Intranet Management Software Blog

With the ongoing acceleration in the growth of our global intranet client base it is great to see that Claromentis support continues to evolve under Anthony’s guidance to provide a solid, technical and customer facing service that delivers a great service to all of our customers, whatever the nature of their request.

The support portal – ‘Discover Claromentis’ – has been relaunched with a much more appropriate design, and more importantly a very clear separation between Support Requests, Change requests and enhancement ideas.

The Claromentis support portal - Discover

As a sales an marketing person I will leave the technical team to discuss the details, but here is what I really like:

1. The separation between Support requests, Change requests and Suggestions/Enhancements is very clear.

2. Meet the team – our clients build strong relationships with the people that provide such a great technical intranet support service – so why not get to know them?

3. Latest tips and online help – Claromentis is a massive system and we all exchange best practice ideas every day – it is great that we provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and innovative thoughts on the best ways to use the system.

Of course it is all built in Claromentis – Process Manager ( InfoCapture ) builds the ticketing system and Discover itself is completely a Claromentis system.

4. I also like the simple graphical dashboard. We are continually providing intranet KPI systems to our clients – and it is good to see that we implement the same for our own clients.

Our clients are already providing great feedback on the increase we have made to our support team, and the new look Claromentis intranet support portal confirms the effort we are making and the increased clarity in our intranet support services.

Home, Services intranet software, support

This 4 minute video blog shows adding a new draft policy to Claromentis Policy Manager, one of the 3 applications in our Quality Management Solution.

This is a first in a planned series of short videos on the use of the Claromentis Quality Manager Solution to improve compliance and gain efficiencies when working in a quality controlled environment. If you have any feedback or content requests please just let us know.

Home, Prod-Quality ISO18001, ISO9001, policies and procedures, quality management software

Sharing a great example of one of our customer’s intranet systems, combined with the extranet view when a user from a major client logs in.

The Intranet View

Extranet View

What we see here is important :

• Exactly the same system
• Exactly the same URL
• Visual Interface assigned according to the user – in this case according to extranet membership
• Permissions control the data that is viewed within the interface

What this means is that the same system is on the one side a corporate intranet and information system, and on the other side a project collaboration based view for a client providing a project status including live web cams, latest design files, version controlled documents, KPIs and Health and Safety statistics..

It is great to see how Claromentis is such a powerful framework that each user logging onto the same intranet and extranet system will not only receive a completely different interface, menu system and access to applications but also see completely different data within that interface.

It is actually quite hard to understand that this is exactly the same system!

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Where your primary requirement is Quality Management Software we offer a portal framework – which provides information management, access, permissions, user management and the interface customized for your company – combined with several QM solutions focusing on Audits and Policies.

Entry solution

Smaller companies can use Process Manager for controlling audits and the document management solution in our permission based framework for managing version controlled Policies.

This provides a low cost entry solution for companies that need an appropriate environment for compliance, but where the size of the policy information is not large and audit requirements are not extensive – perhaps only one external audit a year of only one site.

SME solution

If policy life cycle management is required, or the number of policies is substantial -  the Policy Manager product is the preferred solution.

Policy Manager allows specialist teams to participate in consultancy and ratification phases before policies are distributed. It provides specialist views of policies and procedures to the end users – including lists, category views and A-Z views. Master lists of policies are managed in the Administration Panel.

As a guide any company that has dedicated Quality Management staff, but no Audit Managers, will find this solution set appropriate. For this reason SME companies can still manage smaller scale audits using Process Manager.

Corporate Solution.

If a company has a requirement to run multiple audits across multiple sites, or to track none-conformancies against specific clauses in any legislation such as ISO 9001:2008 and ISO:18001, then the Audit Manager product should be used working seamlessly with Policy Manager.

Audit Manager can work with any external legislation as well as bespoke audits, with multiple audit teams and sites and offers a complete solution including root cause analysis.

Enterprise Solution.

For larger companies with thousands of procedures, perhaps across multiple business units, Policy Publisher can be used either alongside Policy Manager – or as a replacement solution.

Policy publisher replaces completely the need for application files such as PDFs to contain policy information. Instead the entire information set is moved online.

The principle advantages are :

•    Business Unit branding is applied by the framework, so there is no need for multiple copies just to present information in different branding.

•    Polices and procedures can automatically update themselves when included information changes.

•    Online flowcharts that hotlink to other supporting URLs can be used to create a genuine online quality management system.

Summary

The Claromentis Quality Management Solution offers a complete range of benefits to ensure that your company can commit to improving quality and compliance with complete confidence that the supporting infrastructure is in place.

Further Information

Product Data sheets are available on our site :

Overview of our Quality Management solution
Policy Manager
Audit Manager
Policy Publisher

In addition there is an online tour of Policy Manager here

Next Steps

We would welcome a chance to understand your requirements, and if we offer a Quality Management system that matches your needs we provide individual webinars and site visits to further demonstrate our approach.

Prod-Quality ISO18001, ISO9001, QMS, quality management software

Shakespeare would not be terribly impressed but the point is valid. Although a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – users will get more excited, and participate more, in upcoming intranets launches where the system is not called ‘The Intranet’.

Peace Rose in the Sun

We have posted about intranet names a year ago, providing many project examples form our extensive experience in working with intranets around the world.

The reason for this short post is that we are currently launching an intranet for a company in New Mexico – more on our continued exciting global reach in future posts – where the employee participation on choosing a name for the intranet reached impressive standards even by our own tough benchmarks. In summary

• 93 employees suggested names for the intranet
• A total of 283 names were suggested

Why is this exciting?

• The outcome is great – a great name and a great strap line.
• Extensive participation in this process shows our client is already engaging and generating interest from a wide cross section of employees.

Our immediate challenge is to incorporate the name into the mock up design process – including logo generation – and to bring this whole concept into the intranet as a whole – obeying the corporate style guide we have already been provided with.

Hopefully there will be a celebratory fizz of some kind for the employee that suggested the winner!

Home intranet names, intranet software

We talk about intranet permissioned news systems and blogs a great deal – internal Marcomms so often have a strong interest in efficient, relevant news systems on global intranets.

It occurred to me that we as a solution provider never actually discuss the content! we just provide a great permissioned news system for our clients to use – yet of course the company is thinking all the time of how they would use it – we all know that it works.

Once I took on this perspective I thought I would look for the use of reporting and distributing news to suit an end goal. I obviously did not look around our confidential client intranets – I just went out to the public internet to compare side by side reporting of the same news stories – looking for examples of spin.

I have to say this has been made so easy with aggregators – I just flipped through some relevant stories on side by side news channels :  I found the results absolutely shocking – call me innocent but I had never realized that even in the most dry, factual events the amount of comparative spin  – and therefore what you walk away with as ‘content’ – is awesome in its power.

I could have chosen much more dramatic events, like the BP oil spill and the discovery today of PhotoShop alterations to the images – but I thought that was in a way not so disturbing – this after all is a very opinionated and passionate space. So I chose instead the rather dull and factual release today by the “Committee of European Banking Supervisors” of the stress test results on European banks. Basically a bunch of numbers, very factual and very informative – if you like that kind of thing.

Totally different perspectives

So basically here are two reports of exactly the same publication.

This, I repeat, is simultaneous ( same day ) reporting of a very dry, factual summary by a relatively obscure financial organization. Fortune, as reported by money.cnn.com – side by side with the same data as presented by Reuters.

So I am no longer surprised by our client’s interest in News systems, and the power they have to provide on message communications. I am also equally understanding of our clients concerns about our corporate social networking application, Innovate, and it’s requirement to open up all communications and therefore lose all control of debates and discussions.

Home, Prod-Intranet intranet software, news management

I am really pleased to say that our partners in Australia have today solved the problem of signal degradation with the iPhone4 if you hold the phone as anyone in the northern hemisphere might..

iPhone reception solved

This is just outstanding and demonstrates that old traditions have a lot of modern value!

Great job guys!

Solutions

As a company that is ISO9001 certified, and also provides web based software specifically to assist in this area, it is great to get the chance to experience our own QMS software as a user – we have our own very genuine needs and its interesting  to put our own software through our own hoops – instead of everyone else’s.

We actually only have 10 policies – one of those – our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process does have 4 flowchart based procedures, the others are perfectly well represented as application files and version controlled inside Quality Manager itself. We don’t even need the complexity of storing those in the main document management system – another cost saving for an SME client meeting the stringent demands of any QMS framework like ISO9001.

Policy Manager and Policy Publisher

In our case we use InfoCapture to control our audits, as we don’t have multiple sites or multiple legislation – or teams of auditors and quality managers – so the efficiency gains of using Audit Manager as a dedicated and powerful QMS application are just not there for us as a user. It’s a truly great application for larger companies – but we just don’t have the requirements so why use it just because it is free for us!

We do however store the primary flowcharts of our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process in our ‘Process Diagram’ album in image gallery. This gives the designers the ability to work on them as we refine the process, and also makes them available in smaller resolutions for presentations to interested clients and partners.

Flowcharts and online policies

Importantly whereas 9 of our policies are maintained as version controlled application files, the flowchart based process is totally online within Policy Publisher. This is a single policy with automatic inclusion of the latest version of each of the flowcharts – keeping the main policy up to date is therefore completely automatic – if a lead developer changes the process, the policy is automatically kept up to date.

Summary

We ourselves are very typical of any SME company that has some flowchart based procedures, a set of policies, and a requirement to schedule and manage internal audits, with in our case one additional external ISO9001 audit every year.

Of the 5 applications we could use from the Claromentis framework to meet this need:

• Document Management
• Policy Manager
• Audit Manager
• InfoCapture
• Policy Publisher

We as our client actually only need to use 3. Policy manager ( there is a new policy manager tour available here ) provides its own version controlled document management specifically for policies, and InfoCapture is great for scheduling audits, managing non conformancies and moving each audit through the appropriate stages towards a successful conclusion.

For our core development processes we maintain those online in Policy Publisher, removing the need for any application files and allowing us to maintain and present the relevant flow charts and showing how all these processes relate.Since each process chart is maintained as its own procedure, the policy will auto update whenever any chart is changed, as we continue to evolve our own processes.

As a final conclusion we made fast access buttons on our intranet home page to both Audits and Policies just to make sure we are all aware of everything, and nothing is more than a couple of clicks away.

Fast acces links to our Quality Management

All in all I can honestly say we are a very satisfied user of our own QMS software, and I believe we are a typical example of an SME company that has a real need to get proactive value out of compliance – in our case with ISO9001.

This software is helping us break down the barriers between the intent of the legislation – improving quality – and actually achieving that goal with minimum administration and maximum returns.

Home, Prod-Quality intranet software, ISO9001, quality management software

• How do you select applications in the Mac apps store?
• How do you select books to buy online?
• How do you chose a hotel?

If like me – and almost everyone else – you flick to the reviews then you are an advocate of social media and a natural believer in the wisdom of crowds. As I am sure you already know.

The depressing thing is the low number of UK B2B company sites that directly give these kind of potential customers the information they so obviously look for when making purchasing decisions.

There are several possible reasons :

•    The company has so little traffic that the minimal level of engagement would actually influence such buyers in a negative way. No feedback looks to impatient prospects like bad feedback.

•    Engagement takes energy – but recession and continued political incompetence in the area of encouraging business has hit energy levels hard in the UK.

•    Engagement takes a strategy – but the whole world of corporate social media is too unfamiliar for most UK SME companies to set strategies for engaging with it.

•    They don’t have an appropriate technology platform.

•    They are genuinely a local business – anything more than a cursory presence on the internet is perceived as a distraction.

•    Companies are just too afraid of what the public will say about them.

I am sure there are others, and I look forward to any comments and suggestions,  but is the last one that I want to focus on – fear of opinions. In general I have noticed a hierarchy of comfort across the main audience lines as follows:

•    Intranets – companies allow engagement provided this is moderated by a ‘manager’ – which amounts to paying lip service to engagement and frustrating contributors.
•    Public – companies remain scared of negative perceptions on lead generation
•    Extranets – marketing view : our customers are the most important assets we have and we will totally control that space to make sure all content is on message.

Modern intranets are at least some way down this path of increasing user engagement, even though very few employees are comfortable engaging with blogs on the corporate intranet compared with the large number that are interested in reading them.

I have already posted on the depressing lag in the UK compared to the USA in adopting openness and engagement, so I will refrain from comparing engagement levels across these spaces. But for interest, in the best of the USA extranets the customers are welcomed to provide feedback precisely because they are the most valued asset – the company wants to learn to do a better job and has identified senior staff ready to engage with and work through any negative feedback in exactly the same public arena.

Lets go back to my original point. We use reviews. But the truth is we also use the content. We look at photos of the hotel, a location map and then read the comments. We know of an author, find their books, then read the reviews. It is a question of balance.

Balance

This is how it should be in corporate B2B websites and extranets as well as intranets – and not just in public large scale e-commerce B2C sectors. The information and the interaction both have an important role to play, but should be directly complimenting each other – and for that reason products like Claromentis Innovate are of great interest. When you can follow a document that is actually in your own corporate infrastructure, and by doing so extend the information layer seamlessly – the results are much greater participation and increased innovation.

In my view significant interaction through corporate social media but without adequate information is just as useless as lots of marketing information with no interaction. Both are increasingly liable to generate a cynical response from the visitor.

The companies that develop strategies to balance the two in a truly integrated environment will provide not just a more engaging and informative online presence, but  generate significant innovation benefits that will ultimately feed through into higher margins and increased sales.

Home, Prod-Intranet, Solutions corporate social media, engagement, extranet, intranet software

The functionality of the solution set in Claromentis intranet framework are so large now that we often spend considerable time during projects, and especially at inception – in choosing from various options in order to meet a business need.

Since the Claromentis business framework also includes a complete intranet API, we also need to consider whether a bespoke application to meet the client need is the best solution, as opposed to the superficially ‘easier’ route of configuring an existing application to meet the requirement.

This is particularly the case with e-forms, which for many simpler business needs can indeed be configured to meet a requirement as initially expressed to us.  This is basically because many small applications are based on collecting data, moving along a process and notifying participants of significant events that need their attention – exactly the space Process Manager occupies.

When we are making these decisions we are in general terms trying to balance 3 disparate needs :

• Project risk – configuring and localizing an application is a relatively simple and certainly time limited process that does not involve scope creep, whereas developing a bespoke intranet application takes time and resources.
• Budgets – applications need to be licensed, this might be commercially inappropriate for the number of users that need access.
• Flexibility as a solution for future requirements – we have learnt that there is always a phase 2, and after using the solution in phase 1 the client may well drastically change the application requirements – it is so much easier to evolve a bespoke application.

Technology selection factors

What we are finding is that we are emphasizing flexibility more and more as we continue to engage with intranet clients around the world. And because we can now give so many examples and speak with the confidence that comes from working in this space for 10 years now, we are noticing that clients are increasingly listening to us.

The result is that they do take slightly longer to get to phase 1, they take more risk, and generally may spend slightly more to get to the first release  – but the platform for their success is built on the solid foundation of an intranet application that was built from the ground up to meet the need, and can grow without constraints to continue to serve the client well.

If, as is so often the case – phase 2 is considerably different to the initial requirements – the client in the end saves money as well as getting exactly what they need – since the changed specifications do not require us to start again.

In the fast moving web based intranet world where there are almost no technological limits, building for possible feedback and change requests is basically too important to ignore.

So in the longer term it seems that time and time again actually focusing on flexibility can minimize budget and project risk, rather than increase them. Another great lesson.

E-form Services, Home, Products bespoke development, e-forms, intranet software