Intranet Management Software Blog

We ourselves at Claromentis have an interesting example of complete automation versus manual interaction with a process.

We have recently changed our follow up or inquiries – via a public web form – so that filing in that form kicks off a process manager process that automates sending 3 emails over a 14 day period. In essence we are now using InfoCapture as an auto responder according to SLAs.

Previously the sending of a relevant email would need editing of the ticket to select that an email should be sent, via a simple check box.

We still allow for manual intervention – the account manager can mark any lead so that the emails will no longer be sent.

In this way the benefits of automation are kept – but the flexibility of manual intervention ensures the process is still valid for very important enquiries where dialogue is already taking placed and automated emails would damage that process and so needs to be stopped.

The account manager can automatically create entries in our Sales Manager system with just one click, and can allocate telephone qualification according to the country of origin.

InfoCapture reports are available to show what the lead funnel is looking like, what call stats are by area and anything else recorded in the forms.

So we ourselves are heavily dependent on our own technology to automate core business processes – in this case lead generation – and that is exactly how it should be.

Prod-Process process manager

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

As I have discussed before on this Blog -  by delivering a complete web based project management product we are providing the logical move from collaboration to execution within one comprehensive intranet framework.

But as previously reported, with the planned process manager integration within project manager – we are adding totally configurable form based workflows to the execution side of our software.

It will be extremely interesting to see how this is used by our clients. Will we be providing a generic library of e-form process manager solutions applicable to project management – risk management, material requisition, change management for example -  or will each client prefer to use the ability to generate their own form based workflows for each individual project need?

Products intranet project manager, process manager

It continues to amaze me how many businesses, both big and small, rely on spreadsheets and emails to report on their business. A time sheet here, a KPI there, right through to budgets - all done in a spreadsheet and passed on through the business via email.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly fine for small companies (and by small, I mean less than 20 employees) but any more than this, a basic e-form application can deliver immediate benefits to both the user and the business.

Take for example a recent client of ours. They are required to keep stringent records on all communications with their customers, no matter how trivial. However, rather than having a central storage area, this information was shared around by email. It was of no real surprise then, when a critical piece of information went walkabout, so did their client.

E-forms are perfect for such applications, and can quickly be measured by both increases in customer AND staff satisfaction.

E-form Services process manager

During an interesting meeting with a major potential client today – considering deploying Claromentis for 300,000 staff around the world –

Process Management

I was struck the most by the reaction when we showed InfoCapture – the central application of our Process Manager Product for form based workflows and processes.

What was so interesting is that they assumed you would need a technical DBA to implement the database structures behind each project that InfoCapture users are designing a solution for. But InfoCapture automatically generates all the database tables and relationships you need – even for the most complex workflow projects. And it does this for MySQL , MS SQL or Oracle – just like all of Claromentis and in line with our fundamental values of giving customers choice.

Just 12 hours before this a client purchased InfoCapture in the USA to maintain contact records – in that case the idea of  DBA had never occurred to our new client – they just needed a solution for a very simple, but ultimately important, problem.

I think that in reality that’s the unique power of InfoCapture – it can be as transparently simple or as complex as you need it to be. It just can do anything that form based workflows require you to do – without a whimper and without a DBA.

Prod-Process process manager

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