Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

It is great when you join up a process and see seamless integration in software solutions to really support you across the whole process.

We use our own intranet software to deal with website leads and sales management of opportunities that result from them. Whereas previously we used Process Manager to manage the leads and Sales Manager to manage opportunities once meaningful interactions had occurred and an account manager needed to be involved - we had no clean implementation to produce a truly integrated approach. Recently two developments have really boosted our sales efficiency :

•    We started to use Process Manager SLAs to act as auto responders, which meant people who had shown interest in our software were sent personal emails and useful data sheets via 3 emails

•    If an interaction takes place we developed a Process Manager Plug-in to provide a one click process to generate a CRM company, contact and opportunity record in Sales Manager.

The net result has been a very significant increase in discussions with potential customers, and a really efficient enquiry handling process for our own business.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, intranet applications integration, intranet software, processes

Recently we have just completed a web-based job processing application based on Claromentis Sales Manager. For us this is one of the prime examples how a CRM application such as Sales Manager can be tailored to suit specific requirements.

The application is designed for Total Support Group - one of UK ’s largest service provider specialising in satellite/terrestrial antena installation, helping them managing and sorting jobs which has to be distributed through 6 regional support offices through post-code recognitions.

Built-in Claromentis strong permission system allows each regional office to view only the jobs relevant to their region while the head office can monitor them all in real time.

Next time when you buy a digital set-top boxes for your television and having an engineer to install it, it might be one of the many jobs managed by Claromentis. A small contribution to get UK goes digital by 2012.

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I have seen articles recently that praise the fact that intranet 2.0 is starting to deliver value and becoming more mainstream.

Great! But then I read on and they are talking about the same old functionality : Forums, Wikis and blogs.

This is a shame - I think many corporate intranets and extranets are missing the true synergy of innovation and collaboration that a web 2.0 intranet should address - which at Claromentis means the progression of a concept from an idea, through to a collaboration space and then onto execution in a project - the “shout - collaborate - execute” mantra of Claromentis 6.0

Missing the point

Yes we do implement - and for certain company cultures see a lot of value - in the intranet equivalents of Twitter - our “what am I dong at work” concept for example - and certainly Blogs are really adding dynamism and freshness to many of our implementations - but in our view intranet 2.0 is a platform for collaboration, innovation and establishing connections in the workforce to break down silos and encourage lessons learned from best practice.

We need to unearth new ideas, bring them through to sharing with hitherto unknown colleagues from disparate experiences and then actually take that shout and make something different for the company that didn’t exist before – in summary we need innovation!

Many of the applications and approaches that others see as getting a tick in the box for intranet 2.0 we view as latest generation approaches to information management – a truly important piece of the puzzle – but not the answer.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Products, intranet applications intranet 2.0

As an integrated framework that provides significant applications it is great to see how easy it has become to link between them – and how pragmatic and useful the resultant functionality is for companies.

One great example is the use of Claromentis for managing a customer relationship – from initial lead processing, through to sales management and onto the implementation using Project Manager. In all cases the integration is simple, effective and efficient.

• Lead processing : managed using InfoCapture auto responders and using notifications and SLAs – the leads are responded to and useful information provided. At any stage manual interaction can take place, and auto responders are then set on hold. When gates are passed and the lead qualifies as relevant and appropriate – one click generates a company, opportunity and contact record in the relevant Sales Manager territory.

Direct Integration

• Sales Management : from this point all relevant information, activities and documents are captured as the new account moves through a customizable sales cycle.

• As soon as the project is approved, a direct link form the sales Manager record is generated to the new Project in the correct Programme in Project Manager to deliver the products and services that have been ordered.

For completeness the project metadata can link back to the Sales Manager records – so there is no need to duplicate relevant documents and data in project manager.

This level of integration and support is a pleasure to use and really offers the sales and project managers an integrated platform of information on which to ensure success for both our company and our new clients.

In our own company as we continue to accelerate our rate of customer acquisition this platform also allows us to scales up our delivery side with no loss of quality. It is becoming one of the most critical sides of our business as we continue to grow - which is particularly satisfying when we recommend this approach to our own clients.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Products, intranet applications, project management efficiency, integration, intranet applications

A lot of the focus of intranets, and the vision of Claromentis 6.0 – is, as we have posted before, around the ease of progressing an initial idea to some kind of collaborative effort and then onto execution of that idea against measurable objectives ( “Shout -> Collaborate -> Execute” ) as Claromentis 6.0 has chosen to describe this process.

So it is with interest that I read research and opinions that point out the many pitfalls with teams, and the occasions when they fail.

Many corporate cultures, indeed one might even argue national cultures, encourage teams as some higher goal and ‘being a team player’ as skills to be rewarded above all else – and that expression of individual talent can be taken sometimes as selfish or detrimental to the corporate good.

Team players

I watch people in our company, talk to our clients and read with interest examples of great team success : and I have a few rather disjointed observations.. hence this post.

1.    When is a team not a department and what does that imply?

To me a team is obviously volatile, it will be ultimately disbanded – and therefore everyone on it has a real job and a personal agenda somewhere else. That doesn’t sound like a great start.

To me that certainly means they need a strong leader and a vision to carry them through – and a good selection of skills to get the job done – but how can these needs be met if by definition there is no recruitment process for a team, by contrast with jobs in a department or business unit?

How do you make sure a team has the best resources if it has no recruitment and assignment process to go with it – just because it’s a team not a ‘proper  job’?

Would it be better to resource up your top talent and change the jobs of everyone else so they are available to help on demand?

And anyway - if you decide to form a team instead - who wants to spare their best people for an uncertain innovative collaboration agenda?

2.    People talk about team Obama

Often raised as a great example of a quickly implemented and talented team – he implemented his top officials in record time.

Yeah right – so he had a real recruitment problem – only had to chose between about 200 million American citizens who would have loved to spend the first term in a highly paid job with loads of travel working for someone generating a global buzz of anticipation…

3.    My productivity Nirvana – a uniquely talented individual having all required resources..

In Claromentis I see time and time again that a really talented person can achieve so much if they just have resources to allocate to a task they need done, and be able to trust in the quality of that work. They don’t see this as a team at all – they just see it as someone available to do what they need to the standard they expect.

They don’t want anything in the way – this isn’t a team –it’s a resource pool they can select from on demand because they are the most talented implementers of our objectives. They get so frustrated if there isn’t someone to do the required work fast enough, or to the appropriate skill level.

So its all about managed execution with the right resources always available to help talented people.

So I vote for a team that is just in existence because someone sufficiently talented needs to allocate some skilled recourses so as to deliver their vision.

I know I have to have resources on the bench ready for his assignments – but in reality they can be working very effectively in their ‘normal’ jobs.

So maybe Claromentis 6.0 is right on the money – the final emphasis is resource allocation management to implement the vision of the person in authority – the ‘execute’ stage.

Just make sure you have the right person approved as someone who has overriding authority over all those resources – that’s actually manageable in a small company  - but of course completely impossible in a larger one – which is why an oil tanker can’t turn on a sixpence.

Or more appropriately why every manufacturer of yesterdays mobile phones cant just create an i-phone. They have no-one with the vision, the authority and the resources just sitting on the bench. Shame for them – they probably have quite a few teams in place, lots of budget and a very large HR department…. and they had all that way before the time when the i-phone was invented.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, intranet applications collaboration, intranet software, teams

Built-in content management module (codename: Publish) in Claromentis is used in several products such as Intranet & Extranet Manager, Document Manager and Enterprise Content Manager.  In version 5.6 we are going to introduce brand new multilingual content management capabilities.

Old days:  Folder solution

Until now web-page contents on the Intranet are limited to one language, although our interface supports complete localization, which means you can have Claromentis interface in Japanese but the content you’re looking at are in English.

We have managed to get around this situation by setting up different folder in Publish, one for each language, for instance we can have folder named “English” for English content and “Japanese” for Japanese content. It make sense right? not quite…

Complexity and Problems

Wait until you have to combine with Departments for example you may have set your folder structure by Departments for example “Marketing”, you may have a page called “Branding” under Marketing.

Imagine the complexity that you may forced to have 2 marketing folder one for each language. It’s hard enough to look after one folder now you have 2 in separate location, not to mention about a company with offices worldwide deploying more than 5 languages.

Multilingual content in 5.6

In Claromentis 5.6 we are going to introduce built-in multilingual support in Publish. It is so simple to setup, in fact you don’t need to setup anything,

Language Bar

You’ll see language bar displayed when you editing a page to add new content in new language just click “add language” and existing content will be automatically copied ready to be translated.

Know your language

Content based on your preferred language set in “my settings” will be automatically displayed.  For example you may have set your language to “Spanish”, if there is no “Spanish” content of the page you want to see you will be automatically presented with “default language” which in most cases will be “English”.

Unified URL

Say you speak English; you can send a URL of a content page in English to your employees in Japan, when they open it, they will relevant page in Japanese.
Example screenshot below and feel free to give us feedback

General Intranet Posts, Products, Visual Interface, intranet applications 5.6, Claromentis, collaboration, internal customer communications, technology

We are getting important requests from customers that now would like our new Project Management Application to deliver ever more powerful functionality so that it becomes a serious product in it’s own right – and no longer a functional  add on for our clients whose primary need is intranets and collaboration frameworks.

This is an interesting challenge for Claromentis – what percentage of our R&D should be devoted to project management software? Increased investment, combined with feedback from our existing client base, will generate a product appropriate to large scale deployments where the primary need is web based project management for complex programmes – as opposed to fit-for-purpose functionality targeted at existing intranet/extranet/document management customers.

Our current thoughts are to embrace this challenge and to aggressively build on our current release to provide a best in class programme management collaboration portal.

Feedback welcome! Is this a direction that we should pursue? Or should we focus back on enhancements to our core collaboration applications?

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, intranet applications, project management

I’ve recently been tasked with developing a web-crawler for our clients at the Savannah Riverkeeper organisation. Their conservation efforts mean they have been manually looking through a long list of web-pages for new PDF documents of applications regarding the Georgia Savannah area, and this is something they wished to automate. This is the result:

The application will crawl a URL to a specified link-depth and automatically import new documents into a folder in Claromentis’ Document Manager. It also sends the relevant users notifications of new documents, and any problems encountered. This should really cut down the time needed for our clients to sift a range of sites for relevant new documents and notices.

There is a question I was asked about whether it was legal and/or  responsible to trawl other organisation’s sites in this way. Of course there is no way for a web server to know what sort of client is connecting apart from the User Agent (how the browser identifies itself to the server) and the IP address, so server administrators really have to take it as a given that their sites will be crawled on a regular basis. Anyone who’s looked at a website access log will know that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are constantly on the crawl for new content for their search engines to index. So legal definitely yes, and in this instance the end certainly justifies the means.

Using the Claromentis Framework and other FOSS(Free/Open Source Software) tools for these kinds of mini-applications makes Rapid Application Development easily possible, and I was able to get a working prototype and interface ready in plenty of time to meet the client’s requirements.

And who knows, maybe I’ll have helped save an important, useful and beautiful stretch of river in the process.

General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, intranet applications, technical

With 5.6 Claromentis now supports WebDAV – including the automated preservation of version control – to provide drag and drop file management in parallel with the rich browser based visual interfaces of Claromentis. For those that haven’t used this protocol you can read about it here

Set Up

Setting it up is simple, here on my laptop using Vista Add a network location by right clicking the computer icon:

I will then be asked to provide the URL of the Claromentis system that I need to manage I will also need of course to provide my access credentials for the intranet : Right away the new drive is available to me.

It appears like any normal drive, a very familiar environment for the user.

We can directly compare this with the rich browser based experience of looking at exactly the same document folder using the Claromentis visual interface through the browser - as the screen shot below shows :

This of course is just the central part of the document management interface.

What are the Implications?

Users that don’t need a graphical interface can just work with drag and drop on their PCs IT departments or users themselves do need to set up the shortcut to the file system on their local PC – so a slight disadvantage over strict access anywhere using only a browser that the Claromentis VI provides.

Claromentis have made sure that adding later versions of files using drag and drop in WebDAV does indeed create a new version of the file in the Claromentis system.

Lets look at this : I navigate to >testing >001 folders in both systems : Here in the Claromentis rich interface

Lets look at the individual file “summary.doc”

Using the interface :

I can look at the properties of this file as normal : here is just a part of the screen :

Notice there is no version TAB at all, as there is only one version of this document in the version controlled library of the Claromentis system.

Now without touching this file in Claromentis I decide to just open it in windows using WebDAV. Word fires up just like in any local directory, to me it is a local file system.

I then edit it, and I just save it from MS Word as normal – in this case I added some content relating to Voltaire.

Refreshing the browser back on my Claromentis interface – and indeed – I now have two versions of this document!

More details

I can of course just create a shortcut now on my desktop that represents the local file system - expressed as a normal folder - for the version controlled document management system of Claromentis.

I can also just drag and drop any file into it :

and there it is :

And after refreshing the browser - the file is there as normal for all users in the normal visual interface.

To complete this story - lets say a normal user in the rich browser based visual interface now searches for “Voltaire” - you recall that was the content I added locally - then dragged that file into the WebDAV folder locally..

The file is there - adding it via WebDAV still invoked the full automatic searching of content in the normal Claromentis indexing system.

Conclusions

Claromentis has always provided a rich browser experience for the manipulation of documents using check in and our icons, or renew functionality.

There is now an alternative for certain types of users  - or even certain tasks – where the ability to just drag documents into a “local”  folder makes life a lot simpler!  The browser based Visual Interface is always available – users can select the best environment for the task at hand.

I am sure certain companies will find this extremely useful.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, intranet applications, technical document management, version control, WebDAV

Recently we have been very involved in of course our plans for Claromentis 6.0 and all that will involve in terms of bringing web 2.0 into the corporate communication platform. This is really exciting.

At the same time we are being asked to design social networking platforms for companies, and this is really causing me to question the level of thought that the average UK company puts into these ventures from a business perspective.

Given the fact that these companies are basically SMEs and so are far from owning a global brand, they are normally not concerned with monitoring brands across social networks, which of course has significant value once you have a brand to protect and indeed leverage.

Instead what our SME clients are looking to do it to take advantage of a world that frankly, in my opinion, they don’t understand. They imagine that this is some low cost of entry platform to get themselves a significant audience to interact with.

The amazing thing is that it is!

But the approach needs to be very different from simply finding a way to interact with some massive and totally unrelated set of people on Facebook – or anywhere else.

Disconnected networks

So often the discussion starts with design, and how to make sure that people on “My new social network” will be able to easily find their previous friends from some “Other massive unconnected community” they belong to. We get a bunch of deign sketches, and minimal thought about the business and the potential consumers we might be able to reach.

In my view, and I am glad to say many others, “the way for a business to convert social networking into measurable revenue is to use the social networking approach to connect the business value of that company with unserved consumer needs”.

This means that significant effort for an average SME needs to go into determining exactly what the business value is that is appropriate for this medium, and how they can connect and interact with potential new consumers who share those values, but who are presently are either not customers or whose purchasing patterns can be influenced in a positive way.

Some of the people they reach in this new medium need to be empowered to become ambassadors through their genuine alignment with the brand – and so create momentum behind the network. They will be able to become innovators by interacting with the brand to create new value – or to extend the reach to geographies or verticals that the company previously was prevented from leveraging. That’s exciting.

What these new people will absolutely not be is some arbitrary ‘friend’ that technology makes it easy to log into something in which they have absolutely no interest at all.

Believe it or not they will just leave.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, intranet applications Social Networking