Intranet Management Software Blog

Within many global 2000 companies, the journey to create Social Enterprises (also referred to as Enterprise 2.0) is underway, set against a backdrop of hopelessly outdated methods for employee collaboration & communications.

There’s a lot at stake. Companies that make a smooth transition to a social enterprise can unlock innovation more quickly, capture & share knowledge more effectively and harness their global networks of talent to outwit the competition. But the transition is complicated, requiring not just adoption of new technologies but significant changes in culture and working behaviour.

So how do you set about achieving a smooth transition, preferably before your competition? This is where Microsoft’s Sharepoint looms large, as the intranet collaboration platform of choice across many large enterprises today.

Read more at Knowledge Board

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Ekurhuleni West College (EWC) one of the leading Further Education and Training Institution in South Africa. Spread across 6 geographical location with 550 numbers of staff, EWC offers training and development programme in Engineering, Business, ICT, Finance and Community Services

It is the second Public FET Collegae in Gauteng to obtain SO 9001: 2000 certificate from the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) in 2008.

In order to continue maintaining high standards EWC has chosen Claromentis Quality Manager solution. They have developed a Quality Management web portal, which can be easily accessed from all campus location, and it has become a one-stop-shop system to find up-to-date policies and procedures. EWC also uses InfoCapture application to track and manage non-conformances.

Read more about Quality Management  Solution or take the tour

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You might be wondering what on earth such title for a software company blog, in fact there are many similarities when you compare family trip to IKEA and delivering IT project for an organisation.

I begin with a little story that the state of my kitchen is dreadful, the look is so dated and it needs total refurbishment and I’ve been promising my wife a trip to IKEA so we can have one of those shinny looking kitchen just like the one in the brochure.

So we take a look on the brochure and we really like this one.  At £860 It’s a bargain! So let’s go and get it!

Then the reality starts to emerge you don’t came out the store with that kitchen; in fact you ended up with these.

All the good things isn’t included, definitely not the coffee and the laptop, but fittings and lighting, all the things that make it looks good.

If you think about isn’t it an elaborate con? They are selling you the picture with the price tag but you ended up with pile of flat pack?

Have we actually factor-in the cost and time required for transport, unpack, build, other fittings, disposal of the old kitchen units, daily disruption, and possible error?
Of course not we are so blinded with the image in the brochure and the low price!

It makes me wonder how many of the proud purchaser that successfully ended up with the picture just like in the brochure. Perhaps the percentage is not dissimilar to the percentage of successful IT projects.

Now back on the software business. I am seeing the similar attitude of “Honey let’s go to IKEA’ to sort out problem within an organisation.  Many of us still believe that to sort out internal communication problem is to go out just buy the software.

How about that “intranet” Dear? It looks sexy and cheap? Surely it’s within our budget.

How about other things, which we need to factor-in? Such as Planning, resources, preparation Check out 10 steps planning your intranet project.

At Claromentis our attitude is always to go for extra miles, we believe unique solution is required for unique problem, the value it’s not in the product but in the complete solution based on our experience that we’ve learnt deploying more than 100 intranets and bespoke web-based software across the world.

The reality is we are only one side of the coin; the other side is you Mr Customer. We can’t solve your problem if you don’t want it to be solved.

No offense to Mr IKEA, I still think your business model is brilliant, and this post is based on my personal view.

Services Case Study, commercial, fun, humor, intranet, intranet consultancy

Hearing about how our government spending tax payer money are juicy topics to share. I was staggered after reading this article from BBC after recent stories about government website spending and iPhone apps, and I thought I would share it for the fun reading.

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk £105m for 3 years with only around one million unique visitor a month

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk £35m a year

http://www.nhs.uk £21m a year with six million unique visitor a month

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Frustrated user

Does it sound familiar? It’s a human reaction when we encounter a system which is difficult to use or doesn’t work as we expected it to.

When usability touches a personal level the effect of a simple usability error feels like it has been multiplied tenfold. This post reminded me of one of the best usability books by Steve Krug “Don’t Make me think”. Usability is simple, it’s just common sense yet it’s also an incredible form of art.
I’ve spent more than 8 years working as an Information Architect, designing complex web-based software and many times I feel that I am still learning. Things that are obvious and logical from a technical point-of-view may be totally wrong from the novice users perspective.

We’ve just completely revamped our holiday planner application and one of our clients is currently running a beta test for the application. From a technical point-of-view the new holiday planner is much better than the old one. Some of the new features include an interactive holiday calendar, overview screen, automatic calculation, and a team/manager dashboard.

Apparently things are not going so well with our users. They don’t appreciate all of these wonderful features, what they care about is one thing and one thing only “Their holiday allowance”.

Here is a snapshot of the screen showing a user booking a half-day holiday.

Holiday request

Taking a closer look you might notice several things:

1. The icon representative a half day holiday is correct, a half red square indicating that the user only booked a half day holiday.
2. Duration is shown as 0.5 day, which is correct but in brackets (1 calendar day) which is causing major confusion.
3. Users are very sensitive to their holiday allowance, when they book a half day they only want to see a half day, without any reference to calendar days.

Here are some reactions from the users:

• “Why is duration showing 1 day, I booked a half day only”
• “What is calendar day? How’s that different to a normal day?”
• “Does it mean if I took a half day off, the system took 1 day from my allocation?”

Again, from a technical point-of-view, the reason we display calendar day is simply to give useful information about the overall duration of a users holiday.  For example you may have booked 2 half-day holidays, which means 1 day has been taken out from your holiday allocation. But you may want to know that you have booked 2 calendar days with each half-day holiday.

I can see this piece of information is actually quite useful but having to display both day types has caused major confusion to the user, after all, when a user books their holiday the only thing they care about is their holiday allowance.

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Every organisation understands the value of instant feedback. It promotes continuous improvements and creative discussion. Some say it is what makes a business ‘tick’.

Working on a communication software platform, we want to facilitate this positive feedback culture.

Pages or web pages is one of the largest type of content of an Intranet along side with Documents and News. In Claromentis we already have comments for News as well as Document and to complete the whole picture we are now introducing comments for publish page.

Here is the anatomy of commenting:

Home, Solutions collaboration, comments, Design, intranet 2.0, online collaboration, web 2.0

As we  all know MySQL is the most popular open source SQL database available until today. If you’re like me – not comfortable with command line SQL – then one of the most popular GUI tools is phpMyAdmin. a MySQL adminstration application which is written in PHP.

Oracle provides an alternative that allow you graphically work with MySQL databases which is called MySQL Workbench. It is a cross-platform GUI tools available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Anyone has some experience using this tool ? if so please share…

Resources-Technical databases, mysql, Old - technical

What an interesting point mentioned in the video above, in the business realms we are trained to execute the best possible plan and punish failure, instead of continuously prototyping and learn from mistake as you go along just like what the kindergarten kids do.

It seems we’ve not learnt our lessons that the best possible plans will always have flaws and there is nothing can substitute the reality. In the software world we tend to create the ultimate plan and concept, which looks good on paper so we can secure funding. This is usually leads to either the result is not fit for purpose or we tend to over complex the situation and not get the basic rights.

In Claromentis, we’re now embracing prototyping worlds, create endless revisions until it’s right, even when the software is developed and deployed the project is not finished, deploy early and quickly learn from it. The  whole point is to create a continues improvement, what works in one environment may not works with others, every situation every problem is unique in many ways and we want to create something that fit to that purpose.

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Everyone knows that even in the era of web 2.0  and micro blogging today, email is still a powerful and extremely effective communication tool.

Our relationship with Email is a bit like a ‘love and hate relationship’. We love it because we don’t have to go somewhere to fetch or read the information, it is right in ‘my inbox’, and for most of us it is part of morning ritual, breakfast, cup of coffee and check email.

We hate it at the same time because our inbox tends to be very messy; there is no easy and reliable way to separate genuine emails we like, emails we hate, good or bad notifications and spam messages.

Not just quality of the messages, sometime we also have to think about frequency, and volume of information being delivered.

People sometime complain they are not being informed about important information, in our case recently our book keepers insisted that they need to know if any of the managers has approved overtime as soon as possible in real-time so they can authorize the payment immediately, without further delay.

Before it was lack of information but now take a look at this person’s inbox :

OK that’s just too much information, the accountant is now complaining that the system is spamming them.

This issue made them realizes the consequences of their request. Sometime it is hard to imagine but what the differences can be simply by the frequency of the email you receive. Less than 5 a day seem acceptable but 50+ a day is just too much. Is it really ‘too much’ or it is a sign that system is working?

The fact is that each request is now visualized, and they can see what’s going on in real-time. It might be  just a  normal psychology reaction, who likes  to see the work has just piling up ?

The problem is where is the balance? Lets say 20+ a day might be OK for someone but it is too much for others. If we change the method for example using daily digest, then some people might complain they don’t get the information in ‘real time’ when they need it, or is it just our way to make ourselves feels better.

Tell us what you think…

Home, Services collaboration, email, information architect, intranet consultancy, spam

Old and New Intranet

About UBS

The United Bible Societies (UBS), a collective name for 145 Bible Societies working in over 200 countries and territories is launching a new Intranet using Claromentis Intranet Manager.

New Intranet

After sending out questionnaire and running a focus group to improve Intranet, Claromentis and UBS Communication team working together to make the new intranet richer but easier to use and faster to find the information.

UBS also introduced several new application built within their Intranet such as contact directory for all members, document management and multimedia such as online videos.

The new intranet is also multi-lingual, The system is designed to detect user’s language preference and display the right information and interface in their native language.

User’s Feedback

User’s feedback so far has been really positive.

“I love the new look website. God bless you for the good job. Its much easier to navigate and its also easy to find the past stories. Absolutely love it. Will definately send more stories this year. God bless you all.”

“A big thank you to you and your team for their work so far on the UBS intranet site.”

“I’ve just given a detailed presentation to our global senior management team and it went down extremely well. They were particularly impressed by the design (‘clean, easy to use, familiar for people using sites such as Facebook’) and by the layers of permissions that are now possible and will enable us to do so much more with the site.”

Hamish Bruce – Communication Manager at UBS.

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