Intranet Management Software Blog

Recently there are many discussions among our existing clients and partners about possibility extending granularity of the permission in Document’s folder within Claromentis.

This is our current standard permission where having “Edit” rights to a folder means you simply have rights to add and edit both documents and sub folders.

Some of our clients think that current “edit” permission is not flexible enough, they would like to split simple “edit” into sub-folders and documents.

After digging into our enhancement request database, I discovered that this is just one of the many request around the same subject.
Some says that having permission to view content of the folder should be different from permission to view folder’s properties and audit of the folder (usage statistics).

Others want to have flexibility where not all users with edit permission can run workflow on the same folder.

For a second I thought, “Hey this is getting ridiculous!”  Let’s mock-it up and see what happen if we accommodate all of them:

Can you see something is definitely not right, usability has been compromised to accommodate more granular permission, causing complexity to perform simple task which in most cases we just want simple “Edit”.

This issue raise a philosophical question, “Are we all so stupid so everything has to be over protective?” What’s wrong with a low-tech solution called “discipline”.

My niece is going to celebrate her 1 years old birthday next week. She starts cruising, walking short distances from object to object, she falls often and has many bumps and bruises, but she learns very quickly.

Aren’t we always told that allowing one or two bumps is a good thing?

Solutions Design, document management, fun, humor, intranet software discussions, user interface

Recently we were discussing about development of  an Intranet system for a large organisation and capture how it seen from different roles involved in the projects:

My classic problem is how you translate this requests into software:

Solutions humor, internal customer communications, intranet consultancy, intranet software discussions, user interface

Delivering a successful Intranet or large IT project is not easy. Based on our experience they hugely depend on these 4 cornerstones:

Sponsor

Sponsor is usually coming from executive level with strong vision to transform the business. It is important to keep the sponsor up-to-date with every stage of the project, from planning, development and deployment. Her or his influence and active participation can make such a huge different. Need a practical example? Organise brief speech during the launch, record his/her video, and write in the executive blog or press releases just to name a few.

Champions

Champions, power users or cohort is a collection of individuals who represent their departments or business unit. They get early administration training and it is their job to introduce the new system and train other users. Just like in any other team building exercise it is important to choose the right member of the team. These are certain quality worth considering: bright, creative, helpful, good with computers. Champion group is acting like a fuel during the early adoption.

Vendor

Choosing a software vendor for a large IT project is like choosing a life partner. er.. maybe I am exaggerate a little, but there is some truth in it. Ending up with the wrong vendor can be frustrating and greatly impact your business. Sometime it’s not just about the product but look for extras and advice they could bring to the table. Do they have enough experience? Are they easy to get hold of? How’s the after-sales service? Are you tighten into a proprietary technology with no future?

User

Understand what the end users wants and translate them into the product is a winning formula. Get out from your cubicle and talk to all users from every corner of the department especially the one who sit nice and quietly in the corner. Ask them do they get the benefit? Keep an eye on usability issues, sometime they just not knowing the thing they are looking for is there. Monitor the changes; avoid common mistakes, keep them happy, ultimately they are the reason why we’re having this project.

Services Claromentis, internal customer communications, intranet, intranet consultancy, intranet software discussions

We all love intranets (at least in Claromentis). Intranets don’t just allow you to manage and organize your precious data in your corporation, but it also encourages your users to get involved in the workplace; if it is used correctly. In this article, I am going to list the 7 common mistakes that an intranet administrator shouldn’t do. I hope this helps you optimize your intranet and make it work more efficiently for both you and your users.

Keep It Simple, Yet Efficient

We all are busy, aren’t we? Nobody wants to come to an office and see a load of irrelevant documents nagging them and announcements that they have no interest with. You wouldn’t want them to spend tens of minutes looking at a single page and assume them to find their way around.

It could be pretty painful for the end user if you keep your intranet’s user interface cluttered. Try to have a clean and well structured user interfaces; both on your internal pages and public pages.

Use Intranet Permissions, Groups and Roles

Most of our users have been enjoying the comfort and luxury of the extensive intranet permissions system of Claromentis. By using this powerful yet innovative feature of Claromentis Intranet Software, you can filter your documents, files, pages, announcements, news and almost everything else for your target audience. Our software allows you to keep your intranet elements well efficiently organized and gives your workforce a clean and well-thought environment to work on. By preventing them seeing the unnecessary elements of an intranet, they will be more likely to be focused on the actual work itself.

Do Not Assume Your Users Are Computer Literate

Try to be precise on your descriptions and guidelines, particularly if you are trying to explain a part of your intranet. Don’t assume them that clicking on the “Submit” button after filling all of the information is obvious. Write it down and make it clear every single step they should follow. If you are not lucky enough by not having a user friendly intranet software, well, change your provider if it is still not too late or push your service provider to provide you a better interface.

Encourage Your Users to Communicate

Most of the intranet software suites provide a functionality to enable your users to communicate each other, one way or another. Be it an instant messaging, e-mailing or forums; encourage your users to communicate each other. This will not only reduce the workload of your support team but your users will also pick things up quicker by trying themselves. If you have a collaborative intranet solution, then use the many of the features provided. Allow users to comment on your news, allow them to write blogs, certainly use forums for both personal and corporate matters.

Use Short, Precise Surveys

Every week or so, create a survey and try collecting an information from your users. With the advantage of a permission based intranet, you can have different surveys for different audiences all within the same intranet. Sometimes try to ask something about a national event or something out of a business matter. Don’t have long and boring surveys as most of the users will not bother filling the information correctly, if not at all.

Keep Your Language Simple and Easy to Understand

If your organization is big and have many levels of knowledge between the different areas of your intranet, try to keep your writing language simple and easy to understand. Use short and grammatically correct sentences. This especially applies to your news, announcements and e-mails sent to masses. If you are going to write about a very specific topic which will be interesting for only some of your departments, assign reading permissions to people who belong only those departments.

Try to be Innovative

It has always been encouraging for us to see some innovative uses of our intranet software by some of our clients. Don’t be afraid of expressing your ideas to your manager or your intranet software provider. In most cases, there is always a way to achieve what you are after and it is usually easier than you think.

What are your ways and best practises for improving your corporate intranet’s user experience? Share it with your comments.

Services intranet, intranet software, intranet software discussions, Prod-Intranet

I posed the question on a Knol by Abigail Lewis-Bowen about the possibility of using Tagged corporate intranet information combined with group or role membership to locate possible mentors within your organization.

The answer was very relevant and can be seen here.

The comment that I find intriguing is the use of activity streams to identify what you really are doing at work, as opposed to what your job title or direct responsibility is. I want to explore this further, as it ties directly into the current vision of Claromentis 6.0 and we have had some interesting debates about this concept – we did not call them ‘activity streams’ but I think the concept is perhaps similar.

With Claromentis 6 we will embrace URL based tagging irrespective of the underlying object. It doesn’t matter if it’s a document, a persons profile, an admin panel, Wiki, web page, customer profile, policy  or anything else. The point is that if that URL has been tagged, you looking at it tells us useful information about your interests and so contributes to your ‘consumer side’ Tag cloud.

The debate we had was that this is not how the wisdom of crowds normally works – that concept of course involves getting participation from the user by some concept of voting, or ‘digging’ – and aggregating votes to rate the article. More popular information sets can then float to the top of searches, or be found be specific questions seeking them out from increasingly massive information stores.

In Claromentis 6 conventional participatory crowd sourcing will be adopted – but in addition we will use the simple viewing of information to reveal something about what you find interesting, and therefore enable you to explore, if you wish, potential relationships with other people across the extended enterprise.

Why?

Because we don’t want to emphasize in the corporate world the fact that some people are just more comfortable spending time to vote, create tags and visibly participate – we want to also just find out what you frequently look at.

crowd sourcing

I should point out that each of our clients can chose to just turn all this off – this is not Big Brother – it’s a way to try to reveal potentially interesting relationships based on common interest without needing you to take time out to vote on something – just read similar tagged sets frequently and I am sure we can work out what you are looking for and currently finding interesting.

I will be really interested in how our clients embrace this.

In particular I will be fascinated how this is adopted internationally, given the different legislation, cultural issues and position in the technolgy adoption curve of various countries and communities. Will our USA clients be much more inclined to implement this in their Claromentis systems when compared to the UK for example? Will certain industries never see value in this, will others always embrace it?

Home intranet software discussions, online collaboration

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

Solutions intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

A significant trend has been happening over the last few years here at Claromentis, as our technology – and the space in which we operate - continues to mature and evolve at bewildering rates for those not used to the evolution of web based software.

I have given two specific high level presentations recently – and also redesigned from scratch a proposal document for a significant global company based in the USA – and I realised that neither the presentation or the proposal – for separate companies – included any details at all about our intranet software!

We keep a gallery of our web presence over the years, in fact this post by Michael is in interesting in this regard, and of course we can retrieve and review proposals we delivered to a range of companies looking for intranet solutions over the last 5 years.

There is a quite remarkable sea change here, obvious in just a surface scan of the relevant documents. In previous years we would always discuss features and functionality – because the general web space was moving so fast and every ISV, not just Claromentis, needed to continue to demonstrate that our solutions contained the functionality that our prospective clients needed.

In 2008 we have instead discussed our track record, our client base, global presence, our levels of customization and the fact that we are a PHP intranet framework that is commercially supported and open source extendable – all strategic issues that reflect our ability to partner with a new customer over the 5 year time frame to deliver their own as yet unplanned requirements. We are engaged in portals now for such critical issues as Competitive Marketing Intelligence, Sustainability portals, and managing Policies and procedures in a new online way to produce dramatic improvements in legislative compliance.

No-one is that interested in the details – yesterdays intranet peaks have become today’s functional commodities. Our discussions have genuinely moved back to where the requirements originated, and not on how they will be delivered in technical detail. And our conversations are more and more at board level. Long may it continue – it is about time the collaboration platform world delivered on its hyped up promises of yesteryear.

Solutions intranet software discussions, intranet software proposals