Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

Once again today I was talking to a potential intranet customer and I was asked “how many applications do you have?”

This is a challenge we have met many times, and that I think we will continue to face.

One of our core values is clarity – so we are re-launching our website tomorrow to be as clear as possible about our products – the fact that we now offer our intranet clients a choice of 7 major products that address the following significant pure open source extendable areas of functionality:

• Intranets and Extranets
• Processes
• Sales
• Projects
• Quality and compliance
• Content management
• Document management

So what does this mean for a client trying to understand what collaboration framework to invest in?

I think that once again it is all about clarity. We have to explain that having a pre packaged form for staff to order a cheese sandwich is not an application – it is a tiny customization. We have to engage our potential customers at the appropriate level where we can make a difference to the achievements of their company.

Unfortunately it is a hangover from the understandable local software world of “what exactly do I get for my money” and “feature comparisons” that understandably some customers still adopt this mindset when looking for significant business impact from a powerful and customizable collaboration framework like Claromentis.

Our challenge at Claromentis as always is to be transparent, clear and engaging with everyone who has an interest in how we might be able to impact their business.

The challenge for our potential customers is to see the process of ordering a cheese sandwich for what it really is – a simple match between users and a temporary object of desire. This requires about 5 lines of code and a database table.

Is this an intranet application?

Is this a major software application that is going to make a significant difference to my business?

No it is not …

… Easy to say when you aren’t hungry.

General Intranet Posts, Products, intranet applications

As we continue to work on the definition of what will become Claromentis 6.0 I feel that it is important that we ensure ideas can migrate without effort between applications. For example they mature from initial idea shouts on collaboration walls to collaborative exchanges and onwards to execution as a Project.

collaboration

As an intranet software supplier we are always driven to ensure each application is intuitive and fully functional -  but in the post 2.0 world an important aspect within an integrated framework like Claromentis is to make sure that the transition between applications is effortless, and does not require regeneration of information already captured and exchanged.

In some areas we are strong, but in general I feel we need to have more  awareness of the living evolution of a single idea into something that can be executed by an identified team. We are strong for example at making sure a Project in Project Manager has integrated forums, document management and resources – but not so strong in enabling with a single click the creation from a forum or blog an actual project, as an idea moves from collaboration to execution - with no loss of information.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Products, intranet applications intranet applications, intranet ideas

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

I want to make the relatively simple point that on many occasions the concept of context for a particular question, request for a solution or recommendation can, if we are not careful – remain uncertain – when often it is the most important aspect of any such debate.

What do I mean?

Lets consider a relatively simple example. As part of a large scale implementation of an intranet solution for a very large company we might be asked ‘what would it cost to implement a procedure for submitting purchase order requests?’

The context should include analysis of the following : “Who is asking, and what authority do you have to change an existing project?” “Do you know if your request might conflict with come other stakeholder in the business?” – “What expert knowledge do you have for the correct procedure for submitting PO requests across the business?” “Do you know the scope of the intranet project?” “Do you know what departments are included or excluded as authorized participants for the intranet project?” “If some departments or stakeholders are excluded do you know what the cost would be is we allow two systems to control such a fundamental process?” “Do you know what the cost is of potential errors if we allow multiple systems to coexist?”

Possibly most importantly : “Should I include the cost of establishing if this is a valid request within the context of the established road map for this intranet project?”

These are just a few very trivial examples of what can go unanswered if the context of the question is not established.

One of the Claromentis core values is Clarity, and that means we must make sure when any client asks a question our staff are very aware of any possible misunderstandings due to the context of that question not being clear.

We have a valued reputation as a consultative intranet solution provider. That means we absolutely must be responsible for thinking about context – as the client will very often not be sensitive to this, and expect a short term answer that is valid, but from our point of view too simplistic – and therefore dangerous.

Providing we are sensitive to context all such questions are welcome, interesting and often lead to hitherto undiscovered return on investment for our client. Without Claromentis staff taking full responsibility for establishing context we might inadvertently mislead a client, which is understandable but unforgivable!

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues

Recently a lot has been written about project based collaboration, ranging from thought provoking articles about their position in open/closed vs. flat/hierarchical analysis to simply promoting one tool over another. Vendors have really struggled to meet the varied requirements of different projects, while preserving all the advantages of a single information layer and a truly integrated application stack.

With Claromentis Project Manager the company has leveraged everything in the framework to really bring a user selectable range of deeply functional applications to bear on any project, all through the flexible and powerful permission system.

Project Manager Portal

It will be fascinating to watch developments here – as the company now has two flagship products that have extraordinary potential – InfoCapture and Project Manager. Both are related – indeed InfoCapture projects can be integrated in any Project within Project Manager, to report anything within a project and control resolution through any workflow.

With plans to make InfoCapture an integrated complex workflow engine for any Claromentis objects, and Project Manager providing such a deep range of project based functionality, it is a tough call as to which will become the flagship product for 2009.

Workflow illustration

Maybe they both will.

General Intranet Posts, Products, intranet applications collaboration, e-forms, project management

The title of this blog could have been a question, but I prefer it to be a heading.

We had a corridor conversation a few days ago, Mike and I, and I mentioned  that I wanted him to think about how we might extend InfoCapture so that we can report Process Manager issues on a PDA, those processes to upload to the Claromentis server as soon as it is connected. A great many processes in certain industries start with PDA input of initial data, and then complex work flows need to take over. For example office surveys, certain types of audits.

Within the context of my chat, I was expecting some kind of possibly in 6 months, what version of Claromentis – series of discussions. The normal priority setting of what should make a Claromentis release, and what should miss out.

It is now a few days later and he has the application installed on his Nokia  phone, with the developer now coding the mobile windows version.

We have never met the developer – Mike just put out the work on an open source developers recruitment platform, and it’s done. No fuss, no headache – minor investments and great functionality.

What an amazing leap in our software, from talented people unconstrained by any limitations.

The heading of this Blog could not have been a question – because it doesn’t have an answer.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Open Source Intranets, intranet applications

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy

I have detected a theme in some of our recent Blogs – which is related to collaboration, our core business as a technology vendor in this space, but to some extent addresses the silent partner of collaborative interactions. I refer of course to ‘listening’.

I noticed for example that Hilda in one of her recent posts on Oracle Expert referred to the vocabulary gap between the business users and the IT funded change agents – who often seem to users as from another planet. Informed interaction just doesn’t reach the goal required – in this case relevant and accurate product specifications. The two sides basically cannot listen effectively to each other.

Personally I recently discussed the importance of clarity, as perhaps the most important core value at Claromentis. Clarity comes from observing and listening to your audience – often so diverse - and making sure that communication is founded on understandable concepts that everyone has the vocabulary to absorb at their required level for project success.

Out there in the very much larger world Maureen Chiquet Global CEO of Chanel, recently wrote a short personal article in the Harvard Business Review (November this year) which I found enjoyable and insightful, where she admitted that the emotionally charged and heated advice she received in her early years at Chanel “you’ve gotta learn to listen!” turned out to be one of the most valuable things she ever learned, and that a listening focus now forms a foundation for her success as the CEO.

I was reflecting on the fact that in so many collaboration projects, and with so many client teams, we discuss the importance of user take up, which we tend to default to quantifying as participative content creation. We look at the audit logs to measure how many posts, documents, news items, blogs and just about anything else were created or edited this month as opposed to last.

I am wondering if we are missing something fundamental here.

Ever been to a party and met someone really interesting - then at the end of the evening realized you didn’t learn anything at all about them - they were just great and encouraging listeners? I am sure you have - it is an old analogy.

My point is that there might be a significant user base that is quietly listening and learning from the collaboration hubs, the posting, documents, blogging and general content creation that some types of users are either confident enough – or for whatever reason motivated enough - to participate in.

The fact that they don’t directly participate back to the discussion might not be important for certain types of users – they are absolutely engaged because they are listening.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues listening, online collaboration

Managing and Maintaining user accounts is always struggle for an IT team.  They have to work closely with the HR department to ensure that new starters and leavers are granted and removed from the appropriate groups on the internal network.  This can often be a struggle even without an intranet; so introducing an Intranet to the business can cause additional complexitities.  However… there are options available to ensure that this potential issue is reduced, or even eliminated entirely.

The Claromentis Intranet Software offers a variety of methods for ensuring that the Intranet user accounts are simple and easy to manage and maintain.

The options for manging user accounts within Claromentis are:

1. Manual User Creation and Deletion
2. Bulk User Import and Update using CSV
3. Auto Sync with Active Directory using LDAP

All of the options above have their pro’s adn con’s, but most importantly, the options are available, and you can in-fact use any combination of them, at any time.

Let me explain.

The IT department may not be prepared to introduce a syncronization option at the beginning of the intranet deployment process, so they may wish to begin with a bulk upload of a collection of users by using the CSV file import process.  If then at a later date, the IT department decides that they would like to switch to an automated synchronization process, the switch is simple. Claromentis can provide instructions and assistance with the switch; and I can tell you now, the process is relatively straight forward to complete. If then at a later date, the company decides that they wish to manage accounts on the intranet as a manual process; again, the switch to do this is again relatively straight forward.
The point is simple. Claromentis Intranet Software offers 3 very different ways of managing user accounts on the Intranet Software. Each of these methods is designed to sit neatly with a variety of existing network infrastructures and business models, from 5 user systems to 50,000 user systems. Whatever your implementation; Claromentis ensures that managing and maintaining access to the system is straight forward and simple.
If you are an existing Claromentis Customer, and would like to find out more about the items discussed in this post, please contact the Claromentis Support Team.
For all new customers who would like to find out more about what Claromentis can offer, please contact the Claromentis Sales team on +44 (0) 1273 666 355, or email sales@claromentis.com.

General Intranet Posts, Products, Services, technical intranet, ldap, managing users

The world is a challenging environment right now, but for Claromentis it is full of opportunity as our cross platform, commercial but open source extendable information management solutions continue to be adopted around the world.

This global opportunity brings with it several challenges for us:

• Making sure we provide the partner channel with everything they need to promote Claromentis in their own language and culture. This involves localisation files, user guides and web site content translation just to get on the first page.

• Making sure we are sensitive to understanding the partners abilities – when all of the communications with us is in for them a foreign language and if we are not extremely attentive this can lead to considerable misunderstandings and incorrect perceptions.

• Recognizing that in many parts of the world we as a company do not yet understand which of our solutions are the most appropriate to add value to the local customer base.

• Being very aware that we are not aware of the alternative solutions available in that country, and so need to embark on a discovery process with new partners in each new area.

• Trying to set and maintain a suitable pricing model for our customers, partners and ourselves.

But despite these challenges this is just such an enjoyable process. Working with customers and partners from other countries and cultures brings all of us a special interest. We so enjoy meeting our partners and customers from around the world – it adds to all of our lives in so many ways.

Claromentis around the world, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues global, partners