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.”

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

We have been using our Intranet software for managing our own training records and like our clients the advantages of using our form based workflow software – Business Process Manager – for this are considerable :

Training & Development Intranet Records

Custom Form Design

What we need to store about our training records is appropriate to us, and different to other companies. Using Business Process Manager means we design our own  form and evolve that over time, with version control.

Granular permissions

It is easy to assign managers permissions to review the training requests of their own teams, and to allow users to review just their own training records.

Custom statuses

We can set whatever statuses we need for our training records.

Notifications

In our case managers of course need to be notified when an employee submits a request – but later on in the process – on approval – so do HR and accounts.

Reporting

The in built statistics allows us to review our training attendance over time and by status.

Auditing of all data

As an ISO9001 audited company training records are  inspected ever year, and we benefit from being able to review with the external auditor the complete changes made to ever request, down to individual field level – who changed what and when.

And to think that – just like many of our new clients – we used to do this on spreadsheets on shared drives!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process intranets, training records

There are so many aspects that we consider when going through our process for agreeing the best intranet design for a new customer.

One relatively simple one to discuss is how do we make sure users can find what we assume they will be looking for – an also how can we encourage them to visit an area that they might not think would be interesting or relevant?

One part of the answer is through what Claromentis describe as “fast access buttons”

These are significantly sized buttons that provide a visual pull to certain areas of the intranet. They are also – like everything else in Claromentis – permission based so that certain groups of users will see different icons. In this way we can try to predict what should be of interest to those users, and encourage them to take the actions we require.

Andy Briggs from our custom design team recently produced a great document on intranet design, and this is a diagram from the section on fast access buttons:

Intranet Design : Permission based fast access

For interest I also show the access areas that are promoted for me on our own Claromentis Intranet.

Lets look at the 10 buttons that are presented to me and summarize each one :

• Company Policies – Claromentis has a duty to ensure I have every chance to read our policies, and this button is extremely appropriate for discharging that responsibility
• Audits – we are a quality managed ISO9001 company and I have access to all of our internal audits, and the actions arising from them
• Dev Wiki – even in sales it is great to have access to internal technical resources!
• Discover Claromentis – our support portal – allows me to review any issues or enhancement requests that my clients may have filed
• Webex – we provide private tours for anyone interested in our software and I use this every day
• Live demo – access to our standard live intranet and business process management demonstration system
• Blog Admin – as you can see I write blogs and I don’t want to remember another set of credentials!
• Marketing database – exactly the same – provides access to a web based system that I use extensively
• Google Analytics – useful to periodically review our traffic sources and what they are looking for
• National Rail – access to the live departure board at Brighton station – I commute by train and this is just a convenience for me.

So fast access buttons provide :

• Single sign on access to other web applications – the intranet provides a gateway to your digital workspace.
• Convenience for the user
• A way for the company to encourage my participation in certain applications or information areas.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Services intranet design

Many potential clients and partners request a sandbox to allow them to experience the full Claromentis functionality.

This had been an issue for us, as our live intranet demo actually locks down the users permissions in order to maintain the integrity of the site.

So using our cloud servers we now have available an intranet trial where you can request an instance from our sales team, who once they know your requirements can make your own personal trial instantly available. There is nothing to download – it is a fully functional Claromentis web platform that is ready for you to use immediately.

The official release day is Monday – but I happen to know its available from Friday – so if you would like to evaluate a professional intranet environment, just get in touch!

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet, Services, Solutions

After much elevated praise on the new Claromentis 7 web platform, the core team – well some of them anyway – today got down and dirty as part of making room for the latest developer to join the Brighton office!

Core Team come down to Earth

As 30 minutes later we authorized yet another new hire they might as well have stayed down there for a few more minutes and ran another cable or two..

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet developer

For many years Claromentis allowed intranet administrators permission to see all the data on their Claromentis system for the applications they have admin rights to.

This seems perfectly logical. For example if you are a People admin you need to be able to create, edit and assign permissions to users – at least in the granular sense that an intranet needs when layered on top of any central system like AD or eDirectory. If you are a documents admin, then how can you cancel editing on a document when someone has gone on vacation without freeing it up for others that need to work on it – unless you can see the document?

But as the web platform world has expanded and become ever more powerful we have many situations where the assumption that we should apply god-like permissions for all relevant data to an application administrator at times makes no business sense at all.

With recent releases we have implemented great solutions for precisely these two areas – people admin and docs admin.

In people admin we can actually define who sees each field, who can edit and under what conditions. We can say whether the people list in admin areas shows anything at all about a field.

In Documents admin we can wither give the administrator rights to see a document, because we feel they need to – or we can make it so that the system is locked down – a DMS administrators can see that a document exists but cannot see the content of the file at all.

In this case we just need to set a simple variable in a config file:

// Whether to allow documents admin to view and download documents.
// If set to false admin will be able to browse all documents and view their metadata, but not actual documents files.

$cfg_docs_admin_can_view = false;

As the world of intranet platforms has moved on we certainly can continue to give power to the people – but now we decide exactly ­to whom and how much!

Intranet-Extranet

As we start a new year we had an interesting series of reviews of some of our Intranet designs in 2011.

We have many example systems and guideline documents on intranet design, but one key in the early process for designing a new intranet is to show the customer team a large selection of designs that we have already completed. Based on their feedback the designers can then move onto the Photoshop mockup process, which is always reviewed, completed and signed off before any interface is actually built.

As a new client it seems that there is nothing worse than just being asked to describe “what you like” when confronted by a blank whiteboard with one of our designers looking at you and expectantly holding a marker pen – but the same clients can certainly point out areas of other designs that they appreciate and would like to incorporate into their own new web platform.

We all had our perspectives, but from mine working with new customers I noticed that many of our projects liked to start from a baseline with many of the elements from the image shown here:

Best Intranet Design

Of course they would then request considerable changes and apply their own branding, but the base system was a very useful start for them, and enabled the creative process to start.

I think there are indeed some strong basic points about this design :

• - It is quite ‘strong’ and vibrant, even though it has more than enough white space for a system that is the core web platform for all users in a substantial global corporation.
  - It is welcoming – while still containing a significant amount of corporate information
  - The application slider bar is a nice touch, rather than a permission based text access menu – which in this system is reserved for departmental resources
  - The rounded corners and pin board effect are appropriate without being distracting
  - The corporate social networking component on the home page shows the collaborative two way intent of the system
  - Multiple and differentiated intranet news channels are appropriate for such a large client that generates a lot of information for various sets  of users
  - We liked the introductory video that shows for all new users, explaining the intent of the system and intranet guidelines.

Of course everyone in the actual design teams had their own personal favorites – but for 2011 for me this was an extremely useful base design when discussing new client intranet projects. If you have any comments or favourite designs of your own – please comment!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Services intranet design

Weird things are happening in the Claromentis office!

The support team are so full of energy that Christmas trees have been subject to a strange electrostatic effect and have stuck to the ceiling

Those of us old enough to remember the David Bowie ‘Glass Spider’ concerts have a trip down memory lane around the developers desks..

Claromentis developers desk

Glass Spider at Wembley ( I was there! )

Meanwhile a 40 inch monitor has caught fire in a great impersonation of a welcoming fireplace – providing that stoker Ricardo remembers to move his mouse every so often!

Intranet-Extranet

We really should talk more about our customer base and how Claromentis is making a real difference for so many types of businesses around the world.

As we continue to grow we in sales and marketing need to pedal faster just to keep up with our customer base and all the interesting ways they are using information management, web processes and custom applications to make a real difference in what they can accomplish and how competitive they can be.

One way we can do that faster peddling is just to post about events that generate real interest in our own internal corporate social networking about new clients – if our staff are fascinated then maybe you will be!

Internally we use both News channels and our Innovate application – and I noticed that the news today that Twilight producer Summit Entertainments LLC had selected Claromentis to become their intranet supplier generated a lot more interest – and requests from all the girls to be part of the onsite team in Hollywood – than any recent post about new clients.

This lead me to think about sectors – and taking this as an example we do have great examples of movie producers that use the Claromentis framework for their internal communications.

Let’s take two – Omnilab in Australia and our new client Summit Entertainment in California. Opposite ends of the world, and judging by my very limited experience producers of very different movie experiences.

Disclosure at this point – I am 50-something, male and really like walking my dogs. I also have limited interest in vampires.

Twilight

Their external image could perhaps be represented like this – with every girl in our office leaping up and down about Twilight, and myself having really enjoyed Happy Feet – an animation about penguins that like to dance:

Happy Feet

Not a lot of similarity in that external face to the world..

What I am planning to do in a future post is get both of these great movie production companies to allow me to share images of their intranets – it would be so much fun to share their internal comms with their external production!

Do Summit have dreamy girls on their intranet pages? Does Omnilab have animated cartoon figures as signposts on the intranet?? Or great sound tracks?

Does either company walk the talk when it comes to internal communication?

We shall see!!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Solutions film companies, hollywood

We are working with a client under our sponsored development scheme to provide an e-learning module with the upcoming Claromentis 7 – and today we had the first prototype review with the client, the lead information architect and staff from Claromentis sales and marketing.

E-learning Prototype Review

I thought some aspects of the meeting were really instructional.

The value of the prototype

Following on from the initial scoping meeting the client had provided a well thought out specifications comprising several pages of written specifications. Comparing the understanding from the written specifications with the prototype that we created is just inspiring – how any company would want to code business logic straight from written specifications is beyond me.

The value of the framework

Coding in the Claromentis framework gives us so much access to instantly available and powerful functionality – such as permission systems, universal tagging, business processes – applications can be coded so much faster and with greatly increased quality.

The value of Claromentis 7 Standards

Now that the design standards of Claromentis 7 are available in the custom development team everything is so much more consistent, giving a much better end user experience as they move from standard platform products to their custom applications.

All in all a great meeting and we look forward  to the second iteration – the prototype can be shared with all stakeholders in the client team and round two will just be a few days away!

Claromentis 7, Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions, The Framework