Intranet Management Software Blog

Recently, I was working on a news component to generate a “cloud” of News Channels in our Intranet to allow our users to navigate our news articles with ease. The “first draft” worked nicely - It generated a list of news channels from the system based on a users permissions and put them into a styled infobox - nice.

Having put this into the Claromentis Component Library, it was suggested by Nigel that we take this one step further… to modify the component code, allowing users to add in some additional parameters and generate a more commonly known tag cloud, including randomization of the results returned, with varying font sizes depending on the most popular channels - now we’re talking!

After some code changes and some input from Dan at Claromentis, the component was modified to generate something that looks a little something like this:

The view can be changed by editing the user parameters on the component code as mentioned above.

To view a full description of the coponent and how to implement it, see here: http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/components:news_cloud

Until next time,

Craig

Home, Partners, Resources-Technical components, Tag Cloud

We are pleased to announce that the developers community is up and running, with a code repository for sharing components, plug-ins, and even applications.

A summary and instructions are on the WIKI, please do provide feedback as to how we can make the community valuable and easy to interact with.

Resources-Technical claromentis development

Interesting video demo of highly-anticipated Google Chrome OS. It looks like all of your information will be stored in the ‘cloud’. The boundaries between what is local software and online software has become blurred. I have not yet to see this will be adopted in the corporate world anytime soon. But should we care? It shows the potential future of web-apps, software or application should be easily accessible, deployed through an internet browser regardless the OS or type of browser.

Check demo video below:

Resources-Technical os, software, technology

As Claromentis continues to grow in the scope and range of products and applications, the framework is being actively developed and enhanced by the use of components to provide flexible, configurable functionality for clients wishing to use them.

Just in the last week the following very useful components have been added :

Anniversary Intranet Component

The Anniversary component gives you the ability to summarily compare dates attached to users profiles within Claromentis through the use of metadata.

Once configured, not only can you change how far in the future you’d like to list events – up to one whole year from today, but also how many user anniversaries you’d like shown.

This anniversary component could be useful for anything from showing birthday information for employees, to listing anniversaries of employment with your company - there are lots of opportunities for configuration of this component.
 
File Review Intranet Component

The File Review component also through the use of custom metadata allows you to configure multiple options for ensuring that you always know what review dates are coming for your files.

This component allows you to change how files are listed and also what scope of listing to give. For example: you can also attach a reviewer to the component, and it’ll list also for the reviewer of the file; you can show review dates to everyone – ideal for a departmental vi.  The major advantage of this component is how configurable it is, you can show due dates to all, or just the reviewer, or just the owner, or even both the owner and the reviewer; on top of which you can change how far ahead it is looking for document review dates, and it will make it really clear to the viewers when something is overdue for review!

 
RSS Reader Intranet Component

The RSS Reader component makes reading news or events easy, be it from an external source such as the BBC or using your own internal RSS feed.

The component allows two modes of reading, one is a fixed feed experience – designed for when you want a feed readable by all without them being able to customize where it is reading from; the second makes use of custom metadata, allowing your end user to configure where the news is coming from, so that the component is always personal to them.

Interested clients should contact us – we have these components available on our development WIKI and we are currently considering if they should be included in the core distributive.

Home, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Resources-Technical, framework-web components, intranet software

There has been many post on the subject related to permission lately, and I want to show a hidden ‘gem’ in the admin panel of Claromentis Document Management which is going to help us monitor and manage permission better.

Complex Permission System

Claromentis Document Management System has comprehensive permission system, which means you can define permission by extranet area, role, group down to individual users. The permission can also inherited from the folder above as well as applied on the individual file itself.

Access Report

When you logging in to the system of course you can only see the document that you are allowed to see, but as you know from admin you can see all files.
As a document administrator you may be asked by your manager to create a report showing what a particular user can see or not see on the system.

They might be a business partners or contractors, while you want to make sure they have access to the information they need, you want to make sure there is no permission leak. You don’t want the corporate sensitive information exposed to this type of users.

What’s new in Claromentis

We created  a new functionality called  “Document Permission Report” and it is available from admin panel from Claromentis 5.6.3 onwards.

Under utilities in Document Panel click on “Document Permission Report”
Where you can select a user and get the permission report instantly, you can also export it to CSV format.

Screenshot

Home, Prod-Project, Products, Resources-Technical Claromentis, document management, online collaboration

During an intranet training session today that was focused on design, it really dawned on me how functional components and smart objects are becoming in the intranet software world.

As an example - in our own sales management we use Process Manager to manage our inquiries, until we open up a Sales Manager opportunity – with just one click.

Now on our sales publish page in our intranet staff get a live view of the incoming leads and their status – a simple Process Manager component gives a window onto that project that is always and instantly up to date, with direct access to every individual lead. The page also shows the live sales documents folder through a smart object.

We are also continually enhancing our components – for example the ‘most popular document’ (or pages) component is now being enhanced into a new version, at the request of a new client – so it displays on the intranet home page the most popular document for each user.

In fact I struggle to see what can limit the usefulness of this growing library of components and documents. Just today we decided that a most viewed topic in a forum can turn an administrator populated FAQ into a genuine FAQ – as it continuously reacts to show the genuinely most popular questions in any FAQ board.

Resources-Technical components

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.

Resources-Technical Claromentis, document management, Prod-Intranet, update, user interface

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).

Resources-Technical Design, e-forms, fun, user interface

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.

Resources-Technical web crawler

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.

Resources-Technical document management, version control, WebDAV