Bridgewater Bank is the only Canadian Chartered Bank with head office located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The bank is wholly owned by the Alberta Motor Association (AMA), the largest membership service organization in the province. With assets more than $3 billion, employing more than 215 employees and serving over 60,000 customers, Bridgewater Bank continues its expansion with wide-range of product service offering from Mortgages, High Interest Saving Account and Credit Cards.

Partnering with Claromentis since 2010 we’ve been working on the highly complex and sophisticated portal deployment for a banking industry, and we are delighted to see the project has been well received by the executives, staff, brokers and their customers.

“I went through the app from start to finish including saving and re-entering to edit. Very slick application and user friendly process. I like it., I want to thank you for the time and effort you put into this over the past week to get it done.”

Peter Flannigan │ Director, Customer Solutions

All Star Broker Portal

All Star Portal is the result of Bridgewater Bank’s commitment to their brokers and their business. Having visited several broker houses in Canada and understanding their day-to-day job provides tremendous insight of what they actually need, instead of just working of the requirement documents. The result is outstanding the broker loves it and the project has been a great success. Here are some of the key features:

• Secure and Robust Permission
• Ease of Access (any browsers, PC, Mac, Smart Phones, Tablet)
• Real-Time update
• Drag-and-drop secure document upload for mortgage application
• Automatic email notification
• Auto-sync with third party Mortgage system

Broker Information System

Broker Information System is the back-end of central database for Bridgewater Bank ‘s Brokers. We have done complete transformation on what it was difficult to use in-house software into an integrated web app with the portal itself.

Key Features:

• Broker’s profile database
• Broker-Sub Broker
• Ratings & Super Broker Concept
• Red Flag warning
• Commenting facility
• Integration with Google Map
• History
• Fully integrated with Broker Deal Management

New Website

We are also working with their team giving their tired public website a new live with complete redesign and implementing Claromentis CMS.

Smart Applications

For the ‘cherry on top’, we’ve created custom web-form allowing web visitor applying to their products such as Mortgage and Smart eSaving Account through the built-in easy to use web form

Features:

• Strong Field Validation
• Saving application to submit later
• Auto secure password generator
• Email Notification system
• Real time application status

At Claromentis we believe that user experience is paramount and cannot be compromised, however sophisticated the technology we always put human aspects behind it.

If you would like to know more about this project and find out more on how we can help you. please contact us.

Intranet-Extranet, Services, Solutions bank, bespoke development, Design, intranet consultancy, online collaboration, portal, user interface

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

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

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

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

A short description of our custom web application development

All comments welcome!

Custom Development, Services custom development, development

We have posted previously about the importance of choosing an intranet name, and provided example intranet names. Two posts are here and here.

To continue this theme a new intranet client has got the list down to the last 5. I was reminded of this during a meeting today and so thought it would be good to add them to the list, as they also provided the reasons for suggesting these names :

Name        Meaning

Prime — Beginning, prepare, advise, inform, notify, stimulate, provide, best

Core — Backbone, root, origin, essential, support, and framework

Hatch — Devise, brainstorm, create, breed (as in ideas!), develop, discover, prepare, and cooperate

Vault — Storage, depository, safe, treasure,

Nexus — Comes from the Latin “nectere” meaning “to bind.” The Intranet is a collaboration hub.

Our team preferred Nexus. We should have the final decision from the client soon – and of course we will be designing a logo to match which is always fun!

Intranet-Extranet, Services

With the addition of Hannah to the support team, the attention and response times on our support tickets is now better than ever.

Last month Hannah broke the Claromentis record for ticket closures in a single month, smashing the previous record by 9 tickets. And despite only joining us 2 months ago, Hannah already looks set to be a strong contender this years “Top closer of the year” award.

In addition to that; even the best efforts of some of our biggest clients to swamp us with tickets is no match for the strengthening within our team. The Claromentis support team continues to knock-down the total number of outstanding support requests which has seen a steady decline from the start of the year. We are currently at our lowest figure of outstanding tickets for the last 3 years!!!

I firmly believe this is a result of great team work, mutual respect and good communication. The team effort has been outstanding, and the support/backing from the Dev and Design Teams has been second to none.

Long may this continue!!

Services discover, record breaking, support

Recently we’ve been busy working on revamping the free live demo experience. Using the same username and password generated when you are signing up you can now experience 3 different products:

• Intranet – The most versatile business Intranet
• Quality – Quality Management System & Compliance
• InfoCapture – Business Process & e-Forms Software

All of these products are created based on Claromentis Framework.

This demo also a sneak preview what’s coming in the Claromentis 6.0 Framework.

Universal Tagging
Modular Applications
SOAP Interface
And many other improvements…

As well as our branding exercise which will be reflected on our main site very soon

Stay tuned….

Products, Services Claromentis, demo, Design, user interface, web 2.0

Yesterday I went to Bond International to have a catch-up with one of my old managers. The purpose of the visit was for me to meet with with the Head of European Support and to pick his brains about how to grow a service desk inline with the growth of the company.

Being the world industry leaders in recruitment software, Bond International are undoubtedly a great company for me to model our support services on. Not only does the Bond Support Desk deliver an impeccable service, my old manager taught me most of the best practices that I still use today. Where better to go for advice, ideas and direction.

Not only did I find the experience very rewarding in terms of ideas, clarity and direction for the Claromentis Service, it also made me realize the importance of meeting people face-to-face. There is absolutely no way in my mind that the meeting could have been as rewarding and successful if our communication had been anything other than face-to-face.

As Claromentis continues to grow internationally, it’s becomes less common that we meet our clients face-to-face – at least until an on-site training session is given. Whilst we still manage to deliver successful projects using email and voice conferencing as our main communication tool, my recent experience does make me wonder….

How much more successful are projects that we get to meet the client face-to-face, in comparison with those that we don’t?

It’s a hard one to measure, if not impossible, since much of it is based on satisfaction and confidence levels, but I think we could all rate those areas in our mind.

My mind is made up… whilst a video conference could possibly get close, I just don’t see it achieving the same levels of satisfaction, understanding and rewarding as a face-to-face meeting.

Intranet-Extranet, Services

Claromentis has created a simple procedure which allows a documents administrator to export all documents stored in Claromentis with its metadata into some location on the server / network drive for backup and archiving.

Click here to learn more about this functionality.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Document, Products, Services

With the ongoing acceleration in the growth of our global intranet client base it is great to see that Claromentis support continues to evolve under Anthony’s guidance to provide a solid, technical and customer facing service that delivers a great service to all of our customers, whatever the nature of their request.

The support portal – ‘Discover Claromentis’ – has been relaunched with a much more appropriate design, and more importantly a very clear separation between Support Requests, Change requests and enhancement ideas.

As a sales an marketing person I will leave the technical team to discuss the details, but here is what I really like:

1. The separation between Support requests, Change requests and Suggestions/Enhancements is very clear.

2. Meet the team – our clients build strong relationships with the people that provide such a great technical intranet support service – so why not get to know them?

3. Latest tips and online help – Claromentis is a massive system and we all exchange best practice ideas every day – it is great that we provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and innovative thoughts on the best ways to use the system.

Of course it is all built in Claromentis – Process Manager ( InfoCapture ) builds the ticketing system and Discover itself is completely a Claromentis system.

4. I also like the simple graphical dashboard. We are continually providing intranet KPI systems to our clients – and it is good to see that we implement the same for our own clients.

Our clients are already providing great feedback on the increase we have made to our support team, and the new look Claromentis intranet support portal confirms the effort we are making and the increased clarity in our intranet support services.

Intranet-Extranet, Services intranet software, support