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Many organisations have been created from outdated market research and over analysis of market conditions, with large sums of money invested in creating and developing a business idea.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

Hannah giving a presentation to our client in Malaysia

Client meeting in Malaysia

Will holding a training session with a client in America

Intranet-Extranet Claromentis, collaboration, intranet software

I was looking at our own Claromentis Intranet home page ( we call ours Atlas ) and I was reminded how much useful functionality, providing real benefits, you can get from just a few inches of space. Here is a screenshot of just the top right corner of our current home page for Atlas :

Atlas Intranet - Home Page

My second thought was how much of that came from new suggestions from our own customer base.

In this case 3 out of the 4 have been provided as components resulting directly from customer feedback or live project requests. Now all of our customers – as well as ourselves –  can use these intranet components, and many other examples.

1)    A simple task manager – we developed this on the suggestion of one of our intranet customers. It is a highly effective simple task manager, which allows groups of users to share collaborative tasks and be reminded in their inbox – in this case on our home page – that they have tasks allocated to them, and what their current status is.

2)    News – these permission based news channels have long been a requirement.­

3)    Who’s in and who’s out. A simple application to dynamically let everyone know who is out today. It has been a pleasure to develop this – it runs directly from our intranet vacation planner. It even has a sense of humor – ‘everyone’s in – but it’s a Saturday!’

4)    Posting directly to Corporate Social Media – our new Innovate application for sharing status and ideas. This is a hugely popular application – allowing permission based discussion streams, follows, likes, replies and referencing anything in the intranet – so users for example can discuss a particular project task or document.

My final thought was that 3 of these applications did not even exist a few months ago, showing the accelerating pace with which Claromentis is developing. This is  thanks not just to our own developers and designers but to the growing customer base that provides continuous feedback and requests as they implement against their own particular requirements.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, The Framework Intranet Components, intranet software

Great to start using Innovate!

As the screenshot shows you can now micro blog and follow users in your own personal channel from right within your corporate intranet – referencing files, documents, links to anything inside or outside the intranet.

Innovate in your intranet!

This is a great product for some companies that are prepared to open up this application to certain types of users to encourage innovation.

One great aspect is that using the interface engine you can enable innovate to exactly the kinds of users you want to based on any combination of individual users, groups, roles or extranet areas for suppliers or customers – but you can leave other users with a more Intranet 1.0 experience – all within exactly the same system.

Companies can also have as many channels as they need – again on a permission basis, so that the right users will be encouraged to communicate with each other and share best practice in their open areas of expertise.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products innovate, intranet software

So last week we had a video shoot in our office. This was fun – we got to meet Lucas and his very expensive camera. We also managed not to break the camera, and Lucas didn’t lose patience with us, and we generally got through the day having had fun and with only a few hundred bungled lines.

Video Shoot with Lucas at Claromentis

My point is that because of the video we actually had things in our office that we don’t normally have, like glasses to go with the champagne we have had in the fridge for 2 years, fresh flowers and a plate of oranges. Depressingly we still didn’t drink the champagne..

So after the video shoot we were in a meeting discussing all the new recruitment for our technical staff – amazingly we are taking on 6 more people – and trying to work out the ideal structure for core and custom development teams.

After much internal debate Mike started writing names on oranges, and then we all started rolling people about. The top row are developers, the second designers, and ‘JS’ is a front end JavaScript developer we haven’t hired yet.

Claromentis technical oranges

The point of all this is that sometimes interactive visual models really do help solve complex problems. Within a half hour or so of rolling fruit about we all left feeling we were absolutely clear on our plans for each team.

Personally I think in words, and so at the start I was a bit of a prisoner – but by the end I had to admit this really worked. Mike then added post it notes for tasks – of which just a few are in this photo – and this melange of fruit and paper really got results. We were even able to confirm our management structure by drawing stars on two of the oranges.

So I guess my message is that if you are ever stuck in a complex problem that will have impact on your company’s future and the careers of the staff, have faith when people reach for the fruit bowl – they might just surprise you!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, The Framework intranet software, plans

I had an interesting meeting with the MD of a potential new retail client last week who had allowed the IT systems used in his rapidly expanding company to gradually grow over time. This had just happened naturally, as he purchased systems to meet the separate functional needs of various parts of the business.

He is opening new premises regularly, and the business plan calls for this to continue and even accelerate.

Apart from the obvious need to try to make available accurate version controlled information and news to each new business unit, he shared with me that one of his main requirements for the intranet was simply to allow a single portal to provide access to the other systems.

He had done an internal audit, and his managers now require 17 separate log ins and passwords to access all the systems they need to do their job.

I realized that although all of our clients do use the Claromentis permission system and extensive single sign on support to provide gateway access to other web based applications, I had actually not really thought through how valuable this gateway approach is. Having discussed this with him we added a series of simple slides featuring ‘Puzzled Pete’ – the business owner of a small, growing company without dedicated IT support who feels that life had got to be easier than this!

Claromentis single sign on

It is one of those great features that is really easy to understand and also to provide – requiring a simple once only set up effort in the Claromentis config files and then allowing single sign on systems like Active Directory, Novell e-Directory, or others to just do what they are supposed to do – provide a single access credential for each user, and making it easy to keep up with new hires and staff exiting the business.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions, The Framework intranet software, single sign on

When it comes to famous statements about business models, Peter Drucker would be right up there with his often quoted emphasis on – “who is your customer, what does the customer value, and how can we deliver value at an appropriate cost?”

With all the changes during 2010 in both our own expanding company and the wider internet world in general, it is interesting to apply this to ourselves here at Claromentis.

What we are seeing is that because we now :

• Offer true SAAS deployment as an option, as well as perpetual licence models
• Have a framework with entirely optional modules as entry points
• Have a well established custom application team

This means we have seen a growing engagement with a whole new audience – younger technical companies and start ups that need to offer a corporate web based software solution not for themselves at all, but as an integrated part of their offering to their own clients.

So it does seem that we have two clear sets of customers that both embrace the Claromentis framework with equal enthusiasm, but with very different values and requirements :

• Smaller companies and start ups look to us to deliver solution that is in itself ­a significant part of their sales offering

• Larger companies are looking for efficiency gains, collaboration, innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and internal process automation.

It is fascinating to work with these two very different audiences, and to ensure that our business model delivers what they both value at an appropriate cost. Our new financial year is underway as of 1st April, and it is exciting and challenging to have such diverse requirements from our customers.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, The Framework business model, intranet development, intranet software, software, web applications

Following on from Phil’s great post on our intranet analytics available in Claromentis 6.1 I wanted to share a screen shot.

Intranet Analytics

The highlights for me are :

• Really a familiar interface that users will easily be able to absorb and use
• Powerful business information, with summaries by object type in the intranet
• Most popular tabs for each object type – including automatic scrolling from tab to tab to add animation
• Analytics summaries on metrics that are very familiar to anyone working on public sites – Unique users, Page views, average time on site, average page views per day
• Importantly – the ability to compare any date range with any range in the past.

This is a very information rich system that will give Intranet Managers and teams a huge amount of useful information on the way their system is being used.

Thanks to Darren at  one of our Platinum customers for helping us understand what metrics are the most useful to our users!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Services intranet analytics, intranet software

Our meetings and workshops are often focused on quantifying where value lies in our client projects – what combination of Claromentis applications and custom development is going to make the most difference to the business, and add value to the platform as experienced by the user.

The discussion process – normally involving several key staff from the business and our own client team – is always fascinating and enjoyable. The client will be looking to understand the impact of configuration, the value standard projects bring – and then comparing potential e-form processes with custom development. These kinds of meetings are genuinely fascinating and enjoyable.

Sometimes however leveraged value is added from something that to all of us seemed to be a relatively simple addition to an intranet application or process. This happened to us recently when we were in the situation of being an internal customer  – as we now refer to this – we were looking to use our own project application to manage all of our work around the world – including all core and custom projects – development, design and testing teams co-operating on a huge range of projects.

As the scope of this became clear, we realized that we needed an intelligent filter – a method to look at the tasks facing groups of users – such as the design team – and to further filter that by the status of the tasks. Only then could the application really add value to us, rather than just be a neat way of organising our projects. Without such a filter loading hundreds of tasks into our application would just produce confusion through information overload.

We went ahead and improved the Intranet project management application to provide this filter – and the impact on our project delivery has been significant – making a material difference to our business.

Our project plan with a filter

All of our projects are indeed now in our project application, and anyone finds it a simple process to see  the upcoming tasks for themselves, their team, or any other group of users – directly from within Atlas – which is our own Claromentis intranet.

We are already engaging in workshops to extend this concept and the application further – we would like to see all our projects being stored as separate projects within a programme for example, so that we can grant our clients direct access to each project while maintaining security and integrity across all of our clients. These projects would then transparently build into a master view for all users according to their permissions, appearing to be one Gantt chart for example when in fact the system is generating the Gantt chart on the fly for each user.

Our experience with introducing filters has been enormously successful, we must be one of the happiest customers we have ever worked with. Simple enhancements can indeed produce extraordinary value.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet intranet project manager, intranet software, intranet software discussions

I am often asked by potential clients to provide information on how project funds can realistically be allocated across the spectrum of software licenses, services, support and custom design and development.

I think one of the best ways to think about this is to take an example small project and a very large one. So I did this for two recent projects – one a very standard example of a standard Claromentis Intranet product led engagement with a UK company of less than 50 staff, the other a recent deployment in the United States for an unlimited user system with a very significant custom development to provide specific sales related functionality, integration with third party systems and reporting through an Extranet.

Small Project Analysis

What we see with this project is that

• There are only 3 areas of spending – Software, Services and Support
• Software is 75% of the project spend
• Services and Support equally share the remaining 25%

Large Project Analysis

Large Project Financial Analysis

By contrast a large project has significant spending on Development and Design, as well as international travel and general expenses.

• Software licenses are one third of the spend
• Development and design are equal, totaling half of the project

Clearly these are just two examples, but comparing these to our license records for many projects does show that simple projects have a larger proportion of costs related to software licenses, and adding 25% for support and services give a good approximation to the total budget.

However when estimating budgets for larger deployments with more complex and custom requirements half of the project costs are concerned with the delivery of the custom functionality.

In my next post I will be comparing the customer costs for deploying intranets and custom frameworks through our cloud based SAAS offering, compared with a perpetual license model. I will be comparing these costs over a 2 year period.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, Services, Solutions, The Framework cost, graph, intranet software