Intranet Management Software Blog

We now support Flash Videos directly in Intranet Content Managed publish pages.

The player is built-in.

This is available with the current build of 5.7

Prod-Content content management, flash, flv

Some time ago content management system controlled pages in Claromentis, like many CMS systems, used to be largely flat. You created content, you built links to other version controlled information – for example in documents within the document management system – and you tried to make sure that over time the page stayed fresh and helpful to users - and of course that the links didn’t get broken because someone deleted the document without telling you.

With good templates they were still effective – but they were, I think,  kind of flat.

I just want to outline some of the CMS changes in the post 5.5 Claromentis platform that make content managed pages much more multi-dimensional.

They have made a real difference not just to our clients but also our own intranet so I am going to use that as an example:

Smart Objects

Smart objects take some other part of Claromentis – the document management system for example – and produce a dynamic permission based view of it from within the content managed page.

So for example on our own sales page we produce a view of document folders- sales collateral and information for our partners. These are truly dynamic views – the objects are seen through the visitors eyes and so look different according to your permissions in the DMS – no links are needed, nothing is static.

Components

These can be included on templates to include equally dynamic views of a business process that is set up and configured using Process Manager.

So on our sale departmental home page there is a real time view of people accessing our demo site, and we can dynamically click on any of these sales leads to automatically, for example, create a company Opportunity and contact record in our sales manager CRM system.

We can also of course include permission sensitive menus within the template for such a departmental home page - again a dynamically changing set of resources that makes perfect sense for that department and reacts according to the permissions of the user.

When we describe these changes they are probably hard to imagine, but the difference in the freshness and deep functionality that can now be presented using CMS is absolutely massive.

Prod-Content content management, intranet software

Workflows are everywhere in Claromentis – e-forms and documents and of course in content management.

For several years clients have been asking for ‘approval rights’ in content management – the general principle being that although companies want to delegate authorship rights of a content area out to the business, managers should have the final approval before a page is authorized and so goes live.

With the growing emphasis on intranet collaboration and intranet 2.0, I doubt this is a valid model for the future.  That is an old fashioned command and control attitude, no longer reflecting the modern imperative of opening the intranet out to subject matter experts with direct participation.

The alternative is the ability in Claromentis for a user to monitor a page – in other words to instantly be notified if anything is changed. My suggestion is that this is what managers should do – not just users.

This might seem to be a small difference – but it is part of the brave new world of collaboration - managers need to enable teams to generate content as subject matter experts, and they cannot truly do that if the same content will not appear live until they have finally got around to authorizing it – users will just be demotivated and lose interest if their efforts in creating content are not instantly live.

If managers can just make the simple leap to efficiently monitoring what they care about – and not controlling its existence in the first place – users will stay engaged and motivated, and the intranet will become even more than the average manager ever planned for.

Prod-Content content management, control, intranet 2.0

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

Prod-Content 5.6, Claromentis, collaboration, internal customer communications, technology

When it comes to find the easiest solution to manage intranet and extranet content, Claromentis has some great nifty features for users on every level.

Today, almost all content management solutions offer you a WYSIWYG text based content editor, which means what you create on the editor section is what you will see on the actual page. Cool, but nothing special!

What makes Claromentis special is the way it interacts with your content. Let me explain you a bit further:

In Claromentis, it is possible to create templates and define editable areas. Let’s say you have a page which contains 3 sections; one for the menu, one for the main content and one for the links of websites you visit frequently. I also presume that you would like to have some images within your main content section.

With Claromentis easy-to-use content management software, you define the areas above and their field type. For consistency purposes, you wouldn’t want your intranet and/or users to change the overall look and feel of your template, so you wouldn’t want them to change the main title font size or colour. So you can define the header section of your main content area as ’string’, which means your users will only be able to change the content of the header section but not its styling.

You have your template ready and its sections defined. The next step is populating the actual content. How would you do this? Simple. Just look at the following picture and you will get the idea:

Easy to use content management solution

It is also possible to create areas within your template which are not editable by users. This could be a company slogan or a footer area which contains company address information.

Customizable Intranet Software: Works the way you do…

Prod-Content CMS