Last week our entire office gathered for the unveiling of the beta version of our upcoming software release, Claromentis 7. Released in the coming weeks, Claromentis 7 marks the culmination of months of creative development and collaboration by our dedicated team of designers and developers, highlighting an innovative milestone in our fourteen year history.

Claromentis 7 has been meticulously designed to enhance usability and optimise employee productivity. Core applications such as the document management system still encompass their fundamental functionalities, but they have been significantly enhanced with new features and capabilities.

Take a look at some of the new features below:

Responsive Layout
The visual interface responds and adapts to the viewport size of the device or computer being used. Whether this is a smart phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, the intelligent system will adapt its layout to display content in the most appropriate way for each device, without compromising on experience or functionality. This eliminates the need for an organisation to adhere to a specific hardware policy.

Drag and Drop Files
Users can efficiently and effectively upload files from their desktop by using the clever drag and drop functionality. File upload is achieved through an inline upload process which begins as soon as the user has selected a file.

Document Preview
Users can browse the content of a document without having to download. This is of particular benefit when the ability to modify or access the original document is not permitted to a particular group or user. Users can also scan the content of a document in an efficient manner without ever having to download the actual document.

Claromentis 7, Document Management System, Intranet-Extranet

As you may already know, we have been eagerly awaiting our forthcoming software release Claromentis 7 for some time now. The initial planning process began during the summer of 2011, and our team of developers and designers officially started working on the project at the beginning of October.

During the last four months, tired computer screens have been replaced, working late into the evening has become the norm, and Alexander our lead architect from Russia – has become a permanent resident of the UK.

We are really excited to announce that there are just 27 working days left until we release Claromentis 7! Check out my blog on Friday to find out what the new release will consist of in terms of features and updates.

Claromentis 7

Our own intranet system here at Claromentis UK allows us to flip our intranet into 3 views with a single click.

These 3 views are suitable for

• Users that require a corporate, read and consume information based intranet
• Users that would like to keep an eye on our corporate social media activities
• Users that get significant value from corporate social media

I think this is completely fascinating – as new clients have varying views on the value of internal corporate social networking, from complete evangelists to unconvinced skeptics.

They are now able to easily allocate the appropriate intranet experience to various sets of users, and even allow users to instantly change between them as they wish! They can pilot corporate social media to defined sets of users – for example according to their job roles or locations.

Internally at Claromentis we are using each of the middle and extreme social interfaces for 7 days each – so far, based on user engagement – in our company social wins!!

Unsocial Intranet

Slightly Social Intranet

Completely Social Intranet

Innovate, Intranet-Extranet

One of our large corporate clients has decided to replace internal group emails with our revolutionary social networking application, Innovate.

You may wonder why an organisation would replace such a previously vital method of communication with one that is relatively new in comparison. However this communication method encourages collaboration whilst also creating a crucial information resource for its users.

Take a look at some of Innovate’s features and see how organisations are embracing our corporate social networking application.

You can control through permissions which channels are available to which users, in this way guiding the topics and making expertise available where needed. Information can be made available to people within certain departments – therefore channelling relevant information to the right people.

Users can follow people that interest them and ‘like’ comments and post comments into various channels that you set up to support your business. Facebook-like functionality encourages collaboration and allows users to express their ideas and opinions efficiently.

Users can easily engage in conversations with links to relevant information – for example asking for feedback on a particular design or document. Articles from external sources can be referenced through the addition of links.

Clients, Innovate, Intranet-Extranet

We have had so many thousands of conversations over the last 14 years about “intranet functionality” – new clients asking us if we have this and that feature to enable them to compare us to some other potential partner in a spreadsheet, an RFP or a simple subjective decision.

As intranets evolve to become enormously powerful gateways to the digital workplace we have seen the argument shifting away from low level functionality such as ‘can I book a taxi using your system?’ to much higher level discussions that really make a difference to what a client can achieve. And that’s what we so enjoy.

When clients look for real value from a web platform they are really, it seems to me – asking some perfectly valid and basic questions about capabilities in the following areas :

• Information management – full indexing of version controlled documents, a variety of file types, record management, configurable metadata – and a world class permission system.
• News and internal communication – permission based news systems, announcements and blogs.
• Compliance – policy must reads, full auditing, audit management modules.
• Design – can the design be really, truly inspirational or just a logo and a style guide?
• Corporate social media – does the platform offer true engagement to get the users really engaged with the information.
• Business Processes – we have a lot of processes that are not the most efficient – can we move these onto the web platform and produce powerful form based workflows that help us to understand our process workloads, requirements and increase our efficiency.
• Mobile – is your offering capable of reaching out to our modern workforce with a range of needs on multiple devices.
• Deployment – do you offer truly global, cross platform, cloud or perpetual in house offerings?
• API – can we reliable and efficiently call out information to use in our own applications – for example using REST.

What we have noticed in the last couple of years is that our clients are enjoying the combination of these powerful capabilities. “It’s great to have simple business processes like recruitment that can call on document management resources, all within a permissioned process portal”. “Extensive business logic, with a corporate social media interaction available on top”. “A communication platform with commenting and Facebook style status updates and micro blogging.” “Great – Active directory integration combined with being able to log in with my Google ID.”

A Web Platform

This is indeed powerful, and for us as a partner in these spaces really exciting. By all means start with the web platform functionality that meets your short term urgent business needs, but then add significant areas to work in a combination that is truly powerful, and makes a significant difference to your business.

The functionality discussion is moving up to truly interesting large scale areas of business needs. To me this is a natural extension of the debate, as the workplace goes digital, social and mobile and more and more fundamental business tasks and requirements are met by cross platform browser based web platforms that can grow with your business -  like Claromentis.

And by the way, in case it’s raining out there – yes you can book a taxi – you just need a very simple business process for that task – with notifications, assignments and service level agreements.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, The Framework