Our own intranet system here at Claromentis UK allows us to flip our intranet into 3 views with a single click.

These 3 views are suitable for

• Users that require a corporate, read and consume information based intranet
• Users that would like to keep an eye on our corporate social media activities
• Users that get significant value from corporate social media

I think this is completely fascinating – as new clients have varying views on the value of internal corporate social networking, from complete evangelists to unconvinced skeptics.

They are now able to easily allocate the appropriate intranet experience to various sets of users, and even allow users to instantly change between them as they wish! They can pilot corporate social media to defined sets of users – for example according to their job roles or locations.

Internally at Claromentis we are using each of the middle and extreme social interfaces for 7 days each – so far, based on user engagement – in our company social wins!!

Unsocial Intranet

Slightly Social Intranet

Completely Social Intranet

Innovate, Intranet-Extranet

One of our large corporate clients has decided to replace internal group emails with our revolutionary social networking application, Innovate.

You may wonder why an organisation would replace such a previously vital method of communication with one that is relatively new in comparison. However this communication method encourages collaboration whilst also creating a crucial information resource for its users.

Take a look at some of Innovate’s features and see how organisations are embracing our corporate social networking application.

You can control through permissions which channels are available to which users, in this way guiding the topics and making expertise available where needed. Information can be made available to people within certain departments – therefore channelling relevant information to the right people.

Users can follow people that interest them and ‘like’ comments and post comments into various channels that you set up to support your business. Facebook-like functionality encourages collaboration and allows users to express their ideas and opinions efficiently.

Users can easily engage in conversations with links to relevant information – for example asking for feedback on a particular design or document. Articles from external sources can be referenced through the addition of links.

Clients, Innovate, Intranet-Extranet

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 have been using our Intranet software for managing our own training records and like our clients the advantages of using our form based workflow software – Business Process Manager – for this are considerable :

Training & Development Intranet Records

Custom Form Design

What we need to store about our training records is appropriate to us, and different to other companies. Using Business Process Manager means we design our own  form and evolve that over time, with version control.

Granular permissions

It is easy to assign managers permissions to review the training requests of their own teams, and to allow users to review just their own training records.

Custom statuses

We can set whatever statuses we need for our training records.

Notifications

In our case managers of course need to be notified when an employee submits a request – but later on in the process – on approval – so do HR and accounts.

Reporting

The in built statistics allows us to review our training attendance over time and by status.

Auditing of all data

As an ISO9001 audited company training records are  inspected ever year, and we benefit from being able to review with the external auditor the complete changes made to ever request, down to individual field level – who changed what and when.

And to think that – just like many of our new clients – we used to do this on spreadsheets on shared drives!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process intranets, training records

On the 23rd of January the door handle to our office was mysteriously turned upside down.

After much speculative discussion, we have decided that there are only 3 viable explanations for this strange occurrence.

The first…
In a bid to finish Claromentis 7, someone in our office concocted a devious plan to ensure that we could not leave the office, leaving us with no other option but to return back to our desks. Needless to say this plan failed miserably as we could still open the door.

The second…
This was an act of protest by the door handle – He believes that his ideas and opinions are never taken seriously, and every so often he would like to receive an invite to one of our team meetings.

The third…
In an attempt to fix the broken door handle someone sacrificed rationality for functionality.

I personally would have to agree with the latter as it is the least absurd. But we shall never know!

Intranet-Extranet

Historically there are so many examples of products excelling in either functionality or design, but rarely both. Although, these qualities are now essential in order to create and maintain excellent user experience. At Claromentis we believe design should complement functionality, not contrast it.

When mobile phones were first introduced to the market, they were a revolutionary product, unleashing us from the constraints of a curly wire. Their poor design however soon became apparent – they were gargantuan in comparison to your head, they claimed a gravitational pull similar to that of a small planet, and their sheer weight burdened their owners.

At Claromentis, we believe that every intranet should encompass intelligent design and functionality, and this can be clearly seen from the snapshot below, taken from our upcoming software release Claromentis 7. Key functionalities are prominently displayed in an elegant manner, with ingenious design and usability incorporated into every detail.

The top bar allows the user to effortless access important information relevant to their organisation and it has been developed to remain on the page regardless of where the user navigates within their intranet.

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet

There are so many aspects that we consider when going through our process for agreeing the best intranet design for a new customer.

One relatively simple one to discuss is how do we make sure users can find what we assume they will be looking for – an also how can we encourage them to visit an area that they might not think would be interesting or relevant?

One part of the answer is through what Claromentis describe as “fast access buttons”

These are significantly sized buttons that provide a visual pull to certain areas of the intranet. They are also – like everything else in Claromentis – permission based so that certain groups of users will see different icons. In this way we can try to predict what should be of interest to those users, and encourage them to take the actions we require.

Andy Briggs from our custom design team recently produced a great document on intranet design, and this is a diagram from the section on fast access buttons:

Intranet Design : Permission based fast access

For interest I also show the access areas that are promoted for me on our own Claromentis Intranet.

Lets look at the 10 buttons that are presented to me and summarize each one :

• Company Policies – Claromentis has a duty to ensure I have every chance to read our policies, and this button is extremely appropriate for discharging that responsibility
• Audits – we are a quality managed ISO9001 company and I have access to all of our internal audits, and the actions arising from them
• Dev Wiki – even in sales it is great to have access to internal technical resources!
• Discover Claromentis – our support portal – allows me to review any issues or enhancement requests that my clients may have filed
• Webex – we provide private tours for anyone interested in our software and I use this every day
• Live demo – access to our standard live intranet and business process management demonstration system
• Blog Admin – as you can see I write blogs and I don’t want to remember another set of credentials!
• Marketing database – exactly the same – provides access to a web based system that I use extensively
• Google Analytics – useful to periodically review our traffic sources and what they are looking for
• National Rail – access to the live departure board at Brighton station – I commute by train and this is just a convenience for me.

So fast access buttons provide :

• Single sign on access to other web applications – the intranet provides a gateway to your digital workspace.
• Convenience for the user
• A way for the company to encourage my participation in certain applications or information areas.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Services intranet design

Many potential clients and partners request a sandbox to allow them to experience the full Claromentis functionality.

This had been an issue for us, as our live intranet demo actually locks down the users permissions in order to maintain the integrity of the site.

So using our cloud servers we now have available an intranet trial where you can request an instance from our sales team, who once they know your requirements can make your own personal trial instantly available. There is nothing to download – it is a fully functional Claromentis web platform that is ready for you to use immediately.

The official release day is Monday – but I happen to know its available from Friday – so if you would like to evaluate a professional intranet environment, just get in touch!

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet, Services, Solutions

After much elevated praise on the new Claromentis 7 web platform, the core team – well some of them anyway – today got down and dirty as part of making room for the latest developer to join the Brighton office!

Core Team come down to Earth

As 30 minutes later we authorized yet another new hire they might as well have stayed down there for a few more minutes and ran another cable or two..

Claromentis 7, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet developer

For many years Claromentis allowed intranet administrators permission to see all the data on their Claromentis system for the applications they have admin rights to.

This seems perfectly logical. For example if you are a People admin you need to be able to create, edit and assign permissions to users – at least in the granular sense that an intranet needs when layered on top of any central system like AD or eDirectory. If you are a documents admin, then how can you cancel editing on a document when someone has gone on vacation without freeing it up for others that need to work on it – unless you can see the document?

But as the web platform world has expanded and become ever more powerful we have many situations where the assumption that we should apply god-like permissions for all relevant data to an application administrator at times makes no business sense at all.

With recent releases we have implemented great solutions for precisely these two areas – people admin and docs admin.

In people admin we can actually define who sees each field, who can edit and under what conditions. We can say whether the people list in admin areas shows anything at all about a field.

In Documents admin we can wither give the administrator rights to see a document, because we feel they need to – or we can make it so that the system is locked down – a DMS administrators can see that a document exists but cannot see the content of the file at all.

In this case we just need to set a simple variable in a config file:

// Whether to allow documents admin to view and download documents.
// If set to false admin will be able to browse all documents and view their metadata, but not actual documents files.

$cfg_docs_admin_can_view = false;

As the world of intranet platforms has moved on we certainly can continue to give power to the people – but now we decide exactly ­to whom and how much!

Intranet-Extranet