Intranet Management Software Blog

Within many global 2000 companies, the journey to create Social Enterprises (also referred to as Enterprise 2.0) is underway, set against a backdrop of hopelessly outdated methods for employee collaboration & communications.

There’s a lot at stake. Companies that make a smooth transition to a social enterprise can unlock innovation more quickly, capture & share knowledge more effectively and harness their global networks of talent to outwit the competition. But the transition is complicated, requiring not just adoption of new technologies but significant changes in culture and working behaviour.

So how do you set about achieving a smooth transition, preferably before your competition? This is where Microsoft’s Sharepoint looms large, as the intranet collaboration platform of choice across many large enterprises today.

Read more at Knowledge Board

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Every organisation understands the value of instant feedback. It promotes continuous improvements and creative discussion. Some say it is what makes a business ‘tick’.

Working on a communication software platform, we want to facilitate this positive feedback culture.

Pages or web pages is one of the largest type of content of an Intranet along side with Documents and News. In Claromentis we already have comments for News as well as Document and to complete the whole picture we are now introducing comments for publish page.

Here is the anatomy of commenting:

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What an interesting point mentioned in the video above, in the business realms we are trained to execute the best possible plan and punish failure, instead of continuously prototyping and learn from mistake as you go along just like what the kindergarten kids do.

It seems we’ve not learnt our lessons that the best possible plans will always have flaws and there is nothing can substitute the reality. In the software world we tend to create the ultimate plan and concept, which looks good on paper so we can secure funding. This is usually leads to either the result is not fit for purpose or we tend to over complex the situation and not get the basic rights.

In Claromentis, we’re now embracing prototyping worlds, create endless revisions until it’s right, even when the software is developed and deployed the project is not finished, deploy early and quickly learn from it. The  whole point is to create a continues improvement, what works in one environment may not works with others, every situation every problem is unique in many ways and we want to create something that fit to that purpose.

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Old and New Intranet

About UBS

The United Bible Societies (UBS), a collective name for 145 Bible Societies working in over 200 countries and territories is launching a new Intranet using Claromentis Intranet Manager.

New Intranet

After sending out questionnaire and running a focus group to improve Intranet, Claromentis and UBS Communication team working together to make the new intranet richer but easier to use and faster to find the information.

UBS also introduced several new application built within their Intranet such as contact directory for all members, document management and multimedia such as online videos.

The new intranet is also multi-lingual, The system is designed to detect user’s language preference and display the right information and interface in their native language.

User’s Feedback

User’s feedback so far has been really positive.

“I love the new look website. God bless you for the good job. Its much easier to navigate and its also easy to find the past stories. Absolutely love it. Will definately send more stories this year. God bless you all.”

“A big thank you to you and your team for their work so far on the UBS intranet site.”

“I’ve just given a detailed presentation to our global senior management team and it went down extremely well. They were particularly impressed by the design (‘clean, easy to use, familiar for people using sites such as Facebook’) and by the layers of permissions that are now possible and will enable us to do so much more with the site.”

Hamish Bruce – Communication Manager at UBS.

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Image Credit: Disney & Wikipedia

I’ve just got back from watching Tim Burton’s remake Alice in Wonderland in 3D. What a visual masterpiece with amazing attention to details. It feels like immersing into an art form created by 20th century design technology.  I couldn’t believe that original animation, which I watched in my childhood, was created in 1951; even more amazing the story was first published in 1865!

You might be asking, what this movie has to do with Intranet Blog?

Before the Internet

Well the idea of internal communication is not new, since the beginning of civilization people are gathering and exchange knowledge, ideas and collaborate in many forms.  Remember pen and papers?

Your first Intranet

Your first intranet might be old fashioned by today’s standard, you might hate it, It is slow, looks ugly and doesn’t do what you wanted to do. Updating information is painful and there are many more.
But hey, this is a milestone just like the first Alice movie for the first time words comes to live, we may not have 3D technology just yet but hand drawn animation does the job!

Your Intranet – “Remake!”

Fast forward today the Internet is now teaming with real time collaboration, social networking, web application to do almost anything you can think of, computing power, cheaper storage, faster broadband, multi-touch and portable devices, which blur the boundaries between PC, laptop, & phone.

Claromentis is currently developing cool new communication tools with codename “innovate”.  We will be launching this application with an exciting release of Claromentis 6, leveraging what’s possible in web technologies.

Just like the visual masterpiece of Alice in Wonderland, perhaps it’s time to make your Intranet a communication art form.

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Claromentis delivers a Corporate Social Networking site

We have just completed one of the most interesting project in the corporate social networking space. “PlanetExplore.com” A social media platform released for the outdoor clothing company The North Face. The community connects people, especially younger people, to the outdoors and in particular outdoor activities and events in their local communities.

Social Media Platform

PlanetExplore.com is a bespoke Social Media Platform leveraging Facebook platform and Mash-Ups, delivered from concept to idea in less than 3 months and already attracting more than 100 partners across the United States.  The initial launch is for the Bay Area with Denver and new York City to follow soon.

Some screenshots below:

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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

I have seen articles recently that praise the fact that intranet 2.0 is starting to deliver value and becoming more mainstream.

Great! But then I read on and they are talking about the same old functionality : Forums, Wikis and blogs.

This is a shame – I think many corporate intranets and extranets are missing the true synergy of innovation and collaboration that a web 2.0 intranet should address – which at Claromentis means the progression of a concept from an idea, through to a collaboration space and then onto execution in a project – the “shout – collaborate – execute” mantra of Claromentis 6.0

Missing the point

Yes we do implement – and for certain company cultures see a lot of value – in the intranet equivalents of Twitter – our “what am I dong at work” concept for example – and certainly Blogs are really adding dynamism and freshness to many of our implementations – but in our view intranet 2.0 is a platform for collaboration, innovation and establishing connections in the workforce to break down silos and encourage lessons learned from best practice.

We need to unearth new ideas, bring them through to sharing with hitherto unknown colleagues from disparate experiences and then actually take that shout and make something different for the company that didn’t exist before – in summary we need innovation!

Many of the applications and approaches that others see as getting a tick in the box for intranet 2.0 we view as latest generation approaches to information management – a truly important piece of the puzzle – but not the answer.

Prod-Intranet intranet 2.0

An Intranet specialist Toby Ward has recently published his webinar about the future of Intranet (so called Intranet 2.0), highlighting how web 2.0 and social media is changing the corporate intranet. Interesting…

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