Intranet Management Software Blog

Defining Business Processes

In every working environment, there are often multiple understandings of both a process and a requirement - so how are they defined and how do we deliver them online?

Having worked within a corporate IT environment now for the past 5 years, with the latter being responsible for delivering web based applications to a high standard, across a business of multiple Intranets, with some 17,000 users. It can be difficult to gather the correct information and requirements that are needed to develop a detailed specification and ultimately a precise application.

Often, a customer has an understanding of how their business process should be managed online. However, how do we verify that this is the RIGHT way to manage their process? After all, an online process needs to be simple, straight forward and user friendly, otherwise, who would use it? With Claromentis’ InfoCapture application, workflow becomes easy to manage in a controlled environment. Out of the box, the application operates with defined boundaries, which makes the build and configuration of simple forms very straight forward. But what happens when we need to push the boundaries?

With some additional bespoke “plug-in” code (written in PHP), the boundaries of InfoCapture can be… expanded, but ONLY by a competent developer with access to the “guts” of the application. I found myself commonly defining bespoke coding into specifications, allowing customers to add additional steps into their processes in order to incorporate “features” that they couldn’t imagine having available in any paper form process, or in the default InfoCapture application. In simple terms, this often pushes out both coding and testing timescales, making projects much longer and more complex to deliver. So what happens when the “Out of box” experience requires additional code in order to meet customer expectations?

In more recent Claromentis releases, InfoCapture has grown to incorporate features that I feel were powered by our ability to “Push the boundaries”. Regular feedback and collaborative working with the supplier I feel helped us to better understand the InfoCapture application and put ideas forward for improvements to be shared by all customers. The overhaul of InfoCapture required more comprehensive reporting, straight forward wizards to build and manage forms, stylish skins to promote corporate workflows and a better permission structure.

With InfoCapture providing the majority of our Intranets online forms, I would certainly await the next batch of improvements to the application; maybe we’ll see the inclusion of some of the more common plug-ins into the core application code with simple wizard based builders in the admin panel? Maybe a more comprehensive permission structure to include better default roles to the typical “Reporter and Handler” that can be found at present? Hopefully Claromentis 6.0 will hold the answers…

Comments welcome as always.

Craig

E-form Services Babcock, Customer, infocapture

Process Manager Icon

As my role involves coding more on the front-end development; such as interfaces and scripts; I have always been focusing on the new front-end development technologies such as mooTools and jQuery, and of course cross-browser compatibility issues; especially on the browser we all love-to-hate, Internet Explorer 6.

However we are proudly supporting all A grade browsers across multiple platforms thanks to our development team and innovative intranet platform.

You might be thinking what this has got to do with e-forms… Let me tell you:

Claromentis e-forms feature is part of our Process Manager product which enables you to create forms and assign workflows to them. As of today, I am going through the InfoCapture application (which handles e-form processes) with one of our e-form specialists. This is the first series of posts about learning e-forms feature of the Process Manager product.

With the help of flexible and easy-to-use interface, it is possible to create a complete and fully functioning form with couple of clicks. You can collect various data from various sources, not to mention your intranet users. For example, you can create an expense claim form and let your users fill the necessary areas in the form, even upload the scanned image file of the bill if you need. You can create your own support ticketing system and relief your support team’s workload on managing and dealing with support requests (our own Discover support portal using exactly the same system to manage hundreds of support requests we receive each month).

We always keep saying that we provide a flexible and highly expandable intranet software. Our core code is based entirely on PHP, which is another reason why it is so flexible. And we want to keep the same flexibility on forms as well. Therefore, our form builder enables you to assign CSS styling on every single element of a form. You are free to design your heart out and the system will nicely fetch the your style into your form. You can change the colour, the size, the border; pretty much everything a CSS code enables you. As far as I am aware, there are not many form builders in the market which offers you this level of flexibility.

So what is the advantage of this? First of all (your marketing department will love this), even your forms can carry your branding colours and look and feel. This is very important specially for international clients. You can’t imagine a classic Coca-Cola bottle in a purple can, can you?

In the next post, I am going to talk about workflows. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope this gives you a better understanding about the flexibility of our product.

E-form Services css, e-forms, process manager, user interface

It continues to amaze me how many businesses, both big and small, rely on spreadsheets and emails to report on their business. A time sheet here, a KPI there, right through to budgets - all done in a spreadsheet and passed on through the business via email.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly fine for small companies (and by small, I mean less than 20 employees) but any more than this, a basic e-form application can deliver immediate benefits to both the user and the business.

Take for example a recent client of ours. They are required to keep stringent records on all communications with their customers, no matter how trivial. However, rather than having a central storage area, this information was shared around by email. It was of no real surprise then, when a critical piece of information went walkabout, so did their client.

E-forms are perfect for such applications, and can quickly be measured by both increases in customer AND staff satisfaction.

E-form Services process manager