Intranet Management Software Blog

Great to review and use the early releases of Discuss over the last few days.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting a series of blogs about this innovative intranet chat application to promote the ability for users to fire up real time 1 to 1 or conference chats with anyone online in the corporate intranet.

We have the first client review shortly and that is a great milestone - but both in its own right and as a platform for the upcoming major Innovate Application these are certainly exciting times!

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Image gallery is a popular application within the Claromentis Intranet product suite. There have been a number of recent improvements at the requests of clients, the most recent Intranet Manager build in 5.6.5 includes slide show functionality.

Previously images were just available in a number of images per page, and users navigated from page to page. They could review images directly or add to a light box,  to collections or a download cart as required.

Image Commenting

While this is acceptable in many use cases, the 5.6.5 release includes both a slide show function – allowing users to navigate rapidly within an album – and also adds commenting on images.

A good example of incremental usability and functionality improvements that we continue to make – often at client request as well as our own vision for where applications need to be. Intranet media management is an important part of the  deployment of our software for many clients, and we will continue to improve this application.

In the next Blog I will review more incremental improvements in the 5.6.5 monthly build - the ability to comment anonymously on news, and having configurable RSS feeds for news channels that opened up the possibility of including permissioned news into RSS feeds where required.

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I want to focus a few blogs on the recent release of 5.6.5 – looking at some functionality that came with this monthly build, which will be fully available at the end of January with the production release of Claromentis 5.7

As the first of these today we are looking at the in browser cropping for images with Claromentis.

This functionality enhances the use of images in both News and People Profile. Previously any editing of images had to be done locally before selecting the image for use in these applications.

Intranet News Image Cropping

In both cases the user can now directly crop the image in the browser, before confirming the image for use.

Screen shots above show this is use for both the news application and the people profile.

While these images focus on News and People, the same cropping functionality is available wherever inner file images are used - in any application, including bespoke work developed using the APIs.

A good example of incremental increase in intranet functionality that helps users by making things easier to accomplish, with no dependency on other software or skill sets.

The next blog will look at the image sideshow which is also available in Claromentis 5.6.5

Prod-Intranet images, intranet software

With the growing trend to offer videos as intranet content, especially noticeable recently for some of our manufacturing clients who have learnt that showing a trained engineer performing a task is a great way to train new staff in certain procedures – the issue of managing such videos within the intranet is becoming a hot topic.

Clearly we can enable the FCK editor to embed a pre-prepared flv ( Flash video file ).

However with the many recent enhancements in the intranet image management application of Claromentis, “Image Gallery” - which manages collections of images and allows processing on download to appropriate file sizes - we are now considering enhancing this application  to provide a youtube like environment natively within the corporate intranet.

We would do this by embedding a video processing unit within the system, so a video originating from anywhere ( Camcorder, iPhone, normal mobiles for example ) can be uploaded directly – and the system will convert and compress it to flv – and allow the user to set appropriate meta data as required.

These converted videos will of course be hosted within the intranet and its security systems – and available for embedding on publish pages in exactly the same way as images are now.

This is a reasonably significant task and before we add it the roadmap does anyone have any comments on how useful this would be?

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One of the core values of Claromentis is clarity – we really do try to avoid any chance of confusion wherever we can.

I was reminded of this at a project kick off meeting this week, where some of the client staff had got into the mindset of focusing on “content management” in the discussion, when in fact their intent was to get the best plan for “information management” in the first phase of the project.

Left unchecked this could have resulted in much of the day being focused on entirely the wrong requirement for project success. What was needed was not a detailed discussion of best practices in content management, but a much more open debate about what information platforms were best suited to various sets of data that the client needed to migrate to Claromentis. Managing an information layer is not about content management – but content management is indeed a part of the puzzle.

Examples like this in themselves are innocuous, but they demonstrate again and again that as a supplier of customizable collaboration platforms our responsibility is to add clarity to the potentially confusing world when relatively wide ranging IT projects get underway.

framework-bus intranet software

Working with one of our clients we today produced the extremely useful component to filter a set of issues in any workflow project taking into account the user viewing the project. So the identity if the user modifies the filter directly.

Filters have always been comprehensive in InfoCapture, but the ability to for example provide intelligent links that automatically do the following is very powerful indeed :

• Provide all P1 help desk issues that are assigned to me
• List all HR incidents in the last 12 months where I am the Health and safety officer

It is also great to see our clients working with us to provide extremely useful components that other Claromentis intranet clients are welcome  to use. You can review the component and discussions on our Intranet help wiki.

Prod-Process intranet software

As Claromentis continues to grow in the scope and range of products and applications, the framework is being actively developed and enhanced by the use of components to provide flexible, configurable functionality for clients wishing to use them.

Just in the last week the following very useful components have been added :

Anniversary Intranet Component

The Anniversary component gives you the ability to summarily compare dates attached to users profiles within Claromentis through the use of metadata.

Once configured, not only can you change how far in the future you’d like to list events – up to one whole year from today, but also how many user anniversaries you’d like shown.

This anniversary component could be useful for anything from showing birthday information for employees, to listing anniversaries of employment with your company - there are lots of opportunities for configuration of this component.
 
File Review Intranet Component

The File Review component also through the use of custom metadata allows you to configure multiple options for ensuring that you always know what review dates are coming for your files.

This component allows you to change how files are listed and also what scope of listing to give. For example: you can also attach a reviewer to the component, and it’ll list also for the reviewer of the file; you can show review dates to everyone – ideal for a departmental vi.  The major advantage of this component is how configurable it is, you can show due dates to all, or just the reviewer, or just the owner, or even both the owner and the reviewer; on top of which you can change how far ahead it is looking for document review dates, and it will make it really clear to the viewers when something is overdue for review!

 
RSS Reader Intranet Component

The RSS Reader component makes reading news or events easy, be it from an external source such as the BBC or using your own internal RSS feed.

The component allows two modes of reading, one is a fixed feed experience – designed for when you want a feed readable by all without them being able to customize where it is reading from; the second makes use of custom metadata, allowing your end user to configure where the news is coming from, so that the component is always personal to them.

Interested clients should contact us – we have these components available on our development WIKI and we are currently considering if they should be included in the core distributive.

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As everything is about collaboration, and everything can be moderated – why don’t content editors give edit permissions to their own content more freely?

Everyone is keen to provide view rights, but protective of edit rights, even though this is precisely where new information would come from. Although in certain areas – like corporate policies and procedures for example – this would obviously not be appropriate - for many functions and processes increased contribution to knowledge should be welcome, even if it needs editing before approval.

Cultural openness is hard to achieve – even in collaboration platforms designed for exactly that purpose.

Prod-Quality intranet software, permissions

Process orientated companies, as opposed to departmentally divided ones – will often place little emphasis on job titles and much more on general expertise. They expect a persons contribution to be based on their knowledge sets, but to take place in whichever process most needs them.

When we set up Intranet permissions in new intranet projects the default is usually to base at least one permission set – normally ‘Groups’ – on the departmental structures, and use ‘Roles’ to reflect much more the nature of the persons job – such as ‘manager’ or ‘administrator’ – thus allowing easy collaboration by roles across departments, as well as within them.

Since Claromentis can localize the names of permission sets, perhaps we should offer a set of permission structures that are more process-orientated. For many companies this would not be too hard to think about – ‘role’ can be the expertise area, particularly as each ‘expertise area’ can be defined as having multiple skills, and users can provide information on how they rank for all these skill sets.

Groups could then be ‘Processes’ – or however the company prefers to name them. A user could therefore be assigned to the ‘Product Development’ process but have core ‘Engineer’ expertise, with rankings for the various skills that company Engineers might have.

This would make searching for staff to contribute to a new process, or one that was struggling with workload, simple - as Claromentis already allows searching for any combination of skills within users of a particular role.

In common with career development in process orientated companies, users can also have multiple roles, allowing them to gain practical experience by working in different processes over time.

For some companies making such a change at the same time as deploying a new intranet and collaboration platform might be too much to absorb – but for others that have been considering becoming more process orientated the implementation of these ideas might be facilitated by a platform that is naturally organized along process based lines

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Those of us that go back a few years will doubtless recognize the culturally positive approach in many companies to openly acknowledge mistakes by a friendly, open “pranny of the week award” - or something similar.

These are normally awarded during some kind of Friday beer bust, and predictably seem to always go to any senior manager on hand, who always deserve it, or the marvelous vivacious girl in admin that everyone loves and obviously a long way from being a twit…

We were at an intranet project kick off meeting today with a new client and they have a great idea – once a month the pass around a toy duck that the recipient for the silly mistake of that month then has to have on their desk for the duration. A physical recognition of a daft moment that doubtless is delivered in a humorous and positive way.

In delivering collaboration platforms that increasingly look to promote interaction through tools like micro-blogging I have been interested as to how some basic concepts do or do not translate from real physical collaboration and interaction to their virtual equivalents – and “pranny of the month” might well be one of them!

I cannot imagine that any Claromentis client will look for a place on the intranet to actually promote the person in the company that made a mistake. How ridiculous that would be! The cultural wrapping, the openness, and the humor would of course all be lost – destroying the whole point of the concept.

What concerns me is how the lack of real physical interaction might sometimes lead to a serious misinterpretation of a shout/ post/corporate tweet or whatever approach is used in corporate web 2.0. Some things clearly don’t make the migration to the virtual world of the intranet at all – more worryingly perhaps there is a middle ground where we really have to be careful about our interpretation of pithy, succinct comments without the emotional framing that real life gives us.

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