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Many organisations have been created from outdated market research and over analysis of market conditions, with large sums of money invested in creating and developing a business idea.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

Every morning Claromentis Brighton staff have a meeting that helps us to stay on track, be aware of any high workload concerns or potential deadline issues – and generally keep each other informed of what’s happening. On Mondays these meetings are necessarily a little longer – most days they can be done and dusted in 30 minutes.

What interests me is that as a company that actually creates information management software and collaboration frameworks we still seem to need a multiple of formats, environments and tools to keep track of everything.

1. We start the meeting around a large screen format of our own intranet calendar for the week, going through client visits at our office, who’s out and related time bound events that calendars were designed to show. On the agenda AOB allow each person to add anything for discussion.

2. We then move over to 2 whiteboards that use felt pens and magnets to summarize on one board all the new intranets and systems we are installing, and on the other all the bespoke development projects we have ongoing with our clients. This is strictly a stand up meeting, which is very helpful to keep things fast moving and focused. As each project is summarized it gets a physical magnet in column one – colored according to a simple traffic light system. Other columns reflect responsibilities, alpha and beta deadlines, urgency levels for priority task selection and a whole host of other data.

Often people will refer to our project management software to get deadline and assignment information as needed in the meeting.

3. Before concluding each person gets about 30 seconds to say what they are doing today, and request cooperation from anyone else.

When necessary we will have our colleagues n Russia and Australia join us on video conference, but 99 percent of the time this is a fairly local event.

So my observations are :

1. Its an evolving meeting, everyone can suggest better ways to do things and I think that’s very important – no-one should view themselves as a prisoner, and everyone finds them useful.

2. We seem to need one part when we are sitting down, then a second part when we are all standing up. I have no idea why.

3. We require our calendar ( software ) , whiteboards ( hardware ), pens, magnets, erasers and project management software to get the job done. Together with blank notebooks.

4. Everyone turns up with a pen and paper, hardly anyone writes anything down.

5. Some people bring task lists from their own desks, which often seem to be quite literally written on the back of an envelope.

6. Even though we are all really busy and all trying to collaborate – some people just talk more than others.

So my question is – is this meeting format, which we have evolved into over a long time – simply a good way to deal with the fact that all people are different both in the way they absorb information and interact with others? After all our own project software has Gantt charts, document management, assignments and traffic lights – but you can’t stick magnets on it and if you talk to it it doesn’t answer back.

Our meetings are designed to request and receive participation – you do have to say what you are working on, and everyone will certainly listen to you. Maybe that’s the point – anyone can look at a programme plan and miss a lot of pressure points that the people will chose to talk about when given the opportunity. And that is what collaboration is all about – helping each other through issues, communicating with clients and getting the job done to the highest possible standard given the available resources and time lines.

And I enjoy them!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Project, The Framework collaboration, intranet software

Every organisation understands the value of instant feedback. It promotes continuous improvements and creative discussion. Some say it is what makes a business ‘tick’.

Working on a communication software platform, we want to facilitate this positive feedback culture.

Pages or web pages is one of the largest type of content of an Intranet along side with Documents and News. In Claromentis we already have comments for News as well as Document and to complete the whole picture we are now introducing comments for publish page.

Here is the anatomy of commenting:

Intranet-Extranet, Solutions collaboration, comments, Design, intranet 2.0, online collaboration, web 2.0

Everyone knows that even in the era of web 2.0  and micro blogging today, email is still a powerful and extremely effective communication tool.

Our relationship with Email is a bit like a ‘love and hate relationship’. We love it because we don’t have to go somewhere to fetch or read the information, it is right in ‘my inbox’, and for most of us it is part of morning ritual, breakfast, cup of coffee and check email.

We hate it at the same time because our inbox tends to be very messy; there is no easy and reliable way to separate genuine emails we like, emails we hate, good or bad notifications and spam messages.

Not just quality of the messages, sometime we also have to think about frequency, and volume of information being delivered.

People sometime complain they are not being informed about important information, in our case recently our book keepers insisted that they need to know if any of the managers has approved overtime as soon as possible in real-time so they can authorize the payment immediately, without further delay.

Before it was lack of information but now take a look at this person’s inbox :

OK that’s just too much information, the accountant is now complaining that the system is spamming them.

This issue made them realizes the consequences of their request. Sometime it is hard to imagine but what the differences can be simply by the frequency of the email you receive. Less than 5 a day seem acceptable but 50+ a day is just too much. Is it really ‘too much’ or it is a sign that system is working?

The fact is that each request is now visualized, and they can see what’s going on in real-time. It might be  just a  normal psychology reaction, who likes  to see the work has just piling up ?

The problem is where is the balance? Lets say 20+ a day might be OK for someone but it is too much for others. If we change the method for example using daily digest, then some people might complain they don’t get the information in ‘real time’ when they need it, or is it just our way to make ourselves feels better.

Tell us what you think…

Intranet-Extranet, Services collaboration, email, information architect, intranet consultancy, spam

Business Cases, Collaboration Platforms and Innovation.

A  recent very good Cisco post on the next generation collaborative enterprise mentioned – amongst a great deal of interesting thoughts  on collaboration platforms and how they will change the way companies work – that ‘Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions’. A comment on the post asked then asked the perfectly reasonable question : “how does the framework ensure these priorities are in line with the business goals?”

We getting similar thoughts from our customers, as we begin to show Innovate, the Claromentis 6.0 Innovation application. This relates to a previous post here where we were discussing the implications of collaboration platforms directly conflicting with the discipline of more controlled communication channels.

It seems to me that one possible way these different business structures can coexist is based on the difference between fostering creativity and enabling innovation. Or as Claromentis has described it the  ‘shout, collaborate, execute’ journey.

Creativity and Innovation are two very different things, and sometimes it seems to me that confusion in discussing the impact of Corporate Social Networking results from not being clear about which of these is actually being discussed.

In the well known quote from Theodore Levitt “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

In essence creativity uses divergent thinking to create ideas that then feed into innovation. Innovation is the implementation of those ideas – putting them into action.

Collaboration platforms can really help to foster creativity by putting like minded people from different perspectives or locations in touch and so break down silos both internally and externally.

However when it comes to taking those creative ideas and executing to produce innovation – in a corporate space this will  in general terms require expenditure. Depending on the maturity of the company and the scale of the projects – these will generally need business cases – and these always set out the rational for where the project will generate value within a more traditional and documented vision of the business objectives.

So it seems to me that the next generation enterprise will be able to impose some control not by constraining the way collaboration platforms are used to innovate – but by managing the process that selects which ideas these platforms generate are turned into real projects.

The ideas and decisions made within fast moving collaboration platforms can be prioritised and set within more formal and longer term management goals – and indeed over time help to change these goals – by the continued discipline of business cases being required in practical terms to actually execute on an idea – to move from collaboration to the very much harder task of innovation.

Intranet-Extranet collaboration, corporate social networking, innovation

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

As one of the greatest socialites the world has ever seen Oscar Wilde once said that “there is only one thing worse than being talked about – and that is not being talked about”.

A tidy few years later Seth Godin said you should turn a sales funnel upside down, and create instead a megaphone for people to talk about you – eventually creating sales people from customers.

Since then a lot of sites and online techniques have sprung up or evolved to help us do just that.

The modern world is now full of communication channels and collaboration software that promise a plethora of networked interactions. The basic idea is that this should allow some kind of sense and wisdom to eventually float to the top, much to the satisfaction of the mere mortal looking for useful stuff.

New techniques have become verbs, verbs have become absorbed into the daily vernacular of the nimble fingered – and within just a few years new activities have become so fundamental to peoples lives that not understanding that you can “create an ecosystem out of tweeting about your blogs” now marks you down as some kind of a luddite – even though Twitter was only established in 2006.

However Seth Godin also said that “functionality is the new marketing”  [ source : ‘small is the new big’ ] which I personally took to mean that you do actually need a great something or other to create genuine waves to get  you talked about. And that’s what I personally find a little  frustrating about some of the current ways to network and promote your stuff. They basically are often empty of innovation, and seem to be trying their best to enable people who have nothing to say to be talked about.

It seems as soon as the world finds a way to enable great functionality to float to the top for you and I to find easily – someone else will hire a bunch of cheats to get their stuff there instead of yours. “Rank it by incoming links?” – pay people to create incoming links. “Build great networks?” – form sites where all sense of effort and value based networking is lost and instead allow people to spam everyone all over again.

It takes a huge amount of effort and skill to actually create something that really is functional enough that it should be shouted about. People who do that will be hard working, creative, often burnt out and generally fascinating – and they probably wont have time to nurture any kind of an ecosystem out of anything , even though they are actually creating something that other people will indeed shout about – because it is actually great and that’s what counts.

Oscar Wilde also said that “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast” and on this one I am with him completely.  If you are working that hard to actually create something that might become great you need to find the time each day to just stand up, clear your head, learn from your bruising mistakes and start again – perhaps we should have a quiet reflective coffee and leave tweeting about our blogs to others – chances are that they will enjoy it and do a very much better job than I ever would.

Intranet-Extranet collaboration, Social Networking

Claromentis Interview with Sean Boos -  Information Technology Director of Preferred Brands.
Burnsville, Minnesota.

Hi Sean, tell us a little bit about Preferred Brands

Preferred Brands is the parent company to some of the interior design and decorating industries’ leading marketing companies. Included are such brand leaders as Floor To Ceiling – a network of over 200 independently owned and operated retail showrooms located throughout the U.S. Each store specializes in offering a combination of flooring, kitchen & bath products and decorative accessories,best suited for that particular market. Also included in the Preferred Brands family is World of Floors, a leading flooring retailer, primarily serving Michigan and the upper Midwest.

Who were the intended users? How many of them?

We have 200+ dealers throughout the US.

Did the portal itself have a project or codename?

We call the portal: InFlo

What applications were most useful or essential in this project?

Document management and forms were probably the most important things.

What was the user response and take up of the system?

We found that the users have been very responsive to the new portal.  They have found the address book to be very helpful along with the instant messaging.

Is your business more efficient? Have fundamental processes changed?

We have 100’s  of vendors that we do business with which translates into tens of thousands of products which all need pricing files.  The indexing/search and meta data features have been a pleasant surprise within the portal.  The really allow us to provide detail custom properties for each file which makes finding what you want a snap.

Were you under any deadlines – if so what was the nature of them?

We had an extremely tight timeline.  We had our national show in February and InFlo was the primary focus of the show.  All  products tested were becoming disasters in the making.  What we typically found through our testing, was most portals did a great job of providing a hierarchical security model for one business unit, but when you starting to add more business units to the portal the security model really didn’t do what we wanted.
I contacted Claromentis 2 months before our show.  Although I was very reluctant that anyone could really pull this off in 2 months, Nigel assured me that, while the timeframe was tight, Claromentis could meet our deadline.

Did the project meet your deadlines?

Yes.  We actually had it live a week before the show

How involved were you in the design process?

Other than supplying some ideas, most of the design process was done by Claromentis

Do you have any comments on the final design?

As far as the UI, we gave our ideas to the Claromentis design team and after a few revisions, we got it done in about a week.

Do you find the system easy to use from an end user point of view?

We’ve had very positive responses from our end users.

How did you find the Claromentis pricing model?

Pricing, like most small businesses, is a very important part of the equation.  Compared to other portal solutions, Claromentis was the best value for with probably a better feature mix.

“InFlo has allowed us to become more efficient in both time and money.  In these difficult economic times, being able to stretch your dollars if very important.   It has allows us to focus more on our core services and products and better serve our dealers.” Sean Boos.

Would you have any advice to companies considering Claromentis? Were there any special factors that were part of your selection process?

Claromentis is a very flexible platform.  I come from more of a development background and I was amazed at how much I could integrate with the system.

Thank You Sean, we appreciate your time.

Learn more about soluton for franchise based company

Solutions Case Study, collaboration, commercial, document management, e-forms, intranet consultancy, online collaboration, user interface

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.

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.

Intranet-Extranet collaboration, intranet software, teams