The Advantage of Web Based Intranet Software for International Organizations
I have recently been working on one of our large clients intranet deployment in the USA and I wanted to write how amazed I am when I see a client finding different ways of customization our intranet software to suit their needs.
As of Claromentis 5.4, we have developed a new feature called Smart Objects. This feature helps Claromentis users importing content to their intranet pages from different sources within Claromentis, such as News, Forum messages and Document lists. No longer will users have to navigate to separate areas to see application files as opposed to web based content, for example. A dynamic view of disparate content and objects is possible from just one location.
This company is part of one of the worlds largest clothing manufacturers, and they are using our software to improve the communication between different departments within the organization, as well as simplifying the process of managing documents securely, all within one instance. Departments varies from variety of sources, such as Sales, Finance, Warranty, RD&D, EMEA and more… Without a doubt, a web based intranet solution like Claromentis was the best choice for an international company. Having its employees across the world makes the importance of communication and document management through the Internet was an appropriate choice.
Because Claromentis is permission based intranet software, it is possible to hide your content from different departments using the same intranet software. You simply create groups and roles within Claromentis and identify your content (documents and news) to be shown to a certain number of users.
As you can imagine, a company like this literally has tens of thousands of documents stored within the software, so making these files to be found easily is not an easy job. That’s where the Smart Objects feature is going to make this process a lot easier than our competitors’ solutions.
Let me explain how different parts of Claromentis can work in collaboration to solve complex intranet problems. In this example, I would like to share a document folder containing financial sales targets of this month and a list of products needs to be highlighted during sales campaigns. I would also like to share news belonging the sales department and I need to show all of the above content visiting the Sales Department home page.
In the above example, I am actually aiming to solve my problem by sourcing the content from the following corporate solutions.
- Document Manager
- Content Manager
- Permission Based Intranet Management
- Permission Based News Management
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Smart Objects enables you to show contents from different parts of Claromentis, and this is exactly how this client actually solved this complex collaboration issue.
- Define Groups and Roles (SALES > Sales Managers | Sales Team) and assign users to the appropriate level.
- Using Document Manager application, store my files into one folder created for the special sales campaign.
- Change the permissions of all my files and make the “financial sales targets” viewable only by Sales Managers and the remaining files viewable by people belonging the SALES group.
- Using Web Based Content Management Solution, create an intranet page and fill up the content areas, such as TITLE, SUMMARY, GOALS, REWARDS.
- Using Smart Objects, embed the document folder containing my files into an appropriate space within my intranet page.
- Again Using Smart Objects, embed the Sales news (blogs) channel.
- Save the page and share the web address of the page with my staff.
What will happen is people who has an access to view the page I just created will only need to remember one web address (which can be pasted into an e-mail message) and when they click on that link, all of the information they have a permission to see will be visible to them. Remember that we have embedded one single folder containing both financial targets as well as documents containing products need to be highlighted? Because I set the permissions for my documents, Sales team will only see the files they need to see and managers will also be able to access the financial target documents, even though they are in the same folder and I have embedded that folder into my Intranet Page.
All within one single page. How Smart is that?!
