You can now receive Tweets about Claromentis Blogs! Yippee!!

Process Manager Icon

As my role involves coding more on the front-end development; such as interfaces and scripts; I have always been focusing on the new front-end development technologies such as mooTools and jQuery, and of course cross-browser compatibility issues; especially on the browser we all love-to-hate, Internet Explorer 6.

However we are proudly supporting all A grade browsers across multiple platforms thanks to our development team and innovative intranet platform.

You might be thinking what this has got to do with e-forms… Let me tell you:

Claromentis e-forms feature is part of our Process Manager product which enables you to create forms and assign workflows to them. As of today, I am going through the InfoCapture application (which handles e-form processes) with one of our e-form specialists. This is the first series of posts about learning e-forms feature of the Process Manager product.

With the help of flexible and easy-to-use interface, it is possible to create a complete and fully functioning form with couple of clicks. You can collect various data from various sources, not to mention your intranet users. For example, you can create an expense claim form and let your users fill the necessary areas in the form, even upload the scanned image file of the bill if you need. You can create your own support ticketing system and relief your support team’s workload on managing and dealing with support requests (our own Discover support portal using exactly the same system to manage hundreds of support requests we receive each month).

We always keep saying that we provide a flexible and highly expandable intranet software. Our core code is based entirely on PHP, which is another reason why it is so flexible. And we want to keep the same flexibility on forms as well. Therefore, our form builder enables you to assign CSS styling on every single element of a form. You are free to design your heart out and the system will nicely fetch the your style into your form. You can change the colour, the size, the border; pretty much everything a CSS code enables you. As far as I am aware, there are not many form builders in the market which offers you this level of flexibility.

So what is the advantage of this? First of all (your marketing department will love this), even your forms can carry your branding colours and look and feel. This is very important specially for international clients. You can’t imagine a classic Coca-Cola bottle in a purple can, can you?

In the next post, I am going to talk about workflows. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope this gives you a better understanding about the flexibility of our product.

Keep It Simple, Yet Efficient

We all are busy, aren’t we? Nobody wants to come to an office and see a load of irrelevant documents nagging them and announcements that they have no interest with. You wouldn’t want them to spend tens of minutes looking at a single page and assume them to find their way around.

It could be pretty painful for the end user if you keep your intranet’s user interface cluttered. Try to have a clean and well structured user interfaces; both on your internal pages and public pages.

Use Intranet Permissions, Groups and Roles

Most of our users have been enjoying the comfort and luxury of the extensive intranet permissions system of Claromentis. By using this powerful yet innovative feature of Claromentis Intranet Software, you can filter your documents, files, pages, announcements, news and almost everything else for your target audience. Our software allows you to keep your intranet elements well efficiently organized and gives your workforce a clean and well-thought environment to work on. By preventing them seeing the unnecessary elements of an intranet, they will be more likely to be focused on the actual work itself.

Do Not Assume Your Users Are Computer Literate

Try to be precise on your descriptions and guidelines, particularly if you are trying to explain a part of your intranet. Don’t assume them that clicking on the “Submit” button after filling all of the information is obvious. Write it down and make it clear every single step they should follow. If you are not lucky enough by not having a user friendly intranet software, well, change your provider if it is still not too late or push your service provider to provide you a better interface.

Encourage Your Users to Communicate

Most of the intranet software suites provide a functionality to enable your users to communicate each other, one way or another. Be it an instant messaging, e-mailing or forums; encourage your users to communicate each other. This will not only reduce the workload of your support team but your users will also pick things up quicker by trying themselves. If you have a collaborative intranet solution, then use the many of the features provided. Allow users to comment on your news, allow them to write blogs, certainly use forums for both personal and corporate matters.

Use Short, Precise Surveys

Every week or so, create a survey and try collecting an information from your users. With the advantage of a permission based intranet, you can have different surveys for different audiences all within the same intranet. Sometimes try to ask something about a national event or something out of a business matter. Don’t have long and boring surveys as most of the users will not bother filling the information correctly, if not at all.

Keep Your Language Simple and Easy to Understand

If your organization is big and have many levels of knowledge between the different areas of your intranet, try to keep your writing language simple and easy to understand. Use short and grammatically correct sentences. This especially applies to your news, announcements and e-mails sent to masses. If you are going to write about a very specific topic which will be interesting for only some of your departments, assign reading permissions to people who belong only those departments.

Try to be Innovative

It has always been encouraging for us to see some innovative uses of our intranet software by some of our clients. Don’t be afraid of expressing your ideas to your manager or your intranet software provider. In most cases, there is always a way to achieve what you are after and it is usually easier than you think.

What are your ways and best practises for improving your corporate intranet’s user experience? Share it with your comments.

To find an answer to this, we did have an internal meeting today to narrow down our solutions and decided the following options:

1. Find a reliable third party social networking platform software, buy the software, customize it for the client and resell it.
2. Create a partnership with a third party company delivering social networking platforms and work on their software together with the owner of the software and deliver the result to the client. Consider the possibilities of learning the social networking platform development and combine it with our own product.
3. Develop our own bespoke social networking platform and deliver it to the client.
4. Say no.

The first three options have their pros and cons, while the 4th option is something we don’t like to go for, therefore I am going to focus on the first 3 options.

We found a perfect software delivering exactly what the client has asked for. It ticks almost every boxes based on the client’s requirements sheet. The software is open source and can be acquired with different pricing structures; starting from free up to good amount of money; depending on the package. In my opinion, the most expensive package, which is still relatively cheap based on its functionalities, is the one we should go for. The main reason behind my defence for this software is it works perfectly, delivers exactly what the client is asking for, the software itself is open source so we can modify it the way we want it, customize it to suit the client’s needs and deliver it to the client. The client gets what they want which works and we are happy to exceed the client’s expectations.

However there were several concerns about this option. The main concern, which is the main reason I am writing this article for is the software is actually an open source software. Some of our team members considered this as a negative point, because you may not get any support for the software. However what was forgotten in this concern was actually the provider of the software is releasing the core code of the software and any additional plug-ins (which we will need all of them) costs money. What took my attention was the word ‘open source’ made them think that this software may be unstable or developed by a student in couple of nights for fun and may well be forgotten by its provider. What I find strange is this thought would have never come to mind if the software was released by companies like Apple, Google, Sun or even Facebook or Digg team, just because they are a well known company and/or charging millions for it… For example, Mozilla may well stop supporting Firefox if it was not financially possible for them to keep the development of it.

But there were some other points which I found logical. Up-to-date, we delivered our own software which we know inside out. We are able to answer every question about it because we developed, deployed and delivered it. We are responsible to support our clients for the software they bought from us. What if something goes wrong with this third party software? OK, we have our own developers who can fix many problems, but to address a problem may take 5 minutes if the problem is occured on our software whereas it may well take 5 hours to address the same problem on some other software, if you are not familiar with it, and we are not talking about couple of hundred lines of code. This third party software is huge, so its’ codebase.

The other unspoken concern, which again I agree with, was the feeling we will have from the result. If the client loves this third party solution and sends their greetings to us, we would not feel the same level of satisfaction and proud as much as if they did the same for our intranet software, because simply what we delivered is NOT ours. We may have done a good job on finding the correct solution, customizing it and deploying it, but these are not actually what the client is requesting. These are expected standard results whereas the capabilities of the software are the requirement itself.

The second option is creating a partnership with a local social networking software developer and work on the actual software itself together. By doing this, there will be a mutual level of knowledge sharing. On our side, we will be learning how to deal with social networking management and implementation of these kind of platforms on corporate environments. And so many other stuff that I am not able to share with you for the moment. Because this will be a partnership, the provider will be reachable, therefore it will be possible for us to mash both of our solutions on one platform. Our client is already using our intranet solution and they are happy with it. Rather than giving them a complete new solution, which does not have the same look and feel as our own software, may be seen confusing to them (which is what may happen with the first solution, but again it is an open source software, so we should be able to customize it).

There is already one company we are considering to have a partnership for this project and we are in talks with them. I can not give you more details about this for the moment.

The third solution is a less likely to achive in a timescale given by the client. Our own software has years of experience and development history and as I said at the beginning of my article, it was not developed as a social networking platform. The strange thing is our software can do many of the client’s requirements on an individual basis, but was not designed to use these features on a public website with social networking ideas in mind.

You are probably asking “So, which option did you go for?“, well, we are still considering these and other  options and there are no decisions as of now. What I wanted to share with this article was what may be thought when we hear the word “open source“.

Can/should open source be considered as professional? How far professional and successful it can go? Can commercial products be open source and if they are open source, are they still commercial? Is open source turning out to be a marketing term because of the success of Mozilla Firefox?

Probably harder questions to answer than the meaning of life.

As of Claromentis 5.4, we have developed a new feature called Smart Objects. This feature helps Claromentis users importing content to their intranet pages from different sources within Claromentis, such as News, Forum messages and Document lists. No longer will users have to navigate to separate areas to see application files as opposed to web based content, for example. A dynamic view of disparate content and objects is possible from just one location.

This company is part of one of the worlds largest clothing manufacturers, and they are using our software to improve the communication between different departments within the organization, as well as simplifying the process of managing documents securely, all within one instance. Departments varies from variety of sources, such as Sales, Finance, Warranty, RD&D, EMEA and more… Without a doubt, a web based intranet solution like Claromentis was the best choice for an international company. Having its employees across the world makes the importance of communication and document management through the Internet was an appropriate choice.

Because Claromentis is permission based intranet software, it is possible to hide your content from different departments using the same intranet software. You simply create groups and roles within Claromentis and identify your content (documents and news) to be shown to a certain number of users.

As you can imagine, a company like this literally has tens of thousands of documents stored within the software, so making these files to be found easily is not an easy job. That’s where the Smart Objects feature is going to make this process a lot easier than our competitors’ solutions.

Let me explain how different parts of Claromentis can work in collaboration to solve complex intranet problems. In this example, I would like to share a document folder containing financial sales targets of this month and a list of products needs to be highlighted during sales campaigns. I would also like to share news belonging the sales department and I need to show all of the above content visiting the Sales Department home page.

In the above example, I am actually aiming to solve my problem by sourcing the content from the following corporate solutions.

• Document Manager
• Content Manager
• Permission Based Intranet Management
• Permission Based News Management

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Smart Objects enables you to show contents from different parts of Claromentis, and this is exactly how this client actually solved this complex collaboration issue.

1. Define Groups and Roles (SALES > Sales Managers | Sales Team) and assign users to the appropriate level.
2. Using Document Manager application, store my files into one folder created for the special sales campaign.
3. Change the permissions of all my files and make the “financial sales targets” viewable only by Sales Managers and the remaining files viewable by people belonging the SALES group.
4. Using Web Based Content Management Solution, create an intranet page and fill up the content areas, such as TITLE, SUMMARY, GOALS, REWARDS.
5. Using Smart Objects, embed the document folder containing my files into an appropriate space within my intranet page.
6. Again Using Smart Objects, embed the Sales news (blogs) channel.
7. Save the page and share the web address of the page with my staff.

What will happen is people who has an access to view the page I just created will only need to remember one web address (which can be pasted into an e-mail message) and when they click on that link, all of the information they have a permission to see will be visible to them. Remember that we have embedded one single folder containing both financial targets as well as documents containing products need to be highlighted? Because I set the permissions for my documents, Sales team will only see the files they need to see and managers will also be able to access the financial target documents, even though they are in the same folder and I have embedded that folder into my Intranet Page.

All within one single page. How Smart is that?!

Exceeding client expectations is one of the major key parts for sustainable success, specially during times of economic downturn.

As an interface developer working for one of the best corporate intranet software providers, I need to make sure that a client is satisfied when it comes to their expectations – whereas the client needs to make sure that the software provider is delivering results on time, to specifications, correctly and efficiently.

A comprehensive intranet solution like Claromentis has so many different aspects. For a client, they receive one piece of a software suite and most, if not all, that matters to them is whether it works or not.

Although the other side of the story is complex – in essence the sales process has set expectations, and I need to deliver against them. To help me I have mentors of course, and developers – but to be honest coding intranet interfaces from approved designs is a job I can normally just get on with. So how can I make sure that I exceed customer expectations..? A lot needs to take place before I code a single line ..

• Marketing: Make sure that the product is described accurately, and is the current release not vapor ware – a potential source of miss-matched expectations, in my experience.
• Quotation: Understand the client expectations, analyze the work involved and quote correctly. Try to get technical Claromentis input here!
• Review: Review the response from the client to the quotation. If positive but we need something else, plan any future requirements for delivery of the product and allocate to a release schedule.
• Design and develop: Here I go – create the interface based on client’s requirements.
• Custom development: Develop the custom functionality if required and embed into the product. A  review process takes place here, with client staff, development and myself. We involve the account manager wherever possible.
• Configure: Set the product for review on a staging server and make sure it is working to final specifications.
• Support: Assist the client on solving complex intranet software issues.

The important part here is setting the expectations of… both sides actually. It is important to assure the client that they will get the software as promised whereas our staff should have enough material to  deliver what is required – and not something else entirely!

It is fun though – getting it right takes talent and a lot of creativity… but we do create some great designs for information management in a VI!

Today, almost all content management solutions offer you a WYSIWYG text based content editor, which means what you create on the editor section is what you will see on the actual page. Cool, but nothing special!

What makes Claromentis special is the way it interacts with your content. Let me explain you a bit further:

In Claromentis, it is possible to create templates and define editable areas. Let’s say you have a page which contains 3 sections; one for the menu, one for the main content and one for the links of websites you visit frequently. I also presume that you would like to have some images within your main content section.

With Claromentis easy-to-use content management software, you define the areas above and their field type. For consistency purposes, you wouldn’t want your intranet and/or users to change the overall look and feel of your template, so you wouldn’t want them to change the main title font size or colour. So you can define the header section of your main content area as ‘string’, which means your users will only be able to change the content of the header section but not its styling.

You have your template ready and its sections defined. The next step is populating the actual content. How would you do this? Simple. Just look at the following picture and you will get the idea:

Easy to use content management solution

It is also possible to create areas within your template which are not editable by users. This could be a company slogan or a footer area which contains company address information.

Customizable Intranet Software: Works the way you do…

Babcock Case Study

With a client list including the Ministry of Defence and local authorities as well as major private sector companies, Babcock Infrastructure Services (BIS) manages over 15,000 properties across the United Kingdom. Part of Babcock International Group PLC, the Company services nationwide contracts both directly and through subsidiary joint ventures Debut Services (South West) Ltd, Babcock DynCorp Ltd, and mouchelbabcock education.

Reed the full version of Babcock Case Study.

Google Talkabout Logo

You can do lot of interesting stuff with Google Talk like get alert notifications, save bookmarks to delicious, manage web calendars, set reminders, write blogs, and so much more. Such features can be easily integrated into Google Talk through ‘bots’ which, in simple English, are like virtual friends who are online 24×7 and will always respond with a smile to your questions or requests

Here are some of the most useful ‘bots’ that transform Google Talk into a more useful program:

1. imfeeds@gmail.com – Add this IM Feeds bot as your Google Talk buddy and you’ll be able to read any blog or website that syndicates content via RSS feeds.

To subscribe to a website in GTalk, simply send a new IM message that says “sub abc.com” where abc.com is the address of the website / blog you want to read inside Google Talk.

2. friendfeed@imified.com – This secret bot lets you post to FriendFeed from Google Talk. You may submit either hyperlinks or text messages.

3. imified@imified.com – This imified bot turns Google Talk into a real powerhouse.

You can post bookmarks to delicious, send messages to Twitter, submit blog entries to WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, manage events in Google Calendar, shorten long URLs, run whois and so on.

4. inezhabot@gmail.com – Like IM Feeds, iNezha bot helps you read feeds inside Google Talk but this is slightly more versatile. For instance, you can simply say “digg” and it will show a list of all feeds that match that search term so you don’t have to type (or copy-paste) feed addresses.

5. Translation – This is a free service from Google that helps you translate words from a foreign language into your native language. Just add the relevant bot (e.g. hi2en@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi to English or en2hi@bot.talk.google.com for English to Hindi) as your buddy, send him a message and it will get translated instantly.

6. Set Task Reminders – If you need to remember something important, Google Talk can send you reminders for that event.

Just add timer to your Twitter friend’s list and then add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list in Gtalk. Now if you want to get a reminder after 50 minutes, send a direct message to twitter like “d timer 50 pick kids from school” and a reminder will automatically pop up in your Google Talk after 50 minutes.

7. Transliteration – If you want to chat in your mother tongue (like Hindi or Tamil) but feel more comfortable using the English keyboard, Google Transliteration bot will come in handy.

For instance, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com to you friend’s list in GTalk and all messages you type in English will get transliterated in the language of your choice. Available only for a few Indian languages.

Source: macsimumnews.com

E-mail Standards Project

Most of us are aware of “web standards” and its affects on creating “user friendly web based intranet software“, but it is very hard to say the same about the “e-mail standards“. Are the newsletters and announcment mails you send properly displayed on all e-mail clients? If you would like to know about it more, you can visit Email Standards Project website.

You can find very detailed information from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, From Google Mail to Yahoo! Mail and other web based e-mail clients. There is also a blog for this project.

We always have options. And in the design process we have them too. At the moment we don’t really know to what level open source applications can compete with Adobe. But with support, with independent minds and strong community involvement, the open source movement can grow. Competition is a part of the progress and so is the choice. We need to maintain a competitive arena in design. And we need good open source alternatives for the tools we use. Independent start-ups are the lifeblood of the industry and the breath of fresh air we all need.

But apart from Microsoft, Adobe and the latest computer system to run these applications, you may have problems setting up a professional open source environment which would perfectly meet your needs. We need better open source applications for designers. And we need to work together to produce them and then use them. Just think for a second: how many young designers can afford Adobe anyway? Do we not need a platform that supports us while we support it? Doesn’t open source represent the true spirit of design?

Nick Pretorius,
[Source]

Web Logos

There are 2 different versions in guess the logo website which aims to test your memory skills. You might think that you will always remember the logo of Google, but are you sure?

Visit the website and get ready to be surprised.

The report emphasizes facts like the importance of visual design & ease of use. And also, it points out interesting information like “designers being overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation”.
You can download the full report as a PDF file or read the shorter executive summary.

If you want to see the methodology behind the survey, click here.