Intranet Management Software Blog

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

Claromentis Interview with Sean Boos -  Information Technology Director of Preferred Brands.
Burnsville, Minnesota.

Hi Sean, tell us a little bit about Preferred Brands

Preferred Brands is the parent company to some of the interior design and decorating industries’ leading marketing companies. Included are such brand leaders as Floor To Ceiling – a network of over 200 independently owned and operated retail showrooms located throughout the U.S. Each store specializes in offering a combination of flooring, kitchen & bath products and decorative accessories,best suited for that particular market. Also included in the Preferred Brands family is World of Floors, a leading flooring retailer, primarily serving Michigan and the upper Midwest.

Who were the intended users? How many of them?

We have 200+ dealers throughout the US.

Did the portal itself have a project or codename?

We call the portal: InFlo

What applications were most useful or essential in this project?

Document management and forms were probably the most important things.

What was the user response and take up of the system?

We found that the users have been very responsive to the new portal.  They have found the address book to be very helpful along with the instant messaging.

Is your business more efficient? Have fundamental processes changed?

We have 100’s  of vendors that we do business with which translates into tens of thousands of products which all need pricing files.  The indexing/search and meta data features have been a pleasant surprise within the portal.  The really allow us to provide detail custom properties for each file which makes finding what you want a snap.

Were you under any deadlines – if so what was the nature of them?

We had an extremely tight timeline.  We had our national show in February and InFlo was the primary focus of the show.  All  products tested were becoming disasters in the making.  What we typically found through our testing, was most portals did a great job of providing a hierarchical security model for one business unit, but when you starting to add more business units to the portal the security model really didn’t do what we wanted.
I contacted Claromentis 2 months before our show.  Although I was very reluctant that anyone could really pull this off in 2 months, Nigel assured me that, while the timeframe was tight, Claromentis could meet our deadline.

Did the project meet your deadlines?

Yes.  We actually had it live a week before the show

How involved were you in the design process?

Other than supplying some ideas, most of the design process was done by Claromentis

Do you have any comments on the final design?

As far as the UI, we gave our ideas to the Claromentis design team and after a few revisions, we got it done in about a week.

Do you find the system easy to use from an end user point of view?

We’ve had very positive responses from our end users.

How did you find the Claromentis pricing model?

Pricing, like most small businesses, is a very important part of the equation.  Compared to other portal solutions, Claromentis was the best value for with probably a better feature mix.

“InFlo has allowed us to become more efficient in both time and money.  In these difficult economic times, being able to stretch your dollars if very important.   It has allows us to focus more on our core services and products and better serve our dealers.” Sean Boos.

Would you have any advice to companies considering Claromentis? Were there any special factors that were part of your selection process?

Claromentis is a very flexible platform.  I come from more of a development background and I was amazed at how much I could integrate with the system.

Thank You Sean, we appreciate your time.

Learn more about soluton for franchise based company

Solutions Case Study, collaboration, commercial, document management, e-forms, intranet consultancy, online collaboration, user interface

Working on application design or creation of e-forms, we often make check boxes or drop down selector. In most cases you probably don’t pay much attention setting up the default value of each choice you created. Should a particular checkbox is checked by default or unchecked.  How many items to be displayed per page by default, or which country or age group should be selected by default for instance.

According to behavioural economist Dan Ariely, any value which is set by default will greatly influence decision that majority users is going to make when filling out the form or using a piece of functionality.

For example in Claromentis we have news application with option to set a particular news item as ‘sticky news’.  The idea the sticky news will always be displayed on the Intranet homepage until it’s expired. It is a useful feature allowing an important news item remain visible to the majority Intranet users, otherwise it might get buried down quickly by not-so-important news.

What we didn’t realise the default value for the expired date is set a year in advance by default. For example if you submit a news on the 22nd May 2009, it won’t be off the sticky until the same date next year !

The problem is simple majority users are not even bothered to change the expired date.

The result, intranet’s homepage is filled with sticky news which should have been expired long time ago. In order to fix this problem, an Intranet administrator has to go through each news article and correct the expiry date, which was set incorrectly by majority users.

This problem won’t happen in the first place if the developer put sensible value when he or she typing the code for the news submission form.  Interestingly enough in a much larger scale any default value which may sounds simple can have a huge impact.

Check out an interesting video below (open in new window).

Resources-Technical Design, e-forms, fun, user interface

Process Manager Icon

As my role involves coding more on the front-end development; such as interfaces and scripts; I have always been focusing on the new front-end development technologies such as mooTools and jQuery, and of course cross-browser compatibility issues; especially on the browser we all love-to-hate, Internet Explorer 6.

However we are proudly supporting all A grade browsers across multiple platforms thanks to our development team and innovative intranet platform.

You might be thinking what this has got to do with e-forms… Let me tell you:

Claromentis e-forms feature is part of our Process Manager product which enables you to create forms and assign workflows to them. As of today, I am going through the InfoCapture application (which handles e-form processes) with one of our e-form specialists. This is the first series of posts about learning e-forms feature of the Process Manager product.

With the help of flexible and easy-to-use interface, it is possible to create a complete and fully functioning form with couple of clicks. You can collect various data from various sources, not to mention your intranet users. For example, you can create an expense claim form and let your users fill the necessary areas in the form, even upload the scanned image file of the bill if you need. You can create your own support ticketing system and relief your support team’s workload on managing and dealing with support requests (our own Discover support portal using exactly the same system to manage hundreds of support requests we receive each month).

We always keep saying that we provide a flexible and highly expandable intranet software. Our core code is based entirely on PHP, which is another reason why it is so flexible. And we want to keep the same flexibility on forms as well. Therefore, our form builder enables you to assign CSS styling on every single element of a form. You are free to design your heart out and the system will nicely fetch the your style into your form. You can change the colour, the size, the border; pretty much everything a CSS code enables you. As far as I am aware, there are not many form builders in the market which offers you this level of flexibility.

So what is the advantage of this? First of all (your marketing department will love this), even your forms can carry your branding colours and look and feel. This is very important specially for international clients. You can’t imagine a classic Coca-Cola bottle in a purple can, can you?

In the next post, I am going to talk about workflows. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope this gives you a better understanding about the flexibility of our product.

E-form Services css, e-forms, process manager, user interface

It is a shocking reality, many major corporations still running their entire business on Excel.  Let’s admit it,  Excel is being used on almost anything,  from managing company database, claiming our expenses, accident reporting or perhaps ordering lunch ? Don’t get me wrong Excel is a powerful tool but it gets over-used in business.

Recently one of our clients, a major out-door clothing brand is taking a leap from a tired, out-of-control spreadsheets to a complete web application. We developed a store audit application where a tech rep who visited retail stores can write, and sending an audit report directly to the central database through a web form.  Appropriate finance managers will get notification allowing them to complete the financial details. Data submitted are audited, stored in central database, accessible through corporate Intranet, ready to be extracted by appropriate managers for monthly or quarterly reporting with a simple click.

Now try to get that on Excel !

Products Add new tag, e-forms, internal customer communications, online collaboration, Prod-Intranet, software

We have completed the initial testing of our new extension of InfoCapture e-forms onto PDAs and Mobile phones.

Previously, although you could enter data to start an automated Process Manager workflow from your phone, you were basically using a browser and had to have an internet connection.

We now have a downloadable application solution for both the  mobile windows and Symbian platforms, to enable users to enter data into forms that start the workflow process.

The user no longer needs to be connected to the internet – they can keep collecting data and as soon as a connection is available the data is entered, the issues reported to the server and the workflows take over.

Process manager data entry

This is a significant enhancement to the Claromentis process manager solution.

Prod-Process e-forms, process manager

Recently a lot has been written about project based collaboration, ranging from thought provoking articles about their position in open/closed vs. flat/hierarchical analysis to simply promoting one tool over another. Vendors have really struggled to meet the varied requirements of different projects, while preserving all the advantages of a single information layer and a truly integrated application stack.

With Claromentis Project Manager the company has leveraged everything in the framework to really bring a user selectable range of deeply functional applications to bear on any project, all through the flexible and powerful permission system.

Project Manager Portal

It will be fascinating to watch developments here – as the company now has two flagship products that have extraordinary potential – InfoCapture and Project Manager. Both are related – indeed InfoCapture projects can be integrated in any Project within Project Manager, to report anything within a project and control resolution through any workflow.

With plans to make InfoCapture an integrated complex workflow engine for any Claromentis objects, and Project Manager providing such a deep range of project based functionality, it is a tough call as to which will become the flagship product for 2009.

Workflow illustration

Maybe they both will.

Prod-Project collaboration, e-forms, Prod-Project

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy

The most published department in the UK government, the Department for Communities and Local Government, has purchased Process Manager - the e-forms solution from Claromentis.

This will be a fascinating project for Claromentis as Process Manager is a focus Product for 2009 and working together with the Local Government Department will allow us to ensure  the product receives the feedback to ensure it is developed to met the real needs of our business process driven clients.

Prod-Process e-forms, government e-forms

If you didn’t know already, the Claromentis Infocapture application has the ability to extend it’s framework with the aid of plug-ins.  Plug-ins are add-ons to the application, allowing you to do almost anything with data that the application collects or manages.  You can use a plug-in to import data into the e-form automatically, export the data to 3rd party application/database or file, provide extended field verification and form checking, perform advanced calculations and data manipulation amongst an almost endless variety of other system process enhancing capabilities.

But the use of plugins doesn’t just stop there…

When you think about integrating the InfoCapture Application with another (or several) of the other applications within the Claromentis Framework, plug-ins step into a whole new league .

The InfoCapture Application can already integrate easily with Claromentis Sales Manager, to embed e-forms within pages about each company (to work in conjunction with Contact and Opportunity management), but combine that with InfoCapture plug-ins, and not only are you extending in the CRM system by intergrating with Infocapture, but you have the ability to extend it even further with the use of plug-ins.

I should also not fail to mention that InfoCapture and the Claromentis Document Manager application are also close friends, with linking to documents available within e-forms as standard(while still applying the correct document permissions!).

So where else can this go…

InfoCapture has envolved over the years to become such an adaptable data collection application, it could sit comfortably with so many of the Claromentis Applications.

You could use InfoCapture with other applications such as…

• Creating Special Calendar Events (Calendar)
• Booking meeting rooms (Room Booking)
• Booking holidays (Holiday Planner)
• Managing your email (Webmail)
• Managing your un-qualified sales leads (CRM)

The list could go on….

Imagine combining the Claromentis Project Manager Application with InfoCapture, and using plug-ins to extend the capabilities of them both.

The effectiveness of easily customizable and incredibly powerful e-forms solution combined with a project management application is a sure guarantee to gaining a decent ROI.  How many other project management applications allow such flexibility and extendability with the aid of an application like Claromentis InfoCapture and plug-ins?

So I ask the question again… how powerful are InfoCapute plug-ins??

And the answer appears to be… incredibly so….

Prod-Process e-forms, extending, infocapture, plugins