Intranet Management Software Blog

As Claromentis continues to grow in the scope and range of products and applications, the framework is being actively developed and enhanced by the use of components to provide flexible, configurable functionality for clients wishing to use them.

Just in the last week the following very useful components have been added :

Anniversary Intranet Component

The Anniversary component gives you the ability to summarily compare dates attached to users profiles within Claromentis through the use of metadata.

Once configured, not only can you change how far in the future you’d like to list events – up to one whole year from today, but also how many user anniversaries you’d like shown.

This anniversary component could be useful for anything from showing birthday information for employees, to listing anniversaries of employment with your company - there are lots of opportunities for configuration of this component.
 
File Review Intranet Component

The File Review component also through the use of custom metadata allows you to configure multiple options for ensuring that you always know what review dates are coming for your files.

This component allows you to change how files are listed and also what scope of listing to give. For example: you can also attach a reviewer to the component, and it’ll list also for the reviewer of the file; you can show review dates to everyone – ideal for a departmental vi.  The major advantage of this component is how configurable it is, you can show due dates to all, or just the reviewer, or just the owner, or even both the owner and the reviewer; on top of which you can change how far ahead it is looking for document review dates, and it will make it really clear to the viewers when something is overdue for review!

 
RSS Reader Intranet Component

The RSS Reader component makes reading news or events easy, be it from an external source such as the BBC or using your own internal RSS feed.

The component allows two modes of reading, one is a fixed feed experience – designed for when you want a feed readable by all without them being able to customize where it is reading from; the second makes use of custom metadata, allowing your end user to configure where the news is coming from, so that the component is always personal to them.

Interested clients should contact us – we have these components available on our development WIKI and we are currently considering if they should be included in the core distributive.

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There has been many post on the subject related to permission lately, and I want to show a hidden ‘gem’ in the admin panel of Claromentis Document Management which is going to help us monitor and manage permission better.

Complex Permission System

Claromentis Document Management System has comprehensive permission system, which means you can define permission by extranet area, role, group down to individual users. The permission can also inherited from the folder above as well as applied on the individual file itself.

Access Report

When you logging in to the system of course you can only see the document that you are allowed to see, but as you know from admin you can see all files.
As a document administrator you may be asked by your manager to create a report showing what a particular user can see or not see on the system.

They might be a business partners or contractors, while you want to make sure they have access to the information they need, you want to make sure there is no permission leak. You don’t want the corporate sensitive information exposed to this type of users.

What’s new in Claromentis

We created  a new functionality called  “Document Permission Report” and it is available from admin panel from Claromentis 5.6.3 onwards.

Under utilities in Document Panel click on “Document Permission Report”
Where you can select a user and get the permission report instantly, you can also export it to CSV format.

Screenshot

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As everything is about collaboration, and everything can be moderated – why don’t content editors give edit permissions to their own content more freely?

Everyone is keen to provide view rights, but protective of edit rights, even though this is precisely where new information would come from. Although in certain areas – like corporate policies and procedures for example – this would obviously not be appropriate - for many functions and processes increased contribution to knowledge should be welcome, even if it needs editing before approval.

Cultural openness is hard to achieve – even in collaboration platforms designed for exactly that purpose.

Prod-Quality intranet software, permissions

Process orientated companies, as opposed to departmentally divided ones – will often place little emphasis on job titles and much more on general expertise. They expect a persons contribution to be based on their knowledge sets, but to take place in whichever process most needs them.

When we set up Intranet permissions in new intranet projects the default is usually to base at least one permission set – normally ‘Groups’ – on the departmental structures, and use ‘Roles’ to reflect much more the nature of the persons job – such as ‘manager’ or ‘administrator’ – thus allowing easy collaboration by roles across departments, as well as within them.

Since Claromentis can localize the names of permission sets, perhaps we should offer a set of permission structures that are more process-orientated. For many companies this would not be too hard to think about – ‘role’ can be the expertise area, particularly as each ‘expertise area’ can be defined as having multiple skills, and users can provide information on how they rank for all these skill sets.

Groups could then be ‘Processes’ – or however the company prefers to name them. A user could therefore be assigned to the ‘Product Development’ process but have core ‘Engineer’ expertise, with rankings for the various skills that company Engineers might have.

This would make searching for staff to contribute to a new process, or one that was struggling with workload, simple - as Claromentis already allows searching for any combination of skills within users of a particular role.

In common with career development in process orientated companies, users can also have multiple roles, allowing them to gain practical experience by working in different processes over time.

For some companies making such a change at the same time as deploying a new intranet and collaboration platform might be too much to absorb – but for others that have been considering becoming more process orientated the implementation of these ideas might be facilitated by a platform that is naturally organized along process based lines

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Those of us that go back a few years will doubtless recognize the culturally positive approach in many companies to openly acknowledge mistakes by a friendly, open “pranny of the week award” - or something similar.

These are normally awarded during some kind of Friday beer bust, and predictably seem to always go to any senior manager on hand, who always deserve it, or the marvelous vivacious girl in admin that everyone loves and obviously a long way from being a twit…

We were at an intranet project kick off meeting today with a new client and they have a great idea – once a month the pass around a toy duck that the recipient for the silly mistake of that month then has to have on their desk for the duration. A physical recognition of a daft moment that doubtless is delivered in a humorous and positive way.

In delivering collaboration platforms that increasingly look to promote interaction through tools like micro-blogging I have been interested as to how some basic concepts do or do not translate from real physical collaboration and interaction to their virtual equivalents – and “pranny of the month” might well be one of them!

I cannot imagine that any Claromentis client will look for a place on the intranet to actually promote the person in the company that made a mistake. How ridiculous that would be! The cultural wrapping, the openness, and the humor would of course all be lost – destroying the whole point of the concept.

What concerns me is how the lack of real physical interaction might sometimes lead to a serious misinterpretation of a shout/ post/corporate tweet or whatever approach is used in corporate web 2.0. Some things clearly don’t make the migration to the virtual world of the intranet at all – more worryingly perhaps there is a middle ground where we really have to be careful about our interpretation of pithy, succinct comments without the emotional framing that real life gives us.

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I come across an issue regularly when creating Infocapture (Process Manager) projects…

How to name the statuses appropriately?

I’ve so far concluded the following;

It depends on the project that you are creating

• How complex is the project
• How critical is the process that the project will control

It depends on the audience of the project and who will be interacting with the project

• Users with limited technical understanding or IT competence may require very simple status titles to ensure that they are not confused
• More technically competent users may be confused by a very simple status naming convention

It depends on the workflow within the project

• If the work flow is very simple, you are likely to  have statuses that reflect this.
• If the work flow is complex (perhaps even requiring an approval process), your statuses will be used to assist in the implementation of this.

Here is an example I’ve just run into…

The first status of almost every project is something along the lines of…

• New
• Submitted
• Received

All of those first status titles tells the users a single value of where the issue/ticket is at… but it’s static… it doesn’t say what it’s awaiting for…

What does “New” mean…other than it’s new… Who’’s attention is it pending?  Is it pending attention at all?  Does it require approval?  If so, by who??

Sure, we can send notifications to the person it’s pending some attention from, but what about everyone else who see’s this… what does it mean to everyone else?

In an attempt to provide clarity on this to all users, I tend to create statuses with a dual title…

• New - Pending IT
• Submitted - Awaiting Approval
• Received - Being Processed by IT

However, in doing so, I think it’s easy to potentially get carried away and end up with a status such as…

• New - Pending further information from IT before being approved and sent to HR

My solution - A compromise…

1. Chose clear and meaningful statuses that are targeted to the audiences that will be involved in the project.  “Dual statuses” help achieve this… (see examples above)
2. Try not to define static statuses such as “New” or “Approved” - These are only likely to mean something to a percentage of the overall audience.
3. Use the description fields within the form to describe the work flow and process to all users.
4. Be clear in your notifications to users about what they should be doing in order to get the ticket moved forward

I would be interested in hearing alternative opinions and approaches…

Prod-Process e-forms, infocapture, processes, statuses

Having involved with many projects in various scales, I can see that in general there are 3 types of projects:

1.  A project with no vision

A project with no vision is a bit like life without a purpose. The project exists for the sake of having the project itself. It is almost destined to be doomed even with enough resources to make it happen. There are too many IT projects failures, many of which are due to this problem. Of course no one wants to admit there is no vision, of course they can pretend they have a vision or basically borrow one from someone else - but normally they are just too abstract and meaningless.

2.    Project with vision but no execution

Good, now we are one step closer. We have clear vision for the project but the problem is we don’t know how to execute it. Having a vision without plan and execution is just like having a good idea with no outcomes.
We know how hard it is to execute good idea, and a good idea remains just a good idea until it has been executed.

3. Project with vision and execution

Right, I think we nailed it this time; we’ve got the clear vision and know exactly what needs to be done to execute it.  As we all know having a clear plan and the right resources to execute it is a great recipe to a successful project.

At the end of the day the outcome of successful project heavily depends on execution and control.  We all know things aren’t work according to the plan. Determination, passion and continuous control is perhaps worth more than the vision itself in the real world. The Japanese called this “Kaizen” (Continuous Improvement).

Services development vision, internal customer communications, intranet project manager

Deploying an intranet within organisation can be a complex project. The fact is that a single system has to be created to cater for requirements from individuals with different needs and objectives.

During the Intranet project implementation we often have brainstorming session with representatives from each department and we ask them what is an ideal intranet according to them if they can ignore others and only focus on what they want to see and get from the system.

Here are some interesting examples of intranet design according to their brief.

Executives

Business performance and KPI is something that Directors and executives have inside their head all the time. This type of busy folks don’t have enough time to drill down the detail, they simply want to see everything at glance without hassle.

Designer/Marketing

The look and feel is something that this type of audience cares the most. Sometime they are a bit too creative for their own sake, ignoring the main purpose of the site.

Legal & HR

Distributing information efficiently, securely and compliant is more important than everything else. This is an example of intranet design according to them.

FootNote:

Claromentis supports multiple visual interfaces, enabling the creation of completely different intranet experiences according to the type of user. In most cases we always ended up with a compromise, not the extremes like the examples above.

Home Design, humor, user interface

Some time ago content management system controlled pages in Claromentis, like many CMS systems, used to be largely flat. You created content, you built links to other version controlled information – for example in documents within the document management system – and you tried to make sure that over time the page stayed fresh and helpful to users - and of course that the links didn’t get broken because someone deleted the document without telling you.

With good templates they were still effective – but they were, I think,  kind of flat.

I just want to outline some of the CMS changes in the post 5.5 Claromentis platform that make content managed pages much more multi-dimensional.

They have made a real difference not just to our clients but also our own intranet so I am going to use that as an example:

Smart Objects

Smart objects take some other part of Claromentis – the document management system for example – and produce a dynamic permission based view of it from within the content managed page.

So for example on our own sales page we produce a view of document folders- sales collateral and information for our partners. These are truly dynamic views – the objects are seen through the visitors eyes and so look different according to your permissions in the DMS – no links are needed, nothing is static.

Components

These can be included on templates to include equally dynamic views of a business process that is set up and configured using Process Manager.

So on our sale departmental home page there is a real time view of people accessing our demo site, and we can dynamically click on any of these sales leads to automatically, for example, create a company Opportunity and contact record in our sales manager CRM system.

We can also of course include permission sensitive menus within the template for such a departmental home page - again a dynamically changing set of resources that makes perfect sense for that department and reacts according to the permissions of the user.

When we describe these changes they are probably hard to imagine, but the difference in the freshness and deep functionality that can now be presented using CMS is absolutely massive.

Prod-Content content management, intranet software

Mike shared an interesting comment with me today. He was asked the question “how do I change my intranet notifications settings to avoid pop-ups?”

His response was effectively to try to determine  “what kind of user are you?”

By which he just meant, there are several answers to this, and I need to know what you actually mean by the question, and your own experience and training, to give you the most appropriate answer. Such a simple question but in fact in Claromentis there are several completely different ways to do this:

1. As a normal user, I can just go to “My settings” and select ‘email’ rather than     pop  ups, from now on Claromentis will send all of my notifications to email.
2. As an intranet interface designer, I can just create a child interface that I can allocate to whichever users I wish – by group, role, individuals or any combination – so they can never change their notifications settings from anything else but emails in the first place.
3. As a server administrator, I can change a config file setting from a pop up to a floating DIV within the page :

   $cfg_allow_background_IM_check = 2;

For anyone interested this is explained on our Intranet WIKI

This is of course such a simple question about a very small piece of intranet functionality. Imagine the range of answers to a question like “How can I effectively distribute HR information to multiple offices where policies are different..”

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