As I scrolled down our intranet news feed, I came across published articles regarding new and existing client projects, articles containing important information regarding new software features, and even an article containing a link to a population calculator. Needless to say I was quite intrigued by these articles and according to the population calculator, I was the 5,182,843,237th person born.

While I do have doubts as to whether or not this statistic was indeed accurate, I soon realised that this simple news system had provided me with a wealth of important information, within a matter of seconds.

One of the biggest challenges faced by organisations on a daily basis is their ability to effectively communicate with their employees – this somewhat underestimated tool provides organisations with an extremely effective solution to this challenge.

We have updated our news system for our upcoming software release (Claromentis 7) to ensure that this tool will help organisations improve service levels, aid business growth, enhance communication and enable important information to reach the correct audience.

Here’s an article from the current Claromentis News System

Here is an example of the new style and layout of the upcoming Claromentis 7 News System, and it still contains all of the great features associated with our current news system.

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet Claromentis, collaboration, corporate social networking, intranet software

Many organisations have been created from outdated market research and over analysis of market conditions, with large sums of money invested in creating and developing a business idea. A variety of top consultants are called upon to provide their ideas and opinions based on many years of experience and expertise, all of which hold the same overriding objective; to maximise profits. Many are able to declare their availability to companies, coinciding perfectly with their personal diaries.

However many successful businesses have stemmed from individuals accidentally stumbling across ingenious ideas, or through the shocking discovery that the product or service does not currently exist in the market place. They conduct market research through a number of web searches – a simple but yet powerful tool.These businesses however are undoubtedly more effective in providing valuable solutions which truly benefit the lives of many.

Claromentis was established in 1998 in response to a market place filled with inadequate software solutions, incapable of facilitating a variety of organisational needs and requirements due to their inflexible nature. They also came with hefty price tags making them available only to those with generous budgets. Claromentis therefore embarked upon a mission to create affordable software solutions that delivered real business value, available to a diverse range of companies regardless of their location

It was therefore essential that the Claromentis framework was able to fit the needs of a variety of organisations across multiple sectors, designed to also support any language.

Thirteen years on and this is no longer a mission but a reality, and is now at the core of what it is Claromentis actually represents. Here’s a few pictures of the team providing our clients all around the world with world-class service and support.

Intranet-Extranet Claromentis, collaboration, intranet software

Great effort from all 5 from team Claromentis!

Some serious pain was walked through by the team – raising over £2,000 for the charity.

Congratulations to all for going through the effort, showing up and enjoying the experience!

Solutions charity, Claromentis

A  Claromentis team will be testing their legs, feet and willpower over 100km of the south downs on September 17th, through the night and onto the 18th in an attempt to raise £2,000 for children with Cerebral Palsy. There is an outside chance we will still be going on the 19th and late for work so if you cant buy anything or get any support that day please bear with us, and send out search parties with lots of sticking plaster and beer. Or Burgundy..

It’s a great cause, and certainly for all 3 of us in the team a heck of an ask, as none of us have ever done anything like this.

You can find descriptions of the event here

We are really excited about trying to give something back to such a deserving cause. Hannah has already started sleeping more, Hilda has bought a pair of socks and Nigel went out for a rigorous stroll after Sunday lunch this weekend – then had a good lie down. So the training program is going really well.

If you would like to help us raise money every pound / dollar or anything else that can help these children would be so much appreciated.

You can find our team and individual charity pages here :

The Claromentis team

Hilda

Hannah

Nigel

It’s just great for us to get out there and fight our lack of self belief to see if we can do this, and help such a great cause. If you can donate anything at all please do – as I write this we already have 40% of our £2,000 target and that’s super – but we would really love to get to our target!

Thank you so much!

Intranet-Extranet charity, Claromentis

I have decided to write a series of posts around how we can map the potential contribution of Claromentis as a web platform for your business, against the original components of a value chain as defined by Michael Porter in 1985.

To refresh our memories Mr. Porter described the following Support Activities :

• Infrastructure – Finance, planning etc
• HR Management
• Technology Development – R&D
• Procurement

And the following Primary Activities :

• Inbound Logistics
• Operations
• Outbound Logistics
• Marketing and Sales
• After Sales Service

As the significant building blocks for a value chain, they define the activity in a delivery system which creates margin for the owners of a business.

Back in the mid 80s the main approaches were looking at each of these components, and either seeking to drive down costs without compromising quality – or trying to improve quality without increasing costs.

In general terms the former led to outsourcing and the latter to total quality management.

These early models are still valid, and with technology moving so fast and web platforms like Claromentis able to contribute to so many of these areas, I thought it would be interesting to post on our recent experience in each of them.

My first one this week is likely to be R&D – as it is very much on my mind with our new Innovate 1.1 release.

Thanks also to a strategy handout from Roger Martin-Fagg, provided by Vistage – for prompting the idea of this series of posts.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Prod-Sales, The Framework business model, Claromentis, value, web platform

In this short video Nigel tries to define Claromentis

We welcome comments and questions – thanks!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions Claromentis, video

Recently we’ve been busy working on revamping the free live demo experience. Using the same username and password generated when you are signing up you can now experience 3 different products:

• Intranet – The most versatile business Intranet
• Quality – Quality Management System & Compliance
• InfoCapture – Business Process & e-Forms Software

All of these products are created based on Claromentis Framework.

This demo also a sneak preview what’s coming in the Claromentis 6.0 Framework.

Universal Tagging
Modular Applications
SOAP Interface
And many other improvements…

As well as our branding exercise which will be reflected on our main site very soon

Stay tuned….

Products, Services Claromentis, demo, Design, user interface, web 2.0

About UBS

The United Bible Societies (UBS), a collective name for 145 Bible Societies working in over 200 countries and territories is launching a new Intranet using Claromentis Intranet Manager.

New Intranet

After sending out questionnaire and running a focus group to improve Intranet, Claromentis and UBS Communication team working together to make the new intranet richer but easier to use and faster to find the information.

UBS also introduced several new application built within their Intranet such as contact directory for all members, document management and multimedia such as online videos.

The new intranet is also multi-lingual, The system is designed to detect user’s language preference and display the right information and interface in their native language.

User’s Feedback

User’s feedback so far has been really positive.

“I love the new look website. God bless you for the good job. Its much easier to navigate and its also easy to find the past stories. Absolutely love it. Will definately send more stories this year. God bless you all.”

“A big thank you to you and your team for their work so far on the UBS intranet site.”

“I’ve just given a detailed presentation to our global senior management team and it went down extremely well. They were particularly impressed by the design (‘clean, easy to use, familiar for people using sites such as Facebook’) and by the layers of permissions that are now possible and will enable us to do so much more with the site.”

Hamish Bruce – Communication Manager at UBS.

Intranet-Extranet, Partners, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Project, Products Claromentis, extranet, intranet 2.0, intranets, multi-lingual, online collaboration, web 2.0

I’ve just got back from watching Tim Burton’s remake Alice in Wonderland in 3D. What a visual masterpiece with amazing attention to details. It feels like immersing into an art form created by 20th century design technology.  I couldn’t believe that original animation, which I watched in my childhood, was created in 1951; even more amazing the story was first published in 1865!

You might be asking, what this movie has to do with Intranet Blog?

Before the Internet

Well the idea of internal communication is not new, since the beginning of civilization people are gathering and exchange knowledge, ideas and collaborate in many forms.  Remember pen and papers?

Your first Intranet

Your first intranet might be old fashioned by today’s standard, you might hate it, It is slow, looks ugly and doesn’t do what you wanted to do. Updating information is painful and there are many more.
But hey, this is a milestone just like the first Alice movie for the first time words comes to live, we may not have 3D technology just yet but hand drawn animation does the job!

Your Intranet – “Remake!”

Fast forward today the Internet is now teaming with real time collaboration, social networking, web application to do almost anything you can think of, computing power, cheaper storage, faster broadband, multi-touch and portable devices, which blur the boundaries between PC, laptop, & phone.

Claromentis is currently developing cool new communication tools with codename “innovate”.  We will be launching this application with an exciting release of Claromentis 6, leveraging what’s possible in web technologies.

Just like the visual masterpiece of Alice in Wonderland, perhaps it’s time to make your Intranet a communication art form.

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During early phases of intranet deployment, we are frequently asked by our clients “what do I need to prepare or plan in advance to guarantee a successful of intranet deployment project”.

In our opinion, an intranet project is all about dialog. It’s a dialog between ‘us’ the software vendor with our expertise and know-how and ‘you’ who know the most about your business or organisation.

Step1. Setup a Goal

The first step is determining the goals of your Intranet project. Why do you want an intranet? Some typical reasons:

• Improving and providing a communication and collaboration tool.
• Our existing Intranet is old and dysfunctional.
• Distribute corporate news (electronic newsletter)
• Providing self service staff contact details which are always up-to-date
• Make our company policies and procedures available online
• Sharing documents online instead of using shared drives
• Enabling staff to work from home
• Better searching and easier way finding key documents

Step2. Define the scope & audience

Have you got an answer for these questions?

• Is it just an Intranet for staff or it is also an extranet for partners and contractors?
• Do you want to allow your staff access to the intranet even when they’re at home or client’s site?
• How about mobile access?
• Have you asked representative from each department on what they want to see or get on the Intranet?
• How people currently finding information, which you think should be on the intranet? What are their common pains?
• Would you like to store sensitive information on the Intranet such as payroll ?
• What about chat and commenting? How open is your company culture?

Step 3. Build a SiteMap

Build a sitemap, using your favorite tools such as Visio or simply hand drawn, create draft of Intranet sitemap, typically the main branch are represented by each department, you can see various examples below:

Step 4. What are key application do you want to use?

This step is simply determining what are the main application do you want to use on the Intranet, Claromentis provide these following applications,  you can simply choose which one to use.

News and Blog– Share and distribute company news and blog
Documents – Document collaboration with version control
Publish – Page creator, a content management system
People – Self service personnel database
Calendar – Shared company calendar
Image Gallery – Corporate image database
Bookshelf – Online Policies & Procedures
Policy Manager – Managing lifecycle of the company policies
Holiday planner – manage corporate holiday and absence
Room booking – book a meeting room and office facilities
InfoCapture – Electronic e-forms builder and workflows
Project – Manage project online
CRM – Opportunity Management

Outside these applications we built many other bespoke applications to suit your need

Step 5. Understanding Permissions

A scalable intranet should have a strong permission system, it also helps to distribute information easily. For example you may want to have area where only people in your department can produce or edit its content while everyone else simply just view.

This can be done easily by setting up permission, ie : Roles, Group and Sub-Groups.

To make our job easier when configuring your system, have you got a Company org-chart available?

Step 6. Create Homepage Wireframe

As you know the homepage is the first page everyone is going to see, it’s worth the extra effort to design this carefully after all it is a gateway to all other content within the Intranet. Look at several examples for inspiration and decide what you want to see on the homepage, my advice is to keep it clean and simple.

Step 7. Budget & Resources

How many users will be using the Intranet? Many Intranet software vendors  price their products by number of users.

Hardware, who is going to provide you with the hardware?  If you don’t have any we’re happy to source this for you or you can take the SaaS model.

Have you got an internal project team?  Usually we recommend a project sponsor, an internal project manager as the main contact, a technical contact, and a rep from marketing or communication as a minimum team – smaller companies might have fewer people involved.

Step 8. Timeline

Plan your project timeline carefully.  Each company is different – an Intranet can be deployed from 2 weeks up to a year, these are some key points worth considering which may cause delays:

• Sourcing hardware
• Getting access through your office network
• Finalising design
• Updating user list
• Content population
• Content migration.

Like everything else in life, execution is quick, preparation is the key so do your homework!

Step 9. Future plans (keep evolving!)

I’ve seen many intranet projects loose momentum after the initial launch phase. A successful intranet is something that grows over time, start simple and add new features gradually. Learn from  user feedback and implement user requests wherever feasible.

Small improvements can make a huge different – it’s like the breath of fresh air. Keep the original team and meet regularly for project reviews and brainstorming of new ideas.

Here are some ideas to think about once you have your initila intranet.

• Is there any business processes which can be done electronically?
• Such as overtime request, time cards, new hire.
• Is there a database, which is currently in Excel, and you think it will be much better if it is an online application?
• Any existing system, which can be better integrated with the Intranet?
• Thinking of deploying corporate micro-blogging? Online videos?

Step 10. Do it now!

This final step is the most important of all. You can make all the planning you need but without execution it is still a plan. Get the ball rolling now, gather your team, email them now, start researching or simply drop us a line to discuss your requirement, or book an online demo!

Good luck with your Intranet project!

Intranet-Extranet Claromentis, collaboration, Design, extranet, intranet, intranet consultancy, intranet development, intranet project manager