Intranet Management Software Blog

As someone who helps set the vision for a leading intranet software company, I feel that the decisions we need to make are becoming increasingly fascinating and challenging due to 6 main factors:

1.    Intranet providers like Claromentis have pushed the boundaries of what is usefully deliverable as an intranet application into a space few would have believed possible just a few years ago. Companies, vendors and procurement processes are still trying to adjust.

2.    Modern web based technologies that Claromentis leverage have themselves leapt forwards, transforming what is possible within the constraints of a browser based system.

3.    User expectations have quite rightly moved inline with the ubiquitous availability of modern devices with clean, efficient and beautiful interfaces, an obvious example being the i-phone.

4.    Modern development practices are still evolving towards a reliable method for rapid deployment of web based applications that balance speed of deployment with the goal of exceeding client expectations.

5.    Client management teams are themselves trying to plan their route through information management, compliance, marcomms and innovation issues when planning software acquisitions in the corporate web space.

6.    Our software has become a true platform, rather than a set of products.

What a great place to be!

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It is common to find an organization to put document management as the core of  its intranet, and to encourage the different team to collaborate,separate workspaces would be assigned to different business areas. And when you arrive at any of workspaces, you will find a windows explorer look alike folders, underneath the shared documents reside. If you know what you are looking for, then you are in luck, otherwise, you might have to spend more time looking.

If an organization is taking the step to implement an intranet to encourage collaboration, to improve knowledge sharing, why go backwards at the same time by choosing to implement it to look like the old method of knowledge sharing via a network drive?

An intranet should not only allow the sharing of information, it should also provide the vehicle for users to easily identify the right information that they need, and the right communication channels to allow the barriers between isolated teams to be broken. Intranet should allow everybody from every part of the company to efficiently and effectively collaborate.

Corporate social networking should be recognized as a platform for employees to meet, to collaborate, to nurture new ideas and to innovate. Organizations which fail to grasp this need risk productivity and creativity drain.

Bring on  Claromentis 6.0 - Innovate, enterprise social media delivered inside the boundaries of your corporate information.

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We had a really interesting client meeting today. The discussions were all about leveraging the very considerable interaction and engagement they had achieved from the phase 1 launch of a Claromentis intranet. This has been very successful and has generated  considerable momentum to move on now to phase 2, building on the success achieved.

We discussed some of the Claromentis solutions for interaction and engagement – including of course the upcoming Innovate application – and one of the surprising comments was that they were initially worried that Innovate looked to complex. ‘We have to make it easy’.

The reason being that some of the users are outreaching social care workers who only received company computers a year or so ago.

How often have I heard that. Make it easy. Of course it is a focus of ours in terms of usability.

What occurred to me in the meeting today was that the most frightening thing of all for intranet users is a completely blank page. We have to guide them, give them confidence to express themselves – then they are off.

Staring at nothing is just paralyzing. The dreaded first page of a book. Micro blogging works because it is a simple, highly manageable, open space set within what is in fact a tightly constrained and structured application. It allows freedom without the capacity for procrastination. The small space for your input focuses you in a way that freedom without limits does not.

Many things will work for intranet users – giving them a blank page is absolutely not one of them.

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As a web development company we still get involved in numerous projects where the likely engagement or traction of an idea is overestimated by our customer to a significant degree.

This is surprising given the economic climate we are fast becoming used to operating in, but perhaps it is just the nature of certain types of entrepreneurs to believe those columns of excel data which based on simple projections extend ever higher  over time – reaching total world dominance in just a couple of nimble tabs.

As a contrast those of us that work in intranet projects know how hard you have to work to capture and retain users, and how easy it is to disappoint them and lose them for long periods of time.

Both as users and as customers we are increasingly demanding and sensitive – if we cant find exactly what we want with minimum effort we will just go to where we can – without leaving a trace in a project that tried hard to work out what we might be looking for, but didn’t get it quite perfect.

My question is why some people are so optimistic about the external world but so realistic about the likely behaviour of our colleagues. Perhaps this is nothing more than replacing some idealized version of a dissatisfied and excited consumer with reality, having got to know our workmates over extended periods of time.

But perhaps the workplace constrains both our imagination and our behaviour – it places us in a routine where we will simply not respond and change only because we did not do that yesterday.

If that is the case then intranet project teams need to bring a dose of external optimism into their projects, work hard to deliver exactly what their colleagues need and not let old practices continue to constrain both behaviour and innovation.

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We’ve been working on this feature for several weeks and now I am delighted to reveal what is “Discuss” to you all.

Discuss is chat feature built right in the Claromentis Intranet Manager. There is no additional configuration or chat client install like Yahoo, or MSN, it just works straight on your browser.

Simply click discuss bar to initiate Discuss and then choose the person you wish to have a chat with. You can hide the discuss window if you want to carry on working.

Home, Products development vision, discuss, intranet

Great to review and use the early releases of Discuss over the last few days.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting a series of blogs about this innovative intranet chat application to promote the ability for users to fire up real time 1 to 1 or conference chats with anyone online in the corporate intranet.

We have the first client review shortly and that is a great milestone - but both in its own right and as a platform for the upcoming major Innovate Application these are certainly exciting times!

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Claromentis has been a fully localizable and multi-language system for a while now, but continuing my posts about incremental features in 5.6.5 it is great to see that the intranet news system, with all the channels and tagging features - is now also completely multi-lingual.

Multi Language Intranet News

In exactly the same way as the CMS system works in Claromentis, the identical URL will detect the users preferred language and if the news exists in that language display it for the user.

If news exists in more than one language the user can switch between them using the automatically generated flags.

Home, Prod-Intranet intranet news, multi-lingual

Business Cases, Collaboration Platforms and Innovation.

A  recent very good Cisco post on the next generation collaborative enterprise mentioned - amongst a great deal of interesting thoughts  on collaboration platforms and how they will change the way companies work - that ‘Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions’. A comment on the post asked then asked the perfectly reasonable question : “how does the framework ensure these priorities are in line with the business goals?”

We getting similar thoughts from our customers, as we begin to show Innovate, the Claromentis 6.0 Innovation application. This relates to a previous post here where we were discussing the implications of collaboration platforms directly conflicting with the discipline of more controlled communication channels.

It seems to me that one possible way these different business structures can coexist is based on the difference between fostering creativity and enabling innovation. Or as Claromentis has described it the  ‘shout, collaborate, execute’ journey.

Creativity and Innovation are two very different things, and sometimes it seems to me that confusion in discussing the impact of Corporate Social Networking results from not being clear about which of these is actually being discussed.

In the well known quote from Theodore Levitt “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

In essence creativity uses divergent thinking to create ideas that then feed into innovation. Innovation is the implementation of those ideas – putting them into action.

Collaboration platforms can really help to foster creativity by putting like minded people from different perspectives or locations in touch and so break down silos both internally and externally.

However when it comes to taking those creative ideas and executing to produce innovation – in a corporate space this will  in general terms require expenditure. Depending on the maturity of the company and the scale of the projects – these will generally need business cases – and these always set out the rational for where the project will generate value within a more traditional and documented vision of the business objectives.

So it seems to me that the next generation enterprise will be able to impose some control not by constraining the way collaboration platforms are used to innovate – but by managing the process that selects which ideas these platforms generate are turned into real projects.

The ideas and decisions made within fast moving collaboration platforms can be prioritised and set within more formal and longer term management goals – and indeed over time help to change these goals - by the continued discipline of business cases being required in practical terms to actually execute on an idea – to move from collaboration to the very much harder task of innovation.

Home collaboration, corporate social networking, innovation

Image gallery is a popular application within the Claromentis Intranet product suite. There have been a number of recent improvements at the requests of clients, the most recent Intranet Manager build in 5.6.5 includes slide show functionality.

Previously images were just available in a number of images per page, and users navigated from page to page. They could review images directly or add to a light box,  to collections or a download cart as required.

Image Commenting

While this is acceptable in many use cases, the 5.6.5 release includes both a slide show function – allowing users to navigate rapidly within an album – and also adds commenting on images.

A good example of incremental usability and functionality improvements that we continue to make – often at client request as well as our own vision for where applications need to be. Intranet media management is an important part of the  deployment of our software for many clients, and we will continue to improve this application.

In the next Blog I will review more incremental improvements in the 5.6.5 monthly build - the ability to comment anonymously on news, and having configurable RSS feeds for news channels that opened up the possibility of including permissioned news into RSS feeds where required.

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With the growing trend to offer videos as intranet content, especially noticeable recently for some of our manufacturing clients who have learnt that showing a trained engineer performing a task is a great way to train new staff in certain procedures – the issue of managing such videos within the intranet is becoming a hot topic.

Clearly we can enable the FCK editor to embed a pre-prepared flv ( Flash video file ).

However with the many recent enhancements in the intranet image management application of Claromentis, “Image Gallery” - which manages collections of images and allows processing on download to appropriate file sizes - we are now considering enhancing this application  to provide a youtube like environment natively within the corporate intranet.

We would do this by embedding a video processing unit within the system, so a video originating from anywhere ( Camcorder, iPhone, normal mobiles for example ) can be uploaded directly – and the system will convert and compress it to flv – and allow the user to set appropriate meta data as required.

These converted videos will of course be hosted within the intranet and its security systems – and available for embedding on publish pages in exactly the same way as images are now.

This is a reasonably significant task and before we add it the roadmap does anyone have any comments on how useful this would be?

Home intranet software, intranet videos