Claromentis Intranet & Extranet manager provides several ways to collaborate and share information within an organisation. We have application called ‘Documents’ (Document Management System), ‘Publish’ (Content Management System) ‘Wiki’, and our new member of the family ‘Bookshelf’ (online policies & procedures).

In early phase of intranet deployment we frequently being asked by our clients, “Which tool is the best to share and collaborate a piece of information or should we  just stick with an existing company shared drive?”.

There isn’t one solution to all problems

The good starting point is to be aware of the pros, cons and applicability of individual tool available.  Unfortunately as an Information Architect we always says “There isn’t one solution to all problems”. The idea is by having the right solution (with right technology) to a specific problem, we can make everyone’s lives easier.
Let’s start with…

Shared Drive

Typically before an organisation deploys an intranet they have existing growing unmanageable shared drive(s). Shared drive is relatively easy to setup but it suffers from these issues:

• No version control – You ended up having similar files with version number scripted at the back of the file name for example:  “MyPresentation_ver2.doc” not to mention the frustration of someone overwriting the file you’re currently working on.
• Searching – Does everyone feel that it is easier to search information on the internet than on the share drive?
• Limited Access – When you’re not in the office, say on the road or working from home,  you either have to use slow & complicated VPN software or not having access to the company files at all.
• Security – There is no easy way to setup permission on a shared drive, typically it opens to everyone or if you have permission it’s so complicated to set up and configure.
• Audit - You can’t easily check who did what, when and where.
• Duplication – since a single physical file cannot exist in two places at once, you ended up with duplication everywhere.

Documents – Document Management System

Claromentis document management system is designed to address all of the common issues with company Share Drive. The heart of it is the application called ‘Documetns’ It provides built-in version control, searching & indexing, permission layer, easy access, and many enterprise features.

What are the Cons?

• It is not suitable for managing extremely large files. (Larger than 30Mb)
• Files are kept in native format, which means users need to have the application to open / view and edit the file.  For instance not all users within organisation have AutoCAD software needed to open a *.DWG file.
• Speed to upload and download the file stored in Documents are limited to the speed of your network / internet connection
• Extra steps may be required to edit a file. Typically you have to download it (temporary), make changes and upload them back in, although we have several solutions to make this relatively painless such as webdav.

Publish – Content Management System

Using publish, users with no web publishing skills can collaborate & create web pages easily.

• Better access – Information displayed as web pages are widely accessible. Users don’t have to download the file or installing software to view. They can simply read them online.
• Information Hub – everything can be connected in publish page, link to documents, link to other pages, or links to external website. For example you can create a health & safety page which may have link to ‘health & safety assessment guide.PDF’ which is store in Documents as well as link to HSE websites.
• Mash-ups – Publish allows you can embed rich media such as online videos, podcast, web widgets and much more.
• Enterprise features– Publish has everything you need to manage online content, from built-in version control, security & permission, reminder, audit trails, multi lingual and much more.

It may sound like a good idea to convert all documents into publish pages, but there are several points to consider:

• There is not much point converting complicated document such as spreadsheet into a publish page, you probably better of store them in Documents and just link it from a publish page.
• Content for publish page should be relatively short, concise and to the point. Remember the information is designed to be read on the screen just like web pages.

Wiki

A wiki is designed to enable everyone with fast and volatile collaboration. Claromentis integrates with Media WIKI, one of the most popular open-source wiki software. Wiki focuses on fast and real-time collaboration by minimising complexity in content creation. There are several issues to remember here:

• Wiki tend to have open access for everyone – You have to keep sensitive and proprietary data off the wiki.  Avoid posting sensitive data such as financials.
• Wiki syntax to learn, Wiki may focuses on simplicity but there is whole new syntax to learn. Wiki is typically very popular within IT department but what’s popular in one department may not be suitable others.

Bookshelf

Bookshelf is the application behind Claromentis Quality Manager; it is the latest addition to the information layer suite. Bookshelf is designed specifically for managing Company Policies & Procedures. It allows online procedures creation making sure that there is one version of the truth across entire organisation.

• Bookshelf allows company procedures and policies to be maintained online allowing true collaboration of subject matter expert.
• Once the policies or procedures are created online, it can then be read online or exported in various format such as MS Word and PDF.

Summary

These are just a few of the tools available in Claromentis Framework. There isn’t one perfect solution to all problems but at least you can choose ‘the best kit for the job’.

Any comments and feeback welcomed.

Solutions collaboration, document management, intranet consultancy, intranet software, online collaboration, Prod-Intranet, quality management software

10. Run Survey / Poll

It’s quick and easy to do, launch regular survey to get user’s feedback on almost any subjects, for a change try to create survey outside corporate agenda, pick casual topic related to everyday life, political debate, sustainability issue, or entertainments here are some ideas:

• Cool movie of the month
• Casual Friday? (yes no)
• Choose company smart phone? (iPhone or Blackberry)
• How do you travel to work?
• How’s your weekend?
• What do you think of Gordon Brown?

9. RSS feed

Embedding relevant RSS feed to departmental page is one of the easiest ways to get fresh news delivered to your page. RSS news from HSE (Health & Safety Executive can be added to the corporate Health & Safety Page, or an RSS from popular design blog is perfectly suitable for Creative department homepage for instance. It’s not only help member of your department aware of what’s going on out there it also help staff from other department know more about what you’re doing.

8. Enable commenting

Everyone likes commenting. Sometime reading people’s comments in a blog is more interesting than the actual post itself. We want to hear what people say at the same we like to be heard. Staff’s comments can be invaluable to the improvement of the business and organisation as a whole. In Claromentis commenting can be enabled for documents, news, and publish pages.

7. Classifieds (Craigslist)

Have you ever noticing communal pin board next to the kitchen is full of classifieds, from selling used car, sharing apartments to cheap concert tickets. Having an electronic version of classifieds right in the corporate intranet can help users coming back to the system.  If you still like the pin board, you can print it out of your intranet and post it there!

6. Treasure Hunt

Yes a treasure hunt. Simply hide content within the corporate intranet and run a competition to find it. One of our clients had tried this and it was a success. It’s definitely a fun and exciting way to get users familiarising with the intranet without a boring training.

5. Business Dashboard

Businesses are surrounded with data; but they are sharing one common problem. They are not visual enough to draw our attention.  Claromentis dashboard application allows you to generate data visualisation in a form of graph / chart from any data source as long as they are accessible. This can be business statistics, KPI (Key Performance Index), weekly sales figures, real-time number of visitors, stock chart, and much more.

4. Up-to-date Content

The essence of a corporate Intranet is storing and finding information, if users can’t find information they want accurately & effortlessly, it almost guarantee that they won’t coming back. The reality is always harder than theory but you can’t underestimate the importance of having the most up-to-date information on the Intranet.

3. Develop Persona while improving usability

Check your stats & analytics, ask users and identify 3 main areas which are frequently visited on the Intranet. Create attractive shortcuts to access these areas and you are developing persona at the same time improving usability of your corporate intranet.

2. Implement built-in apps

Claromentis offers business-ready built-in applications which can be implemented straight within a corporate Intranet. These applications include room booking, image gallery, holiday & vacation planner, group calendars, forums and course planner.

1. Business processes

Having your business process built right into the corporate intranet is the number on the list. It transforms corporate intranet into something much more than just communication & collaboration platform. The intranet becomes an indispensible business application where day-to-day business processes sit on top of information layer in a single integrated system. Claromentis provides several products such as Process Manager, Sales Manager and Project Manager all can be implemented directly within your Intranet.

Have you tried one of these within your corporate Intranet ? Please share your experience.

Solutions Design, internal customer communications, intranet, intranet consultancy, intranet development, user interface

Over the past few years there has been tremendous noise about the benefits of cloud computing, but in reality many businesses are still struggling with the idea.  From what I heard there are 3 main concerns:

Where is my data?

It’s a human nature that we still pretty much need physical contact. The idea that our data will be located among millions of others somewhere which we don’t know exactly is scary.  Some might still think our data is equivalent of piece of paper stored in unknown place with millions of other papers.

Security

We all heard the benefit that could computing in a managed infrastructure will guarantee security, from the latest patches of the OS up to cross-continental back-ups. Most organisations are still concern about security of cloud computing even though it is a safer than leaving it in your office and you find out the next day the office was flooded.

Change

One issue related to cloud computing is the concern of IT Downsizing. As more and more services related to IT become outsourced and centralized many IT jobs will become obsolete. Some says cloud computing will flourish in current economic situation but in the other hand businesses are facing difficult decisions.

Share your thoughts
Do you think cloud computing is suitable for your organisation? Share your thoughts and read more about claromentis model of software deployment.

Solutions cloud computing, development vision, intranet, intranet consultancy, software, technology, web 2.0

Recently we were discussing about development of  an Intranet system for a large organisation and capture how it seen from different roles involved in the projects:

My classic problem is how you translate this requests into software:

Solutions humor, internal customer communications, intranet consultancy, intranet software discussions, user interface

We’ve been asked many times, what is Claromentis model of deployment? The truth is we are probably the most flexible company in terms of software deployment by offering wide range of configurations to suit your business and infrastructure.

1.    In your office

Claromentis can be installed in one of your servers located in your office. This configuration eliminates cost of the hardware from us. In most cases it works well if you have a good and reliable in-house IT department who can take care of the servers, back-ups and access issues.

2.    Our Data Centre

Working together with our data centre partner Rackspace, we offer a fully managed package. Your software and data are hosted in a secure data centre outside allowing full peace of mind about hardware software patches, and backups.

3.    Your  Data Centre

We can work with any data centre or IT partners you may have to arrange hosting and servers configuration. This configuration is ideal if you have several applications hosted on existing infrastructure such as which you may want to integrate with Claromentis.

4.    Software as a Service

Increasingly popular for SME market, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of managing IT infrastructure, and reduce the up-front expense of the software purchase. Claromentis system can be deployed faster with no hassle.

Services Claromentis, hardware, intranet consultancy, intranet development, software

This article below is written by  Rob Reith our Country Director in Australia which I found it interesting although in some deployments Claromentis can indeed co-exist with Microsoft SharePoint.

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While there are many reasons why a company would want to select Claromentis over SharePoint, we have produced this handout to highlight the critical differences between the Claromentis and SharePoint Knowledge Management solutions. In the context of this handout, a Knowledge Management Software system covers the following functionality;

-    Intranet software;
-    Extranet software;
-    Content Management software;
-    Document Management software;
-    Customer Relationship Management software;
-    Project Management software; and
-    Electronic Forms software.

Work with the owners of Claromentis

Did you know that when you are dealing with Claromentis, you deal with the owners of the business? As part of the original team to build Claromentis, our clients have direct access to the owners and developers of Claromentis. This allows clients to have a direct say into the development roadmap. This is in contrast to SharePoint resellers who have no vested interest in the software and are unlikely to be able to contact Microsoft for urgent changes.

Work with the owners of Claromentis, and be confident that your voice will be heard at the top

Work with the Knowledge Management Specialists

Did you know that Claromentis only works in the field of Knowledge Management? We live and breathe knowledge management and are active in knowledge management conferences and forums. This is in contrast with many SharePoint resellers, who offer a wide range of software solutions, and will not have the degree of specialty as Claromentis.

Work with the Knowledge Management specialists and get better results

Work with more features

Did you know that over and above the Document Management, Intranet, Extranet and Content Management features, Claromentis also offers Project Management and Customer Relationship functionality where SharePoint does not offer either?

Work with the Knowledge Management software that offers more

Work with flexible technology

Did you know that Claromentis runs on Windows or Linux giving you flexibility whereas SharePoint runs on only their own proprietary server and code? This means you have complete control over your IT environment and ensures your Total Cost of Ownership remains low.

Work with software that puts you in complete control

Work with better Electronic Forms Management

Did you know that Claromentis offers an International Standards Organisation (ISO) compatible and integrated electronic forms module where with SharePoint it is optional? In our experience, forms are critical for any size company, and that’s why we include them out of the box.

Work with the company that understands business

Work with integrated Search

Did you know that while Claromentis offers a fully integrated and advanced searching feature, SharePoint charge separately for their search engine?  Image 1.11 shows the complexity of the SharePoint solution (notice the multiple components that have different licensing conditions) which can cause budgeting and resourcing issues as your organisation grows.

Work with a company that keeps it simple and scalable

Partners Claromentis, commercial, intranet, intranet consultancy, software

Delivering a successful Intranet or large IT project is not easy. Based on our experience they hugely depend on these 4 cornerstones:

Sponsor

Sponsor is usually coming from executive level with strong vision to transform the business. It is important to keep the sponsor up-to-date with every stage of the project, from planning, development and deployment. Her or his influence and active participation can make such a huge different. Need a practical example? Organise brief speech during the launch, record his/her video, and write in the executive blog or press releases just to name a few.

Champions

Champions, power users or cohort is a collection of individuals who represent their departments or business unit. They get early administration training and it is their job to introduce the new system and train other users. Just like in any other team building exercise it is important to choose the right member of the team. These are certain quality worth considering: bright, creative, helpful, good with computers. Champion group is acting like a fuel during the early adoption.

Vendor

Choosing a software vendor for a large IT project is like choosing a life partner. er.. maybe I am exaggerate a little, but there is some truth in it. Ending up with the wrong vendor can be frustrating and greatly impact your business. Sometime it’s not just about the product but look for extras and advice they could bring to the table. Do they have enough experience? Are they easy to get hold of? How’s the after-sales service? Are you tighten into a proprietary technology with no future?

User

Understand what the end users wants and translate them into the product is a winning formula. Get out from your cubicle and talk to all users from every corner of the department especially the one who sit nice and quietly in the corner. Ask them do they get the benefit? Keep an eye on usability issues, sometime they just not knowing the thing they are looking for is there. Monitor the changes; avoid common mistakes, keep them happy, ultimately they are the reason why we’re having this project.

Services Claromentis, internal customer communications, intranet, intranet consultancy, intranet software discussions

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy

An interesting question is surfacing in the Claromentis world – what should the correct sales department response be to the question of ‘How much Intranet Consultancy will I need?’

Many times I am in meetings with potential new clients, and we get that question ‘Is that available out of the box?’

Well yes, many things are. Massive applications. But then they need configuration.

For example – yes of course we can connect to many disparate data stores and display dashboards on any required permissioned basis within the intranet. We do that all the time.

A management KPI area, an IT status dashboard – you imagine it – we can deliver it. But not out of the box. You don’t need to buy anything – all Claromentis applications are included in the system – but someone has to make the connections, configure the output to match requirements – drill down multi level bar charts by month, next layer down to show days, graphing only data points with values over £x – yes of course. Its just a data gatherer – but someone has to write it and configure that dashboard.

The client gets all the application, the admin panel, but at the end of the day they probably don’t want to actually do the work. So what should the honest account manager be trained to say?

I think I am coming down to that answer we developed a long time ( in intranet terms ) ago, which is for now, lets focus on Phase 1. Our obligation is to describe to you, the potential customer, the art of the possible – you prioritise it, with or without our help as you wish – you make definite decisions on whether you want us to do that or your own staff that we will train – and then we can sensibly give you a year one budget.

I can hear you say that this is all obvious. But I think it is just not clear to most companies looking to leverage permissioned collaboration to make a difference to their business. There is just too much information to absorb, to many requirements to gather from departments where I know, once they talk to us, they will be inspired in the art of the possible and dream of this or that great functionality – they will immediately want phase 3 – before they have even selected a vendor.

I was going to conclude that ‘walk before you run’ springs to mind, but this is I think not correct. We need to work together to help clients run, and if running is what they actually need then I believe they don’t have to walk first. But they need to understand that going from a standing start to winning the race is not a matter of installing Claromentis code – someone has got to make it happen, and with the best will in the world, if that enabling resource works for Claromentis not your own company, they will need to be paid for..

Intranet-Extranet intranet consultancy