Intranet Management Software Blog

With the growing trend to offer videos as intranet content, especially noticeable recently for some of our manufacturing clients who have learnt that showing a trained engineer performing a task is a great way to train new staff in certain procedures – the issue of managing such videos within the intranet is becoming a hot topic.

Clearly we can enable the FCK editor to embed a pre-prepared flv ( Flash video file ).

However with the many recent enhancements in the intranet image management application of Claromentis, “Image Gallery” - which manages collections of images and allows processing on download to appropriate file sizes - we are now considering enhancing this application  to provide a youtube like environment natively within the corporate intranet.

We would do this by embedding a video processing unit within the system, so a video originating from anywhere ( Camcorder, iPhone, normal mobiles for example ) can be uploaded directly – and the system will convert and compress it to flv – and allow the user to set appropriate meta data as required.

These converted videos will of course be hosted within the intranet and its security systems – and available for embedding on publish pages in exactly the same way as images are now.

This is a reasonably significant task and before we add it the roadmap does anyone have any comments on how useful this would be?

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During early phases of intranet deployment, we are frequently asked by our clients “what do I need to prepare or plan in advance to guarantee a successful of intranet deployment project”.

In our opinion, an intranet project is all about dialog. It’s a dialog between ‘us’ the software vendor with our expertise and know-how and ‘you’ who know the most about your business or organisation.

Step1. Setup a Goal

The first step is determining the goals of your Intranet project. Why do you want an intranet? Some typical reasons:

• Improving and providing a communication and collaboration tool.
• Our existing Intranet is old and dysfunctional.
• Distribute corporate news (electronic newsletter)
• Providing self service staff contact details which are always up-to-date
• Make our company policies and procedures available online
• Sharing documents online instead of using shared drives
• Enabling staff to work from home
• Better searching and easier way finding key documents

Step2. Define the scope & audience

Have you got an answer for these questions?

• Is it just an Intranet for staff or it is also an extranet for partners and contractors?
• Do you want to allow your staff access to the intranet even when they’re at home or client’s site?
• How about mobile access?
• Have you asked representative from each department on what they want to see or get on the Intranet?
• How people currently finding information, which you think should be on the intranet? What are their common pains?
• Would you like to store sensitive information on the Intranet such as payroll ?
• What about chat and commenting? How open is your company culture?

Step 3. Build a SiteMap

Build a sitemap, using your favorite tools such as Visio or simply hand drawn, create draft of Intranet sitemap, typically the main branch are represented by each department, you can see various examples below:

Example Sitemap with colour coded permission

Example of Intranet Site Map using colour to identify launch phase

Step 4. What are key application do you want to use?

This step is simply determining what are the main application do you want to use on the Intranet, Claromentis provide these following applications,  you can simply choose which one to use.

News and Blog– Share and distribute company news and blog
Documents – Document collaboration with version control
Publish – Page creator, a content management system
People – Self service personnel database
Calendar – Shared company calendar
Image Gallery – Corporate image database
Bookshelf – Online Policies & Procedures
Policy Manager – Managing lifecycle of the company policies
Holiday planner – manage corporate holiday and absence
Room booking – book a meeting room and office facilities
InfoCapture – Electronic e-forms builder and workflows
Project – Manage project online
CRM – Opportunity Management

Outside these applications we built many other bespoke applications to suit your need

Step 5. Understanding Permissions

Permission Group & Role

A scalable intranet should have a strong permission system, it also helps to distribute information easily. For example you may want to have area where only people in your department can produce or edit its content while everyone else simply just view.

This can be done easily by setting up permission, ie : Roles, Group and Sub-Groups.

To make our job easier when configuring your system, have you got a Company org-chart available?

Step 6. Create Homepage Wireframe

As you know the homepage is the first page everyone is going to see, it’s worth the extra effort to design this carefully after all it is a gateway to all other content within the Intranet. Look at several examples for inspiration and decide what you want to see on the homepage, my advice is to keep it clean and simple.

UBS Intranet homepage wireframe

Colchester NHS Intranet wireframe

Step 7. Budget & Resources

How many users will be using the Intranet? Many Intranet software vendors  price their products by number of users.

Hardware, who is going to provide you with the hardware?  If you don’t have any we’re happy to source this for you or you can take the SaaS model.

Have you got an internal project team?  Usually we recommend a project sponsor, an internal project manager as the main contact, a technical contact, and a rep from marketing or communication as a minimum team - smaller companies might have fewer people involved.

Step 8. Timeline

Plan your project timeline carefully.  Each company is different - an Intranet can be deployed from 2 weeks up to a year, these are some key points worth considering which may cause delays:

• Sourcing hardware
• Getting access through your office network
• Finalising design
• Updating user list
• Content population
• Content migration.

Like everything else in life, execution is quick, preparation is the key so do your homework!

Step 9. Future plans (keep evolving!)

I’ve seen many intranet projects loose momentum after the initial launch phase. A successful intranet is something that grows over time, start simple and add new features gradually. Learn from  user feedback and implement user requests wherever feasible.

Small improvements can make a huge different - it’s like the breath of fresh air. Keep the original team and meet regularly for project reviews and brainstorming of new ideas.

Here are some ideas to think about once you have your initila intranet.

• Is there any business processes which can be done electronically?
• Such as overtime request, time cards, new hire.
• Is there a database, which is currently in Excel, and you think it will be much better if it is an online application?
• Any existing system, which can be better integrated with the Intranet?
• Thinking of deploying corporate micro-blogging? Online videos?

Step 10. Do it now!

This final step is the most important of all. You can make all the planning you need but without execution it is still a plan. Get the ball rolling now, gather your team, email them now, start researching or simply drop us a line to discuss your requirement, or book an online demo!

Good luck with your Intranet project!

Home Claromentis, collaboration, Design, extranet, intranet, intranet consultancy, intranet development, intranet project manager

Recently, I was working on a news component to generate a “cloud” of News Channels in our Intranet to allow our users to navigate our news articles with ease. The “first draft” worked nicely - It generated a list of news channels from the system based on a users permissions and put them into a styled infobox - nice.

Having put this into the Claromentis Component Library, it was suggested by Nigel that we take this one step further… to modify the component code, allowing users to add in some additional parameters and generate a more commonly known tag cloud, including randomization of the results returned, with varying font sizes depending on the most popular channels - now we’re talking!

After some code changes and some input from Dan at Claromentis, the component was modified to generate something that looks a little something like this:

The view can be changed by editing the user parameters on the component code as mentioned above.

To view a full description of the coponent and how to implement it, see here: http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/components:news_cloud

Until next time,

Craig

Home, Partners, Resources-Technical components, Tag Cloud

Designing for ALL of your users, without asking them all??

Having many hats within an IT team can have its advantages (and obviously its downsides!), but when facing the task of designing new visual interfaces for some 17,000 users, what are the vitals for a successful page layout and how do we cater for everyone?

Currently we have 18 visual interfaces across some two Intranets & nine Extranets, all of which are viewed by virtually the whole of our business. So how is it possible to incorporate all of the features for all of our users? It’s simply not an option. BUT, with good research and some carefully placed demonstrations and trials, we found that it is possible to capture user’s most important features.

As our business is driven by news, safety and corporate information, it is essential that we make available the information that the business needs as soon as they log on. On the flip side, cascading a lot of information as soon as a user logs in can be overwhelming which lead onto another key driver for our new interfaces - a users navigation when logged onto the system. Time and time again feedback appeared indicating that our Intranet was too “One way” – information was hard to put back into the system. Mentioning “News” above, we now have a “One-Click” route to adding news, which has been proven to increase the publication of delivering news on a day to day basis.

With these items in mind, and with the know-how of the Claromentis team, we switched to Java Searching – and boosted our search times to around 0.6 seconds. We simplified our menu structures to two levels and simplified our “People” pages to include an embedded left hand menu for easy navigation and making related pages easy to find.

So far, I think all I’ve alluded to is that our visual interfaces are the same as around 90% of corporate Intranets – BORING! So in response to this, we’ve added blocks of colour, symbolic icons for different applications, consistency in approach, JQuery powered gallery slideshow, easy application navigation from a JQuery powered application slider, and the easiest item for finding what’s mine – “My Desk”.

My advice for anyone designing a new visual interface for a large number of users is a four-step process. Keys to success are brainstorming, research, demonstrate and trial. Keeping users informed of change is always a key to success as they are the stakeholders in the use and growth of your Intranet. The Claromentis team were fundamental in providing accurate mock-ups and advice from other customers, a position that I hope we’ll all be in shortly to enable us to all share our ideas and findings.

One closing thought to a semi-inspiring blog, a couple of links to screen shots of our intranet homepage – to prove we’re moving forward with our Intranet.

“Dimensions” of Old à “Dimensions” Today

All comments welcome as usual,

Craig

Home

Defining Business Processes

In every working environment, there are often multiple understandings of both a process and a requirement - so how are they defined and how do we deliver them online?

Having worked within a corporate IT environment now for the past 5 years, with the latter being responsible for delivering web based applications to a high standard, across a business of multiple Intranets, with some 17,000 users. It can be difficult to gather the correct information and requirements that are needed to develop a detailed specification and ultimately a precise application.

Often, a customer has an understanding of how their business process should be managed online. However, how do we verify that this is the RIGHT way to manage their process? After all, an online process needs to be simple, straight forward and user friendly, otherwise, who would use it? With Claromentis’ InfoCapture application, workflow becomes easy to manage in a controlled environment. Out of the box, the application operates with defined boundaries, which makes the build and configuration of simple forms very straight forward. But what happens when we need to push the boundaries?

With some additional bespoke “plug-in” code (written in PHP), the boundaries of InfoCapture can be… expanded, but ONLY by a competent developer with access to the “guts” of the application. I found myself commonly defining bespoke coding into specifications, allowing customers to add additional steps into their processes in order to incorporate “features” that they couldn’t imagine having available in any paper form process, or in the default InfoCapture application. In simple terms, this often pushes out both coding and testing timescales, making projects much longer and more complex to deliver. So what happens when the “Out of box” experience requires additional code in order to meet customer expectations?

In more recent Claromentis releases, InfoCapture has grown to incorporate features that I feel were powered by our ability to “Push the boundaries”. Regular feedback and collaborative working with the supplier I feel helped us to better understand the InfoCapture application and put ideas forward for improvements to be shared by all customers. The overhaul of InfoCapture required more comprehensive reporting, straight forward wizards to build and manage forms, stylish skins to promote corporate workflows and a better permission structure.

With InfoCapture providing the majority of our Intranets online forms, I would certainly await the next batch of improvements to the application; maybe we’ll see the inclusion of some of the more common plug-ins into the core application code with simple wizard based builders in the admin panel? Maybe a more comprehensive permission structure to include better default roles to the typical “Reporter and Handler” that can be found at present? Hopefully Claromentis 6.0 will hold the answers…

Comments welcome as always.

Craig

E-form Services Babcock, Customer, infocapture

What's that coming over the hill?

Good Afternoon!

As most of you regulars will gather, this is my first post for the Claromentis Blog so please go easy on the comments!

Having worked closely with Claromentis for a little over a year now, and after many discussions with Nigel and Team regarding “What’s coming in Claromentis 6.0“, it seems to me that a growing number of companies are introducing “Social and Business” sharing across corporate intranet sites. On recent occasions I find myself sifting through reams of RSS feeds in my inbox and thinking “The team would be interested in that - I’ll send it on”. With this in mind, it is with great anticipation I acknowledge the introduction of the Claromentis “Innovate” application coming in the not so distant future, which only enforces this need for sharing information with colleagues.

Having seen a preview of the new “Innovate” application only yesterday, one question burns in the back of my mind - How will this work for intranets with many users? To give this more meaning, we currently support a mere 2000 users on our main Intranet including Staff, Contractors, and Clients, located from the highlands of Scotland to the very lowlands of Cornwall. Our users operate across a quite complex layer of permissions on content, roles and groups that I will only imagine a roll-out of this type of application can lead to a multitude of challenges. Will there be a need for an engineer on one of our operations sites to share in my “Idea’s Space”? Unlikely, but just maybe… At the moment, I believe that the best way of understanding how this will “slot into” our Intranet model will be down to an in depth understanding both our business model, and the full extent of the “Innovate” applications capabilities, as well as its boundaries.

When brainstorming our ideas for Visual Interface updates a few months ago, we looked widely at the cyber world for ideas of how large companies had used their websites to display meaningful content, with the ambition of enriching and shaping our users web experience of the Intranet. Feedback we received previously hinted that maybe our users experience was mainly “One Way”. In our early mock-ups, we included the “What Am I Working On” box - A user’s ability to share what they are currently working on with all other users of the intranet - and found that our senior user’s reaction to the “Social Networking” approach left them with a heavy mindset of “Facebook” type applications taking over the intranet. I think that “Innovate” will largely encompass all of the best parts of a more collaborative approach to sharing information while maintaining the integrity of a corporate image. Only time will tell…

The only piece of advice I can throw into the pot while starting promotion of an application of this nature is to be mindful of existing user’s thoughts of “Innovate” replacing key applications such as “News”. I know that the user’s of our intranet rely on our “News” system to deliver key information across our business and a phased replacement (If there is to be one) of these key applications is a must.

I think that in conclusion to the above, the “Innovate” application will introduce a whole new level of collaborative working for our colleagues to better share information across our Intranet, all-be-it with its difficulties and significant cultural changes on implementation, with the idea of sharing ideas live online being quite scary to some.

All comments welcome.

Craig

Partners Babcock, Collaborative Working, Customer

Social Networking vs Traditional Channels

At a meeting today we showed the designs for the new Innovate Corporate social networking application to a very significant client and the reaction was in my view extremely interesting.

The design was clearly great, the functionality of corporate social networking was absolutely acknowledged and the whole idea of bringing this out as a central application of Claromentis 6.0 – with all the new Ajax emphasis and other aspects is appreciated.

The main concern was one that we at Claromentis are going to have to thoroughly understand and plan for. “If Innovate is this easy, and employees really embrace it – what will happen to existing more corporate channels?”

This is a very valid concern in certain types of organisations. They focus considerable effort on consistent messaging and adherence to standards and quality initiatives – then along we come with a great way for all staff to cut through everything and just collaborate with each other to escalate whatever idea they find fascinating – providing an attractive and immediately responsive environment with content, resources and information that we have designed from the ground up to facilitate breaking through all barriers.

So Innovate is designed to cut through everything and foster idea creation through to innovation. But companies put up barriers and control systems for valid reasons.

If collaboration platform vendors like Claromentis facilitate tearing down walls to encourage participation, and that turns out to be exactly what employees want to embrace – as I could clearly see everyone in the room knew they would - it is dynamic, expressive and well designed - how will we then help our clients to maintain a balance between innovative cooperation and logical adherence to methodologies and approaches that have kept the business centered in its value proposition as defined by the management team and many years of experience?

Of course we would argue that complacence and standards are dangerous for any company in a fast moving world, where successful innovation can change the game in a remarkably short time.  Our job is to provide superior collaboration platforms.

But I do think it is true that free expression using corporate social networking must have a clear space and not simply be allowed to run riot with existing internal communications and controlled documents. This is going to be a very exciting space – as a result of the meeting today we decided that innovate will from the first release support a plug-in environment to allow hooks and behaviors relevant to each client. We will really enjoy working with our clients as they learn to create a balance between established practices and innovation.

Our client today actually maintains our nuclear submarine fleet – as one of its many business areas - and personally I would like to think that the relevant staff aren’t being encouraged by Claromentis corporate networking to just have a quick play this evening with a new idea to quickly see if it works…

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