We have had so many thousands of conversations over the last 14 years about “intranet functionality” – new clients asking us if we have this and that feature to enable them to compare us to some other potential partner in a spreadsheet, an RFP or a simple subjective decision.

As intranets evolve to become enormously powerful gateways to the digital workplace we have seen the argument shifting away from low level functionality such as ‘can I book a taxi using your system?’ to much higher level discussions that really make a difference to what a client can achieve. And that’s what we so enjoy.

When clients look for real value from a web platform they are really, it seems to me – asking some perfectly valid and basic questions about capabilities in the following areas :

• Information management – full indexing of version controlled documents, a variety of file types, record management, configurable metadata – and a world class permission system.
• News and internal communication – permission based news systems, announcements and blogs.
• Compliance – policy must reads, full auditing, audit management modules.
• Design – can the design be really, truly inspirational or just a logo and a style guide?
• Corporate social media – does the platform offer true engagement to get the users really engaged with the information.
• Business Processes – we have a lot of processes that are not the most efficient – can we move these onto the web platform and produce powerful form based workflows that help us to understand our process workloads, requirements and increase our efficiency.
• Mobile – is your offering capable of reaching out to our modern workforce with a range of needs on multiple devices.
• Deployment – do you offer truly global, cross platform, cloud or perpetual in house offerings?
• API – can we reliable and efficiently call out information to use in our own applications – for example using REST.

What we have noticed in the last couple of years is that our clients are enjoying the combination of these powerful capabilities. “It’s great to have simple business processes like recruitment that can call on document management resources, all within a permissioned process portal”. “Extensive business logic, with a corporate social media interaction available on top”. “A communication platform with commenting and Facebook style status updates and micro blogging.” “Great – Active directory integration combined with being able to log in with my Google ID.”

A Web Platform

This is indeed powerful, and for us as a partner in these spaces really exciting. By all means start with the web platform functionality that meets your short term urgent business needs, but then add significant areas to work in a combination that is truly powerful, and makes a significant difference to your business.

The functionality discussion is moving up to truly interesting large scale areas of business needs. To me this is a natural extension of the debate, as the workplace goes digital, social and mobile and more and more fundamental business tasks and requirements are met by cross platform browser based web platforms that can grow with your business -  like Claromentis.

And by the way, in case it’s raining out there – yes you can book a taxi – you just need a very simple business process for that task – with notifications, assignments and service level agreements.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, The Framework

We are working with a client under our sponsored development scheme to provide an e-learning module with the upcoming Claromentis 7 – and today we had the first prototype review with the client, the lead information architect and staff from Claromentis sales and marketing.

E-learning Prototype Review

I thought some aspects of the meeting were really instructional.

The value of the prototype

Following on from the initial scoping meeting the client had provided a well thought out specifications comprising several pages of written specifications. Comparing the understanding from the written specifications with the prototype that we created is just inspiring – how any company would want to code business logic straight from written specifications is beyond me.

The value of the framework

Coding in the Claromentis framework gives us so much access to instantly available and powerful functionality – such as permission systems, universal tagging, business processes – applications can be coded so much faster and with greatly increased quality.

The value of Claromentis 7 Standards

Now that the design standards of Claromentis 7 are available in the custom development team everything is so much more consistent, giving a much better end user experience as they move from standard platform products to their custom applications.

All in all a great meeting and we look forward  to the second iteration – the prototype can be shared with all stakeholders in the client team and round two will just be a few days away!

Claromentis 7, Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions, The Framework

Great to have had an enjoyable day this week with our external quality management auditors, and to have been approved for another year as a high quality company under the ISO 9001 framework.

Of course it is doubly interesting to have achieved this as we use our own framework and software products to assist us in our quality control. Specifically we use

• Version control for our documents
• Policy manager for all of our policies and procedures
• We don’t use bookshelf, as we have only one brand and a reasonable number of policies that can be managed by PDF and application files
• Audit manager for all of our internal audits
• Business Process Manager for many processes that we use and our auditors need to inspect – such as complaints procedures and product change requests.

So it’s a great experience for us to be monitored and inspected as users of our own software.

I am pleased to say that we enjoyed the day – we certainly felt that our own software is very much helping us to improve our quality and our auditors agreed!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Prod-Quality, The Framework

I hope this is useful – we are planning an extensive series of instructional videos for all levels of expertise and across all the platform in terms of subject areas. We will make those videos available for download as training aids – and of course from the support portal at Discover Claromentis.

Please do provide your feedback : all of us in support and marketing are excited by this and are motivated to provide a resource library that helps all of our customers get the most from their investment in Claromentis.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions, The Framework intranet news, news management

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

I have decided to write a series of posts around how we can map the potential contribution of Claromentis as a web platform for your business, against the original components of a value chain as defined by Michael Porter in 1985.

To refresh our memories Mr. Porter described the following Support Activities :

• Infrastructure – Finance, planning etc
• HR Management
• Technology Development – R&D
• Procurement

And the following Primary Activities :

• Inbound Logistics
• Operations
• Outbound Logistics
• Marketing and Sales
• After Sales Service

As the significant building blocks for a value chain, they define the activity in a delivery system which creates margin for the owners of a business.

Back in the mid 80s the main approaches were looking at each of these components, and either seeking to drive down costs without compromising quality – or trying to improve quality without increasing costs.

In general terms the former led to outsourcing and the latter to total quality management.

These early models are still valid, and with technology moving so fast and web platforms like Claromentis able to contribute to so many of these areas, I thought it would be interesting to post on our recent experience in each of them.

My first one this week is likely to be R&D – as it is very much on my mind with our new Innovate 1.1 release.

Thanks also to a strategy handout from Roger Martin-Fagg, provided by Vistage – for prompting the idea of this series of posts.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Quality, Prod-Sales, The Framework business model, Claromentis, value, web platform

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

I am pleased to say that as part of Claromentis 6.1 ( currently in Beta ) we have significantly improved our intranet support for LDAP beyond the established support for Microsoft Active Directory that we have had for many years.

The difference between LDAP servers is in the way how they store users accounts and groups information – different servers use different attributes (properties) to indicate record type “user”, “group”, account state etc., a different property name that stores username and some other things. Plus Windows uses “domains” which are not really a part of LDAP.

Previously we had all these properties hard-coded so they match the ones used in Microsoft Active Directory. Now they can be defined in our config file. Currently our support documentation contains configuration options valid for AD and for Novell (as these are two servers that we have production tested in Claromentis 6.1), but it is architected to correctly communicate with other LDAP servers such as OpenLDAP or Samba LDAP server.

This fits very well with one of our core values of choice and cross platform support, and is a very positive development for those companies that require an intranet single sign on but do not use active directory!

Intranet-Extranet, Resources-Technical, The Framework intranet, ldap, novell, OpenLDAP, samba

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