produce them, and if we do – are we actually using documentation as a way to internally review the application or really to help a user who couldn’t work out that to ‘add a document’ you need to click on a link labeled ‘add a document’?

Admin guides are of course an entirely different matter..

Intranet-Extranet intranet software

We have been asked recently if Claromentis supports fuzzy logic searching and I am pleased to confirm that it does.

Not only that but it has a neat feature to refine how much fuzziness is allowed.. if only we could work out the least fuzzy way to use it.

To run a fuzzy logic search just add a tilde at the end of the string.

For example lets search for “term” on a Claromentis intranet.

I have run a basic search , and asked for results from documents and Wikis only. I find only 3 results – the most relevant being a wiki post about search terms, the second a PDF that mentions term in the title, and the third a management report in the form of a word document, that contains 2,322 words, doesn’t mention term in any of the obvious fields like title or metadata but does indeed mention the phrase “long term basis” buried within the content.

Now lets turn to fuzzy logic – I am looking for something like “term”.

On a basic run I get 42 matching results, as usual returned in order of relevancy. The ones at the top contain many words that are really similar to “term” – in fact exactly contain that word. Hits after return 6 are starting to contain “team” and by the time we get to the last result – a word document – I struggle to find the reason for the result – but indeed there are similar words buried in the document.

Now here’s the fun. We can add a parameter to define how fuzzy we really feel! The default is 0.5

To see how this works we really need to be searching for something with more than 4 characters – I don’t pretend to fully understand the Levenshtein Distance algorithm used, but I can see that if you have only 4 characters to play with a fuzzy level of 0.75 or less is going to give close to 42 results, and 0.76 or more is going to get us back to the 3 we found in the first place.

So I use a search for “supervision” – a normal search finds 5 documents from our HR policies about, believe it or not – supervision.

Now here it gets interesting : “supervision~” finds 55 returns – the same top 5 of course, but anther 50 that mention “Support” amongst other things. Being a bit less fuzzy with “supervision~0.75” just finds  the same 5, but “super~” finds 15. This includes documents that have “upper” in them.

I think a great example is “super~0.60”  which is being slightly fussier (this is where English American spelling is really important for a change!) and finds only one return – it turns out I  have a document where super is in the meta data but has been mistyped as “Suer accounts” :

So where does this leave us? Well it is great that we allow fuzzy searching, to lead into the obvious pun I am a little fuzzy as to how exactly to use it. It does, however, find some great typos.

Intranet-Extranet searching

I find the latest programme overview page, and the resulting additions to the project application dashboard page, to be really useful.

Above is the new programme overview, with the programme traffic light that the software sets according to the RAG lights in the individual projects.

If we look at the improved dashboard :

the difference now is is that on the right I can see the automated status lights for all the programmes I have permissions to, on the same page as the filterable list of projects.

These screens really do provide an extremely useful top down view of the projects and programmes across the company, enabling really rapid reviews at project meetings.

I will also be interested in whether clients find the automated calculation of the programme traffic light to be useful – I certainly do but it might be that programme managers would rather set it manually.

Prod-Project intranet project manager

Workflows are everywhere in Claromentis – e-forms and documents and of course in content management.

For several years clients have been asking for ‘approval rights’ in content management – the general principle being that although companies want to delegate authorship rights of a content area out to the business, managers should have the final approval before a page is authorized and so goes live.

With the growing emphasis on intranet collaboration and intranet 2.0, I doubt this is a valid model for the future.  That is an old fashioned command and control attitude, no longer reflecting the modern imperative of opening the intranet out to subject matter experts with direct participation.

The alternative is the ability in Claromentis for a user to monitor a page – in other words to instantly be notified if anything is changed. My suggestion is that this is what managers should do – not just users.

This might seem to be a small difference – but it is part of the brave new world of collaboration – managers need to enable teams to generate content as subject matter experts, and they cannot truly do that if the same content will not appear live until they have finally got around to authorizing it – users will just be demotivated and lose interest if their efforts in creating content are not instantly live.

If managers can just make the simple leap to efficiently monitoring what they care about – and not controlling its existence in the first place – users will stay engaged and motivated, and the intranet will become even more than the average manager ever planned for.

Prod-Content content management, control, intranet 2.0