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.

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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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I find it interesting that since I started working at Claromentis – an intranet solution provider, I have mainly been working on bespoke applications for clients. The variety of specifications I have seen for these different applications from client to client really highlights the versatility of Claromentis as an intranet and its ability as a framework to grow and adapt to a company’s requirements.

Desk booking for me was a great example of this. The “Hot Desk” system is usually employed by large companies who want to maximise the use of their desks.  Essentially employees will work from which ever desk is available on the day rather than have their own personal desk. When employees might work at different times and for different lengths of time this minimizes desk redundancy.

What better way to enhance this system than provide the ability to book desks in advance?  This is precisely what the Desk Booking application does. This in turn allows a company to measure desk occupancy making sure they are getting their monies worth from their office space.

The application also allows managers to maintain a database of desks and their features, as well as providing the ability to assign fixed desks, browse an availability calendar, provide floor plans with desk locations and much more. Another great bespoke project that really highlights good use of Claromentis as a framework.

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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

Home intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet consultancy, intranet roadmap, sharepoint, web 2.0

During my first week I spent time observing Sweta and Julian, gaining an insight into IT Support within Claromentis. Of course, a crucial aspect of learning how to support clients effectively and efficiently involves new employees learning the ins and outs of the company and software. I have started to learn the basic Claromentis applications, beginning with the Holiday Planner. After creating a User Guide for the application, I put together a couple of ‘How To’ pages for wiki. These can be found at the links below:

How to request holiday…… http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/help:holiday_planner:book_holiday

How to approve/decline holiday…… http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/help:holiday_planner:approve_holiday

As well as studying the basic applications, I have learnt to carry out other simple tasks such as creating/editing accounts on Discover. And today I’ve been working on something really important – clearing out the spam emails!

I’ve really enjoyed my first week at Claromentis – thanks guys for being so welcoming (and patient!) with me.

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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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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!

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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.

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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