Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

After applying permission to a folder or document, have you ever wonder that you need to make sure the right person can view the document? Let’s say you added Group:Marketing, until now there is no to find out who are the member of “Group Marketing for instance” unless you have to navigate away to ‘People’ application and run a search or filter.

But now in 5.6.1 we’ve got a nifty solution. It’s called “View effective permission”, as you can see you can now review the permission on every single permission dialog box to make sure the right people has the right permission.

Clients, Communities and Case studies, Design and User Interface, General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Technical Support Claromentis, document management, intranet applications, update, user interface

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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Working on application design or creation of e-forms, we often make check boxes or drop down selector. In most cases you probably don’t pay much attention setting up the default value of each choice you created. Should a particular checkbox is checked by default or unchecked.  How many items to be displayed per page by default, or which country or age group should be selected by default for instance.

According to behavioural economist Dan Ariely, any value which is set by default will greatly influence decision that majority users is going to make when filling out the form or using a piece of functionality.

For example in Claromentis we have news application with option to set a particular news item as ‘sticky news’.  The idea the sticky news will always be displayed on the Intranet homepage until it’s expired. It is a useful feature allowing an important news item remain visible to the majority Intranet users, otherwise it might get buried down quickly by not-so-important news.

What we didn’t realise the default value for the expired date is set a year in advance by default. For example if you submit a news on the 22nd May 2009, it won’t be off the sticky until the same date next year !

The problem is simple majority users are not even bothered to change the expired date.

The result, intranet’s homepage is filled with sticky news which should have been expired long time ago. In order to fix this problem, an Intranet administrator has to go through each news article and correct the expiry date, which was set incorrectly by majority users.

This problem won’t happen in the first place if the developer put sensible value when he or she typing the code for the news submission form.  Interestingly enough in a much larger scale any default value which may sounds simple can have a huge impact.

Check out an interesting video below (open in new window).

Intranet Development and API, People and Cultural Issues, Visual Interface Design, e-forms, fun, user interface

We ourselves at Claromentis have an interesting example of complete automation versus manual interaction with a process.

We have recently changed our follow up or inquiries – via a public web form – so that filing in that form kicks off a process manager process that automates sending 3 emails over a 14 day period. In essence we are now using InfoCapture as an auto responder according to SLAs.

Previously the sending of a relevant email would need editing of the ticket to select that an email should be sent, via a simple check box.

We still allow for manual intervention – the account manager can mark any lead so that the emails will no longer be sent.

In this way the benefits of automation are kept – but the flexibility of manual intervention ensures the process is still valid for very important enquiries where dialogue is already taking placed and automated emails would damage that process and so needs to be stopped.

The account manager can automatically create entries in our Sales Manager system with just one click, and can allocate telephone qualification according to the country of origin.

InfoCapture reports are available to show what the lead funnel is looking like, what call stats are by area and anything else recorded in the forms.

So we ourselves are heavily dependent on our own technology to automate core business processes – in this case lead generation – and that is exactly how it should be.

General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, People and Cultural Issues, Products process manager

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

We’ve been asked many times, what is Claromentis model of deployment? The truth is we are probably the most flexible company in terms of software deployment by offering wide range of configurations to suit your business and infrastructure.

1.    In your office

Claromentis can be installed in one of your servers located in your office. This configuration eliminates cost of the hardware from us. In most cases it works well if you have a good and reliable in-house IT department who can take care of the servers, back-ups and access issues.

2.    Our Data Centre

Working together with our data centre partner Rackspace, we offer a fully managed package. Your software and data are hosted in a secure data centre outside allowing full peace of mind about hardware software patches, and backups.

3.    Your  Data Centre

We can work with any data centre or IT partners you may have to arrange hosting and servers configuration. This configuration is ideal if you have several applications hosted on existing infrastructure such as which you may want to integrate with Claromentis.

4.    Software as a Service

Increasingly popular for SME market, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of managing IT infrastructure, and reduce the up-front expense of the software purchase. Claromentis system can be deployed faster with no hassle.

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An Intranet specialist Toby Ward has recently published his webinar about the future of Intranet (so called Intranet 2.0), highlighting how web 2.0 and social media is changing the corporate intranet. Interesting…

General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Open Source Intranets, intranet applications intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet software, intranets, web 2.0

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.

Intranet Development and API, Products, Visual Interface, intranet applications css, e-forms, process manager, user interface

It has been fascinating to watch the gradual shift of collaboration platforms over the last 5 or so years in particular, as

• intranet and extranet platforms have evolved
• the world has flattened
• open source has raised the value expectations across all of IT.

These three factors are in my experience combining to create a new agenda for our clients and ourselves.

The previous focus on IT, HR and Marcomms systems that were largely driven by content and obsessed by command and control has been replaced by a new engagement that is refreshing, inspirational and challenging to us all. The legacy remains, and is still valid - but is now a necessary substrate on which true value is built rather than a goal in itself.

At Claromentis we we see in our most engaging clients that are achieving high ROI on their investments a focus on:

• Process Execution
• The extended Enterprise
• Innovation
• Sustainability
• Compliance
• Pure Platforms not vendor products
• Open source extendability for rapid response

Collaboration agenda

This is a space in which Claromentis has been able to gain considerable market share as our major products and PHP based platform is proving an ideal environment for this new way in intranet and extranet deployment.

We are able to foster innovation and facilitate the rapid generation of  highly focussed open source applications within our framework, with the code either the property of our clients or available to all depending on the aims of our customers.

It is an exciting time in our company and we look forward to learning more from our most innovative customers, and to helping them discover new ways to interact and innovate.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Open Source Intranets online collaboration, open source

I was really pleased today to review functionality produced by a developer for one of our American clients, that provides Twitter functionality, but with images as well with the most recent tweets displayed wherever the client requests.

What was particularly interesting?

• This was produced for a client that has an extended community out on the road and wanted to engage with them via the intranet. So it was a real business need, and not a pointless embracing of web 2.0 functionality with no business foundation.
• It took the developer a very short time indeed to produce the required application and component.
• The API was perfect – the developer needed no assistance from the core team.
• The result is very pleasing aesthetically – as the designer can work completely independently from the developer.

Most importantly it demonstrates exactly the vision of Claromentis – a commercially supported framework that can be extended to meet bespoke business needs by the open source community, or any PHP developers on a commercial basis.

Excellent!

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