One of the core values of Claromentis is clarity – we really do try to avoid any chance of confusion wherever we can.

I was reminded of this at a project kick off meeting this week, where some of the client staff had got into the mindset of focusing on “content management” in the discussion, when in fact their intent was to get the best plan for “information management” in the first phase of the project.

Left unchecked this could have resulted in much of the day being focused on entirely the wrong requirement for project success. What was needed was not a detailed discussion of best practices in content management, but a much more open debate about what information platforms were best suited to various sets of data that the client needed to migrate to Claromentis. Managing an information layer is not about content management – but content management is indeed a part of the puzzle.

Examples like this in themselves are innocuous, but they demonstrate again and again that as a supplier of customizable collaboration platforms our responsibility is to add clarity to the potentially confusing world when relatively wide ranging IT projects get underway.

The Framework intranet software

We are pleased to announce that the developers community is up and running, with a code repository for sharing components, plug-ins, and even applications.

A summary and instructions are on the WIKI, please do provide feedback as to how we can make the community valuable and easy to interact with.

Resources-Technical claromentis development

The recent personal ordeals of Danah Boyd at Web2.0 Expo resulted in a Blog that is a real revelation about what it is like to present at an innovation based event with a public-facing twitter stream projected behind you that destroys your connection with the audience and in turn your own self-confidence.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html

This blog of such an emotional experience fortunately links back to the excellent text that the actual presentation was attempting to deliver. Within that I just want to focus on one quote :

“Thus, the power is no longer in the hands of those who control the channels of distribution, but those who control the limited resource of attention”.

I continually explore this idea internally when we describe where Claromentis is heading and where intranets offer real value. I find the continual differential in the understanding of this message across different companies and cultures both puzzling and frustrating.

On the one sense of course this is just about push versus pull. In the wider world of the general internet, this is totally understandable – and indeed, almost verging on yesterdays news.

But in the world of the corporate intranet if we discuss these ideas it is as if we are promoting some brave new paradigm.

For many companies even creating a new intranet to ease the outward flow of communication feels like breaking some innovative ground – after all they are embracing a new, attractive, internet based platform to distribute their message.

They are just pushing.

Often they don’t measure value and engagement with their platform based on the fact that they offer such a broad choice of interactive communications that stakeholders are continually – actively – selecting which  information to pull from an ever widening choice of interactions, information streams and enriched media.

They just selectively push information to staff

As Claromentis starts the delivery process for Innovate – the central application of the Claromentis 6.0 platform – we are really optimistic that we are delivering tools that will promote corporate innovation through individuals proactively allocating their attention within a truly rich information stream that is a mile away from simply pushing corporate information.

Lets see if we are right, or like Danah our important message risks getting lost in the delivery.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet intranet, pull, push

Document Management System with Submission Wizard.

Maintaining consistency and integrity of the technical documents is a business critical issue for Crondall Energy Consultant. Crondall Energy is a Floating Production System consultant which helps their clients in many areas ranging from Strategic planning, Market analysts up to Project Delivery and Training.

Claromentis Document Manager

Utilising built-in Claromentis Document Management system, we recently develop bespoke document submission wizard based on specification and guideline from Crondall Energy.

The document submission wizard is not only helping users submitting document into the right storage path (folder), it also automatically creates documents with the right name convention and automatic numbering system.

The same wizard can also be used to make strict control on making revision to the existing documents.

Intranet-Extranet, Products Design, document management, intranet consultancy, user interface

Claromentis delivers a Corporate Social Networking site

We have just completed one of the most interesting project in the corporate social networking space. “PlanetExplore.com” A social media platform released for the outdoor clothing company The North Face. The community connects people, especially younger people, to the outdoors and in particular outdoor activities and events in their local communities.

Social Media Platform

PlanetExplore.com is a bespoke Social Media Platform leveraging Facebook platform and Mash-Ups, delivered from concept to idea in less than 3 months and already attracting more than 100 partners across the United States.  The initial launch is for the Bay Area with Denver and new York City to follow soon.

Some screenshots below:

Intranet-Extranet, Solutions Case Study, intranet 2.0, online collaboration, Social Networking, web 2.0

Interesting video demo of highly-anticipated Google Chrome OS. It looks like all of your information will be stored in the ‘cloud’. The boundaries between what is local software and online software has become blurred. I have not yet to see this will be adopted in the corporate world anytime soon. But should we care? It shows the potential future of web-apps, software or application should be easily accessible, deployed through an internet browser regardless the OS or type of browser.

Check demo video below:

Resources-Technical os, software, technology

The Ajax component allows you to take any component already within Claromentis and Ajax empower it; harnessing a tried and tested JavaScript framework the Ajax component only marginally changes how you’d implement the original component within a template, and does almost all the magic for you.

It automatically breaks down the component into 2 states of information, firstly pushing something minimal to the browser, enough to function without actually running the component first, allowing claromentis to do the work in the background and provide a clean and much visibly faster approach to loading components.

Instead of having to wait 2-3 seconds for a component to load, the Ajax placeholder (a spinning icon to show that some work is being done) will be visible and behind the scenes after the page itself is loaded, it will then run and give you feedback from any component that has been empowered -fantastic for slower components that notably increase the loading time to your home page; It doesn’t matter even if it is an entirely custom component the Ajax loader will work with ANY and all claromentis components.

In addition if the component has a problem the page will still load – isolating the impact of any problems.

Ajax components are being used and tested internally by Claromentis now, and will be officially available with the Claromentis 6.0 Intranet Framework.

Intranet-Extranet

Working with one of our clients we today produced the extremely useful component to filter a set of issues in any workflow project taking into account the user viewing the project. So the identity if the user modifies the filter directly.

Filters have always been comprehensive in InfoCapture, but the ability to for example provide intelligent links that automatically do the following is very powerful indeed :

• Provide all P1 help desk issues that are assigned to me
• List all HR incidents in the last 12 months where I am the Health and safety officer

It is also great to see our clients working with us to provide extremely useful components that other Claromentis intranet clients are welcome  to use. You can review the component and discussions on our Intranet help wiki.

Prod-Process intranet software

Almost all of our potential and current clients come to us with some kind of existing technology based view of the software and solution world.

What varies massively is their attitude to – and internal understanding of – their own perspective.

In our case they are about to influence their company’s decisions and approaches to intranets, workflows, collaboration platforms and document management systems. With other software partners they will potentially bring the same perspectives to bear on very different projects.

It does seem to me that in most cases the perspective – or bias – as that is what it amounts to in practical terms  – that they bring is not thoroughly evaluated in an internal sense.

So basically potential clients might indeed understand their preference for certain approaches but they have almost never, as far as I can see, worked out whether these barriers are internally acknowledged but something they would like to explore the possibilities of escaping from – or a philosophy to which they are embedded for the long term because they have made fundamental decisions in favor of it on the basis of cost savings, recovery strategies or any other framework for increased efficiency or ROI.

When you think about it, this is quite extraordinary.

The most forward looking  companies are always looking for ways to break out of the technology perspectives that might in any way constrain their capacity to innovate. They want to break down barriers.

The bias that a company imposes on an IT selection process are in the new world increasingly far reaching.

As an example in the past the decision might have been purely on the type of database, because the back up and DR strategy favored one over the other or because of the availability of internal trained DBA resources. These are purely internal but highly justifiable reasons.

As the internet based software world changes and solution suppliers like Claromentis respond to this rapid progress, and it is certainly progress, we need to deal with the fact that a single supplier can now offer :

•    Mash up services
•    Database abstraction layers to support any database you need
•    Complete cross platform deployment from Linux to windows
•    Relatively low cost rapid development of complex internet based software
•    A choice of cloud based computing or perpetual licenses
•    Open source extendable commercially supported solutions
•    Complete independence of the branding layer over the business logic

So what value a technology bias of any kind in this brave new world of customizable solutions on any platform in any pricing and deployment model?

Old fashioned bloated solutions are on the way out – COTS solutions and open source extendable frameworks appeal to the modern way of leaving your perspectives on the doorstep, increasing innovation and delivering completely unconstrained value to the business.

Intranet-Extranet Add new tag, technology

As Claromentis continues to grow in the scope and range of products and applications, the framework is being actively developed and enhanced by the use of components to provide flexible, configurable functionality for clients wishing to use them.

Just in the last week the following very useful components have been added :

Anniversary Intranet Component

The Anniversary component gives you the ability to summarily compare dates attached to users profiles within Claromentis through the use of metadata.

Once configured, not only can you change how far in the future you’d like to list events – up to one whole year from today, but also how many user anniversaries you’d like shown.

This anniversary component could be useful for anything from showing birthday information for employees, to listing anniversaries of employment with your company – there are lots of opportunities for configuration of this component.
 
File Review Intranet Component

The File Review component also through the use of custom metadata allows you to configure multiple options for ensuring that you always know what review dates are coming for your files.

This component allows you to change how files are listed and also what scope of listing to give. For example: you can also attach a reviewer to the component, and it’ll list also for the reviewer of the file; you can show review dates to everyone – ideal for a departmental vi.  The major advantage of this component is how configurable it is, you can show due dates to all, or just the reviewer, or just the owner, or even both the owner and the reviewer; on top of which you can change how far ahead it is looking for document review dates, and it will make it really clear to the viewers when something is overdue for review!

 
RSS Reader Intranet Component

The RSS Reader component makes reading news or events easy, be it from an external source such as the BBC or using your own internal RSS feed.

The component allows two modes of reading, one is a fixed feed experience – designed for when you want a feed readable by all without them being able to customize where it is reading from; the second makes use of custom metadata, allowing your end user to configure where the news is coming from, so that the component is always personal to them.

Interested clients should contact us – we have these components available on our development WIKI and we are currently considering if they should be included in the core distributive.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Resources-Technical components, intranet software