Intranet Management Software Blog

I have been involved with the plans for Claromentis 6.0, with the consequent emphasis on collaboration, for a while now – and we have been consistently blogging about intranets and collaboration at Claromentis for over a year. Just this week we also moved some of our information and guidance information to a public facing intranet WIKI.

This has required a considerable and consistent effort in terms of time.

As we have now  also launched a successful social networking platform for one of major USA clients, I am becoming increasingly interested in the relative values of these various platforms if you are looking for information and expertise. I am however only interested in their use in the corporate space, not as an individual looking to expand my social network.

At the same time I have been a member of LinkedIn for quite a while. I have only extremely recently started to Tweet, and really have very little knowledge at all of this platform, but I very much wanted this to be in the mix of what role they would all play in helping me with a topical question connected with my work.

It is clear to me that the return you might get out of all of these platforms does indeed depend on the work you have put in historically – the value of your followers in Twitter or the likelihood of your Blog appearing in search results, for example. However they do also take very different amounts of time to participate in – and for me this is actually the point of this little experiment.

I find that I can consistently only create about 10 meaningful and relatively well written Blogs about Claromentis and intranet software in a month, whereas I can post a question in a forum in just a few minutes, and Tweet in a matter of seconds.  So my question is, for me, which platform is the best return on investment of my time? I realize that the short term is not the way to judge this, so I will consistently try experiments over the next 6 months and try to sum up anything I find.

My natural preference when looking for information has always been simply to Google it of course, and rely on the algorithm itself, with its own complex assessment of the relevance and importance of information to help me find what I need as quickly as possible.

I selected the following question as a simple initial experiment.

“What are the implications of Google caffeine for seo and twitter”

This is a question I am genuinely interested in, and would like to find the answer to. If indeed it is possible to find a definitive answer to such a question – I realize I may have to find the best opinions – but that again is somewhat the point of these platforms, so my approach seems reasonable.

6:45 Straight Google : Immediately I can find some relevant content, although the answer is not clear. From what I can see the algorithm is obviously changing, and some folks think social networking or at least some kind of complex links – rather than just straight keyword links from anywhere, might have implications.

I got distracted, read more about Caffeine in general, and went over to read what Matt Cutts had to say.

Ran out of my 15 minutes allocation with no clear answer.

7:00 Start a post on linked. I already belong to an SEO group, so I just posted the question :

“Does Google Caffeine in any way mean we need to pay more attention to Twitter?

We are an Intranet software company, not in any way an SEO organization - I am looking for information.

I am just curious as our own approach to our SEO is fairly conventional, creating well organized and fresh content, a Blog and now  WIKI - and I wonder if Caffeine is going to emphasize the importance of our online presence in social media in any specific way?”

Had a look through other posts there, but in fact these just seem to be posts by people that I suspect are just trying to get links themselves – there is in fact very little actual interaction at all. So a the end of my 15 minutes I was no further on, although there was some minor mention of Caffeine, but nothing that helped my question.

I have however of course posed the question in a relevant group.

7:15 : Tweeting this took just a few seconds.

“Does Google Caffeine in any way mean we need to pay more attention to Twitter in our SEO approach for marketing? Or is there no connection?“

7:20 : Started to post this blog. Amazingly this actually took almost an hour by the time I published it!

I realize that this is a very small experiment, and just the first one – but I will be interested if any of these approaches help me out in any disproportionate way, compared to the effort required by each platform.

I will post the answer as a comment in a week or so. I will also try a similar experiment in a few months as by then I should have much more experience of Twitter and may have managed to build up a network of people with similar interests which will make this more meaningful.

Home intranet blogging, Social Networking

I have recently been working on one of our large clients intranet deployment in the USA and I wanted to write how amazed I am when I see a client finding different ways of customization our intranet software to suit their needs.

As of Claromentis 5.4, we have developed a new feature called Smart Objects. This feature helps Claromentis users importing content to their intranet pages from different sources within Claromentis, such as News, Forum messages and Document lists. No longer will users have to navigate to separate areas to see application files as opposed to web based content, for example. A dynamic view of disparate content and objects is possible from just one location.

This company is part of one of the worlds largest clothing manufacturers, and they are using our software to improve the communication between different departments within the organization, as well as simplifying the process of managing documents securely, all within one instance. Departments varies from variety of sources, such as Sales, Finance, Warranty, RD&D, EMEA and more… Without a doubt, a web based intranet solution like Claromentis was the best choice for an international company. Having its employees across the world makes the importance of communication and document management through the Internet was an appropriate choice.

Because Claromentis is permission based intranet software, it is possible to hide your content from different departments using the same intranet software. You simply create groups and roles within Claromentis and identify your content (documents and news) to be shown to a certain number of users.

As you can imagine, a company like this literally has tens of thousands of documents stored within the software, so making these files to be found easily is not an easy job. That’s where the Smart Objects feature is going to make this process a lot easier than our competitors’ solutions.

Let me explain how different parts of Claromentis can work in collaboration to solve complex intranet problems. In this example, I would like to share a document folder containing financial sales targets of this month and a list of products needs to be highlighted during sales campaigns. I would also like to share news belonging the sales department and I need to show all of the above content visiting the Sales Department home page.

In the above example, I am actually aiming to solve my problem by sourcing the content from the following corporate solutions.

• Document Manager
• Content Manager
• Permission Based Intranet Management
• Permission Based News Management

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Smart Objects enables you to show contents from different parts of Claromentis, and this is exactly how this client actually solved this complex collaboration issue.

1. Define Groups and Roles (SALES > Sales Managers | Sales Team) and assign users to the appropriate level.
2. Using Document Manager application, store my files into one folder created for the special sales campaign.
3. Change the permissions of all my files and make the “financial sales targets” viewable only by Sales Managers and the remaining files viewable by people belonging the SALES group.
4. Using Web Based Content Management Solution, create an intranet page and fill up the content areas, such as TITLE, SUMMARY, GOALS, REWARDS.
5. Using Smart Objects, embed the document folder containing my files into an appropriate space within my intranet page.
6. Again Using Smart Objects, embed the Sales news (blogs) channel.
7. Save the page and share the web address of the page with my staff.

What will happen is people who has an access to view the page I just created will only need to remember one web address (which can be pasted into an e-mail message) and when they click on that link, all of the information they have a permission to see will be visible to them. Remember that we have embedded one single folder containing both financial targets as well as documents containing products need to be highlighted? Because I set the permissions for my documents, Sales team will only see the files they need to see and managers will also be able to access the financial target documents, even though they are in the same folder and I have embedded that folder into my Intranet Page.

All within one single page. How Smart is that?!

Resources-Technical complex intranet management, document management, intranet, intranet blogging, news management, permissions, Prod-Intranet, smart object

Well, I’m sure the title is not original, but in the context of Claromentis, this is definitely a first!

Claromentis has always had a powerful news system, ensuring that Intranet Administrators can create, manage and deliver news articles to their users. With nearly all of our customers forcing the intranet homepage upon their staff whenever a browser is opened, the news is always an important detail of the intranet content, not only as a means of delivering company and market related information, but also a means of ensuring levels of interest is kept high. Like all web related content, it’s vital to ensure the information is always up-to-date and relevant. Static information becomes unattractive very quickly, particularly in a world that is focusing on the dynamic and creative content in Web 2.0 implementations. So what relevance does this have to blogging? It’s just a news system you say?? Well not any longer….

In Claromentis 5.4, we have introduced the ability to make use of the already proven news management application to allow users to blog also. Whilst still ensuring a strong permission system is upheld in the back-end, users now have the ability to create news articles within individually controlled news channels, effectively creating a blogging platform that all users can use.

The creation of the news channels remains under the control of the news administrators, but users have the ability to subscribe themselves to individual or group blogs, as well as commenting on blog posts, or even managing their own blog.

Not only is this a great step forwards for the Claromentis framework, pushing it closer to the idealism of Web 2.0, but this is a fantastic opportunity for our existing clients to encourage more interactivity within their intranets to increase the distribution of the management for the homepage content. This ultimately makes the homepage content more attractive, more dynamic, and richer than ever before.

Combine this with Smart Objects(coming soon), and the blogging capabilities within Claromentis will be almost endless.

For more information about the Claromentis News and Blogging system, visit our website or contact us at info@claromentis.com

Products intranet blogging, intranet news