Image Credit: Disney & Wikipedia

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.

1.    Intranet providers like Claromentis have pushed the boundaries of what is usefully deliverable as an intranet application into a space few would have believed possible just a few years ago. Companies, vendors and procurement processes are still trying to adjust.

2.    Modern web based technologies that Claromentis leverage have themselves leapt forwards, transforming what is possible within the constraints of a browser based system.

3.    User expectations have quite rightly moved inline with the ubiquitous availability of modern devices with clean, efficient and beautiful interfaces, an obvious example being the i-phone.

4.    Modern development practices are still evolving towards a reliable method for rapid deployment of web based applications that balance speed of deployment with the goal of exceeding client expectations.

5.    Client management teams are themselves trying to plan their route through information management, compliance, marcomms and innovation issues when planning software acquisitions in the corporate web space.

6.    Our software has become a true platform, rather than a set of products.

What a great place to be!

If an organization is taking the step to implement an intranet to encourage collaboration, to improve knowledge sharing, why go backwards at the same time by choosing to implement it to look like the old method of knowledge sharing via a network drive?

An intranet should not only allow the sharing of information, it should also provide the vehicle for users to easily identify the right information that they need, and the right communication channels to allow the barriers between isolated teams to be broken. Intranet should allow everybody from every part of the company to efficiently and effectively collaborate.

Corporate social networking should be recognized as a platform for employees to meet, to collaborate, to nurture new ideas and to innovate. Organizations which fail to grasp this need risk productivity and creativity drain.

Bring on  Claromentis 6.0 - Innovate, enterprise social media delivered inside the boundaries of your corporate information.

We discussed some of the Claromentis solutions for interaction and engagement – including of course the upcoming Innovate application – and one of the surprising comments was that they were initially worried that Innovate looked to complex. ‘We have to make it easy’.

The reason being that some of the users are outreaching social care workers who only received company computers a year or so ago.

How often have I heard that. Make it easy. Of course it is a focus of ours in terms of usability.

What occurred to me in the meeting today was that the most frightening thing of all for intranet users is a completely blank page. We have to guide them, give them confidence to express themselves – then they are off.

Staring at nothing is just paralyzing. The dreaded first page of a book. Micro blogging works because it is a simple, highly manageable, open space set within what is in fact a tightly constrained and structured application. It allows freedom without the capacity for procrastination. The small space for your input focuses you in a way that freedom without limits does not.

Many things will work for intranet users – giving them a blank page is absolutely not one of them.

This is our current standard permission where having “Edit” rights to a folder means you simply have rights to add and edit both documents and sub folders.

Some of our clients think that current “edit” permission is not flexible enough, they would like to split simple “edit” into sub-folders and documents.

After digging into our enhancement request database, I discovered that this is just one of the many request around the same subject.
Some says that having permission to view content of the folder should be different from permission to view folder’s properties and audit of the folder (usage statistics).

Others want to have flexibility where not all users with edit permission can run workflow on the same folder.

For a second I thought, “Hey this is getting ridiculous!”  Let’s mock-it up and see what happen if we accommodate all of them:

Can you see something is definitely not right, usability has been compromised to accommodate more granular permission, causing complexity to perform simple task which in most cases we just want simple “Edit”.

This issue raise a philosophical question, “Are we all so stupid so everything has to be over protective?” What’s wrong with a low-tech solution called “discipline”.

My niece is going to celebrate her 1 years old birthday next week. She starts cruising, walking short distances from object to object, she falls often and has many bumps and bruises, but she learns very quickly.

Aren’t we always told that allowing one or two bumps is a good thing?

This is surprising given the economic climate we are fast becoming used to operating in, but perhaps it is just the nature of certain types of entrepreneurs to believe those columns of excel data which based on simple projections extend ever higher  over time – reaching total world dominance in just a couple of nimble tabs.

As a contrast those of us that work in intranet projects know how hard you have to work to capture and retain users, and how easy it is to disappoint them and lose them for long periods of time.

Both as users and as customers we are increasingly demanding and sensitive – if we cant find exactly what we want with minimum effort we will just go to where we can – without leaving a trace in a project that tried hard to work out what we might be looking for, but didn’t get it quite perfect.

My question is why some people are so optimistic about the external world but so realistic about the likely behaviour of our colleagues. Perhaps this is nothing more than replacing some idealized version of a dissatisfied and excited consumer with reality, having got to know our workmates over extended periods of time.

But perhaps the workplace constrains both our imagination and our behaviour – it places us in a routine where we will simply not respond and change only because we did not do that yesterday.

If that is the case then intranet project teams need to bring a dose of external optimism into their projects, work hard to deliver exactly what their colleagues need and not let old practices continue to constrain both behaviour and innovation.

Discuss is chat feature built right in the Claromentis Intranet Manager. There is no additional configuration or chat client install like Yahoo, or MSN, it just works straight on your browser.

Simply click discuss bar to initiate Discuss and then choose the person you wish to have a chat with. You can hide the discuss window if you want to carry on working.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting a series of blogs about this innovative intranet chat application to promote the ability for users to fire up real time 1 to 1 or conference chats with anyone online in the corporate intranet.

We have the first client review shortly and that is a great milestone - but both in its own right and as a platform for the upcoming major Innovate Application these are certainly exciting times!

The player is built-in.

This is available with the current build of 5.7

Multi Language Intranet News

In exactly the same way as the CMS system works in Claromentis, the identical URL will detect the users preferred language and if the news exists in that language display it for the user.

If news exists in more than one language the user can switch between them using the automatically generated flags.

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.

To be honest this has been going on for a decade. Then this evening I get this :

The very top of the organic listing is dedicated to recent tweets. So is this just me? I had no idea this was about to arrive on the organic SEO scene.. and no I am not logged in!

Any comments?

Previously images were just available in a number of images per page, and users navigated from page to page. They could review images directly or add to a light box,  to collections or a download cart as required.

Image Commenting

While this is acceptable in many use cases, the 5.6.5 release includes both a slide show function – allowing users to navigate rapidly within an album – and also adds commenting on images.

A good example of incremental usability and functionality improvements that we continue to make – often at client request as well as our own vision for where applications need to be. Intranet media management is an important part of the  deployment of our software for many clients, and we will continue to improve this application.

In the next Blog I will review more incremental improvements in the 5.6.5 monthly build - the ability to comment anonymously on news, and having configurable RSS feeds for news channels that opened up the possibility of including permissioned news into RSS feeds where required.

As the first of these today we are looking at the in browser cropping for images with Claromentis.

This functionality enhances the use of images in both News and People Profile. Previously any editing of images had to be done locally before selecting the image for use in these applications.

Intranet News Image Cropping

In both cases the user can now directly crop the image in the browser, before confirming the image for use.

Screen shots above show this is use for both the news application and the people profile.

While these images focus on News and People, the same cropping functionality is available wherever inner file images are used - in any application, including bespoke work developed using the APIs.

A good example of incremental increase in intranet functionality that helps users by making things easier to accomplish, with no dependency on other software or skill sets.

The next blog will look at the image sideshow which is also available in Claromentis 5.6.5

Clearly we can enable the FCK editor to embed a pre-prepared flv ( Flash video file ).

However with the many recent enhancements in the intranet image management application of Claromentis, “Image Gallery” - which manages collections of images and allows processing on download to appropriate file sizes - we are now considering enhancing this application  to provide a youtube like environment natively within the corporate intranet.

We would do this by embedding a video processing unit within the system, so a video originating from anywhere ( Camcorder, iPhone, normal mobiles for example ) can be uploaded directly – and the system will convert and compress it to flv – and allow the user to set appropriate meta data as required.

These converted videos will of course be hosted within the intranet and its security systems – and available for embedding on publish pages in exactly the same way as images are now.

This is a reasonably significant task and before we add it the roadmap does anyone have any comments on how useful this would be?

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:

Example Sitemap with colour coded permission

Example of Intranet Site Map using colour to identify launch phase

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

Permission Group & Role

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.

UBS Intranet homepage wireframe

Colchester NHS Intranet wireframe

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!

Having put this into the Claromentis Component Library, it was suggested by Nigel that we take this one step further… to modify the component code, allowing users to add in some additional parameters and generate a more commonly known tag cloud, including randomization of the results returned, with varying font sizes depending on the most popular channels - now we’re talking!

After some code changes and some input from Dan at Claromentis, the component was modified to generate something that looks a little something like this:

The view can be changed by editing the user parameters on the component code as mentioned above.

To view a full description of the coponent and how to implement it, see here: http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/components:news_cloud

Until next time,

Craig

Having many hats within an IT team can have its advantages (and obviously its downsides!), but when facing the task of designing new visual interfaces for some 17,000 users, what are the vitals for a successful page layout and how do we cater for everyone?

Currently we have 18 visual interfaces across some two Intranets & nine Extranets, all of which are viewed by virtually the whole of our business. So how is it possible to incorporate all of the features for all of our users? It’s simply not an option. BUT, with good research and some carefully placed demonstrations and trials, we found that it is possible to capture user’s most important features.

As our business is driven by news, safety and corporate information, it is essential that we make available the information that the business needs as soon as they log on. On the flip side, cascading a lot of information as soon as a user logs in can be overwhelming which lead onto another key driver for our new interfaces - a users navigation when logged onto the system. Time and time again feedback appeared indicating that our Intranet was too “One way” – information was hard to put back into the system. Mentioning “News” above, we now have a “One-Click” route to adding news, which has been proven to increase the publication of delivering news on a day to day basis.

With these items in mind, and with the know-how of the Claromentis team, we switched to Java Searching – and boosted our search times to around 0.6 seconds. We simplified our menu structures to two levels and simplified our “People” pages to include an embedded left hand menu for easy navigation and making related pages easy to find.

So far, I think all I’ve alluded to is that our visual interfaces are the same as around 90% of corporate Intranets – BORING! So in response to this, we’ve added blocks of colour, symbolic icons for different applications, consistency in approach, JQuery powered gallery slideshow, easy application navigation from a JQuery powered application slider, and the easiest item for finding what’s mine – “My Desk”.

My advice for anyone designing a new visual interface for a large number of users is a four-step process. Keys to success are brainstorming, research, demonstrate and trial. Keeping users informed of change is always a key to success as they are the stakeholders in the use and growth of your Intranet. The Claromentis team were fundamental in providing accurate mock-ups and advice from other customers, a position that I hope we’ll all be in shortly to enable us to all share our ideas and findings.

One closing thought to a semi-inspiring blog, a couple of links to screen shots of our intranet homepage – to prove we’re moving forward with our Intranet.

“Dimensions” of Old à “Dimensions” Today

All comments welcome as usual,

Craig

Defining Business Processes

In every working environment, there are often multiple understandings of both a process and a requirement - so how are they defined and how do we deliver them online?

Having worked within a corporate IT environment now for the past 5 years, with the latter being responsible for delivering web based applications to a high standard, across a business of multiple Intranets, with some 17,000 users. It can be difficult to gather the correct information and requirements that are needed to develop a detailed specification and ultimately a precise application.

Often, a customer has an understanding of how their business process should be managed online. However, how do we verify that this is the RIGHT way to manage their process? After all, an online process needs to be simple, straight forward and user friendly, otherwise, who would use it? With Claromentis’ InfoCapture application, workflow becomes easy to manage in a controlled environment. Out of the box, the application operates with defined boundaries, which makes the build and configuration of simple forms very straight forward. But what happens when we need to push the boundaries?

With some additional bespoke “plug-in” code (written in PHP), the boundaries of InfoCapture can be… expanded, but ONLY by a competent developer with access to the “guts” of the application. I found myself commonly defining bespoke coding into specifications, allowing customers to add additional steps into their processes in order to incorporate “features” that they couldn’t imagine having available in any paper form process, or in the default InfoCapture application. In simple terms, this often pushes out both coding and testing timescales, making projects much longer and more complex to deliver. So what happens when the “Out of box” experience requires additional code in order to meet customer expectations?

In more recent Claromentis releases, InfoCapture has grown to incorporate features that I feel were powered by our ability to “Push the boundaries”. Regular feedback and collaborative working with the supplier I feel helped us to better understand the InfoCapture application and put ideas forward for improvements to be shared by all customers. The overhaul of InfoCapture required more comprehensive reporting, straight forward wizards to build and manage forms, stylish skins to promote corporate workflows and a better permission structure.

With InfoCapture providing the majority of our Intranets online forms, I would certainly await the next batch of improvements to the application; maybe we’ll see the inclusion of some of the more common plug-ins into the core application code with simple wizard based builders in the admin panel? Maybe a more comprehensive permission structure to include better default roles to the typical “Reporter and Handler” that can be found at present? Hopefully Claromentis 6.0 will hold the answers…

Comments welcome as always.

Craig

What's that coming over the hill?

Good Afternoon!

As most of you regulars will gather, this is my first post for the Claromentis Blog so please go easy on the comments!

Having worked closely with Claromentis for a little over a year now, and after many discussions with Nigel and Team regarding “What’s coming in Claromentis 6.0“, it seems to me that a growing number of companies are introducing “Social and Business” sharing across corporate intranet sites. On recent occasions I find myself sifting through reams of RSS feeds in my inbox and thinking “The team would be interested in that - I’ll send it on”. With this in mind, it is with great anticipation I acknowledge the introduction of the Claromentis “Innovate” application coming in the not so distant future, which only enforces this need for sharing information with colleagues.

Having seen a preview of the new “Innovate” application only yesterday, one question burns in the back of my mind - How will this work for intranets with many users? To give this more meaning, we currently support a mere 2000 users on our main Intranet including Staff, Contractors, and Clients, located from the highlands of Scotland to the very lowlands of Cornwall. Our users operate across a quite complex layer of permissions on content, roles and groups that I will only imagine a roll-out of this type of application can lead to a multitude of challenges. Will there be a need for an engineer on one of our operations sites to share in my “Idea’s Space”? Unlikely, but just maybe… At the moment, I believe that the best way of understanding how this will “slot into” our Intranet model will be down to an in depth understanding both our business model, and the full extent of the “Innovate” applications capabilities, as well as its boundaries.

When brainstorming our ideas for Visual Interface updates a few months ago, we looked widely at the cyber world for ideas of how large companies had used their websites to display meaningful content, with the ambition of enriching and shaping our users web experience of the Intranet. Feedback we received previously hinted that maybe our users experience was mainly “One Way”. In our early mock-ups, we included the “What Am I Working On” box - A user’s ability to share what they are currently working on with all other users of the intranet - and found that our senior user’s reaction to the “Social Networking” approach left them with a heavy mindset of “Facebook” type applications taking over the intranet. I think that “Innovate” will largely encompass all of the best parts of a more collaborative approach to sharing information while maintaining the integrity of a corporate image. Only time will tell…

The only piece of advice I can throw into the pot while starting promotion of an application of this nature is to be mindful of existing user’s thoughts of “Innovate” replacing key applications such as “News”. I know that the user’s of our intranet rely on our “News” system to deliver key information across our business and a phased replacement (If there is to be one) of these key applications is a must.

I think that in conclusion to the above, the “Innovate” application will introduce a whole new level of collaborative working for our colleagues to better share information across our Intranet, all-be-it with its difficulties and significant cultural changes on implementation, with the idea of sharing ideas live online being quite scary to some.

All comments welcome.

Craig