Intranet Management Software Blog

We now support Flash Videos directly in Intranet Content Managed publish pages.

The player is built-in.

This is available with the current build of 5.7

Prod-Content content management, flash, flv

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

Workflows are everywhere in Claromentis – e-forms and documents and of course in content management.

For several years clients have been asking for ‘approval rights’ in content management – the general principle being that although companies want to delegate authorship rights of a content area out to the business, managers should have the final approval before a page is authorized and so goes live.

With the growing emphasis on intranet collaboration and intranet 2.0, I doubt this is a valid model for the future.  That is an old fashioned command and control attitude, no longer reflecting the modern imperative of opening the intranet out to subject matter experts with direct participation.

The alternative is the ability in Claromentis for a user to monitor a page – in other words to instantly be notified if anything is changed. My suggestion is that this is what managers should do – not just users.

This might seem to be a small difference – but it is part of the brave new world of collaboration - managers need to enable teams to generate content as subject matter experts, and they cannot truly do that if the same content will not appear live until they have finally got around to authorizing it – users will just be demotivated and lose interest if their efforts in creating content are not instantly live.

If managers can just make the simple leap to efficiently monitoring what they care about – and not controlling its existence in the first place – users will stay engaged and motivated, and the intranet will become even more than the average manager ever planned for.

Prod-Content content management, control, intranet 2.0