Intranet Management Software Blog

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:

Home, Solutions Case Study, intranet 2.0, online collaboration, Social Networking, web 2.0

As one of the greatest socialites the world has ever seen Oscar Wilde once said that “there is only one thing worse than being talked about – and that is not being talked about”.

A tidy few years later Seth Godin said you should turn a sales funnel upside down, and create instead a megaphone for people to talk about you – eventually creating sales people from customers.

Since then a lot of sites and online techniques have sprung up or evolved to help us do just that.

The modern world is now full of communication channels and collaboration software that promise a plethora of networked interactions. The basic idea is that this should allow some kind of sense and wisdom to eventually float to the top, much to the satisfaction of the mere mortal looking for useful stuff.

New techniques have become verbs, verbs have become absorbed into the daily vernacular of the nimble fingered - and within just a few years new activities have become so fundamental to peoples lives that not understanding that you can “create an ecosystem out of tweeting about your blogs” now marks you down as some kind of a luddite – even though Twitter was only established in 2006.

However Seth Godin also said that “functionality is the new marketing”  [ source : ‘small is the new big’ ] which I personally took to mean that you do actually need a great something or other to create genuine waves to get  you talked about. And that’s what I personally find a little  frustrating about some of the current ways to network and promote your stuff. They basically are often empty of innovation, and seem to be trying their best to enable people who have nothing to say to be talked about.

It seems as soon as the world finds a way to enable great functionality to float to the top for you and I to find easily – someone else will hire a bunch of cheats to get their stuff there instead of yours. “Rank it by incoming links?” – pay people to create incoming links. “Build great networks?” – form sites where all sense of effort and value based networking is lost and instead allow people to spam everyone all over again.

It takes a huge amount of effort and skill to actually create something that really is functional enough that it should be shouted about. People who do that will be hard working, creative, often burnt out and generally fascinating – and they probably wont have time to nurture any kind of an ecosystem out of anything , even though they are actually creating something that other people will indeed shout about – because it is actually great and that’s what counts.

Oscar Wilde also said that “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast” and on this one I am with him completely.  If you are working that hard to actually create something that might become great you need to find the time each day to just stand up, clear your head, learn from your bruising mistakes and start again – perhaps we should have a quiet reflective coffee and leave tweeting about our blogs to others – chances are that they will enjoy it and do a very much better job than I ever would.

Home collaboration, Social Networking

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

My calendar view

Getting things done

Have you ever get into panic situation where your work is suddenly mounting, you feel worry that things may not get done, or you feel depressed because you know you are about to cause big disappointment for everyone?  Do you feel so much more positive as soon as you write things down on a piece of paper?  There is an old saying; if you share your problem things aren’t so bad as it sounds?

My job role

My role is an information architect (IA). I work daily with our business and technical consultants understanding client’s needs and their business problems. We’re working in a small team brainstorming debating ideas and deciding ‘the best approach’ on a particular issue for a particular client. In the back-end I have a trio: developer, designer and application tester ready to ‘get-on’ with it.

Challenging situation

Recently it has become quite a challenging situation. Amount of work shows no sign of slowing down; at the same time my trio is no longer solid with the departure of one of our team member.  Unfortunately I have to juggle with numerous tasks which require multiple skills.

Claromentis Shared Calendar

One tool which has helped me to get through this (believe it or not) is Claromentis Shared Calendar. We’ve been using Claromentis shared calendar in our Intranet system as our simple team to-do list. Each of us created a calendar, pick a particular colour and we simply share them. I have permission to create events on each calendar which I am using it to set tasks for my team.

We can easily see each other calendar or multiple calendars in one view. A quick access to particular combination can be done with one click URL allowing even quicker access. It solves classic problem knowing who is doing what and when.  Automatic notification is sent to appropriate person when an event is moved or changed which eliminates the need sending separate email around. I can quickly review my team’s workload.

Make sure things are scheduled

The idea is simply to make sure things are scheduled, it only takes me one click to assign task, the same way writing things down on a piece of paper. You can see at glance when things should be done or when you need to chase them. Shared calendar allows me to spread tasks into certain days instead of one big pile long list. A mountain of tasks suddenly becomes more realistic and achievable.

It has become our second nature just to set a task, pick a day when we can do it and you get things done easily. Sometime the best tool is the simplest one, you know it is working well when you don’t even realise it.

Products Claromentis, intranets, online collaboration, Social Networking

Recently we have been very involved in of course our plans for Claromentis 6.0 and all that will involve in terms of bringing web 2.0 into the corporate communication platform. This is really exciting.

At the same time we are being asked to design social networking platforms for companies, and this is really causing me to question the level of thought that the average UK company puts into these ventures from a business perspective.

Given the fact that these companies are basically SMEs and so are far from owning a global brand, they are normally not concerned with monitoring brands across social networks, which of course has significant value once you have a brand to protect and indeed leverage.

Instead what our SME clients are looking to do it to take advantage of a world that frankly, in my opinion, they don’t understand. They imagine that this is some low cost of entry platform to get themselves a significant audience to interact with.

The amazing thing is that it is!

But the approach needs to be very different from simply finding a way to interact with some massive and totally unrelated set of people on Facebook – or anywhere else.

Disconnected networks

So often the discussion starts with design, and how to make sure that people on “My new social network” will be able to easily find their previous friends from some “Other massive unconnected community” they belong to. We get a bunch of deign sketches, and minimal thought about the business and the potential consumers we might be able to reach.

In my view, and I am glad to say many others, “the way for a business to convert social networking into measurable revenue is to use the social networking approach to connect the business value of that company with unserved consumer needs”.

This means that significant effort for an average SME needs to go into determining exactly what the business value is that is appropriate for this medium, and how they can connect and interact with potential new consumers who share those values, but who are presently are either not customers or whose purchasing patterns can be influenced in a positive way.

Some of the people they reach in this new medium need to be empowered to become ambassadors through their genuine alignment with the brand – and so create momentum behind the network. They will be able to become innovators by interacting with the brand to create new value – or to extend the reach to geographies or verticals that the company previously was prevented from leveraging. That’s exciting.

What these new people will absolutely not be is some arbitrary ‘friend’ that technology makes it easy to log into something in which they have absolutely no interest at all.

Believe it or not they will just leave.

Solutions Social Networking

As being a provider of an intranet software and its side solutions; we develop, deploy and deliver.. an intranet software… Recently one of our clients requested a quotation for an enhanced social networking platform to enable a possible collaboration of their consumers and staff under a single social networking platform. Personally, I think this is a great idea! Specially in an internet age, I can not think of any better solution to improve your public face than this. But there is one small problem… Our software was not developed while keeping the social networking platforms in mind. In other words, we are not the providers of a social networking platform. So how should we answer the client?

To find an answer to this, we did have an internal meeting today to narrow down our solutions and decided the following options:

1. Find a reliable third party social networking platform software, buy the software, customize it for the client and resell it.
2. Create a partnership with a third party company delivering social networking platforms and work on their software together with the owner of the software and deliver the result to the client. Consider the possibilities of learning the social networking platform development and combine it with our own product.
3. Develop our own bespoke social networking platform and deliver it to the client.
4. Say no.

The first three options have their pros and cons, while the 4th option is something we don’t like to go for, therefore I am going to focus on the first 3 options.

We found a perfect software delivering exactly what the client has asked for. It ticks almost every boxes based on the client’s requirements sheet. The software is open source and can be acquired with different pricing structures; starting from free up to good amount of money; depending on the package. In my opinion, the most expensive package, which is still relatively cheap based on its functionalities, is the one we should go for. The main reason behind my defence for this software is it works perfectly, delivers exactly what the client is asking for, the software itself is open source so we can modify it the way we want it, customize it to suit the client’s needs and deliver it to the client. The client gets what they want which works and we are happy to exceed the client’s expectations.

However there were several concerns about this option. The main concern, which is the main reason I am writing this article for is the software is actually an open source software. Some of our team members considered this as a negative point, because you may not get any support for the software. However what was forgotten in this concern was actually the provider of the software is releasing the core code of the software and any additional plug-ins (which we will need all of them) costs money. What took my attention was the word ‘open source’ made them think that this software may be unstable or developed by a student in couple of nights for fun and may well be forgotten by its provider. What I find strange is this thought would have never come to mind if the software was released by companies like Apple, Google, Sun or even Facebook or Digg team, just because they are a well known company and/or charging millions for it… For example, Mozilla may well stop supporting Firefox if it was not financially possible for them to keep the development of it.

But there were some other points which I found logical. Up-to-date, we delivered our own software which we know inside out. We are able to answer every question about it because we developed, deployed and delivered it. We are responsible to support our clients for the software they bought from us. What if something goes wrong with this third party software? OK, we have our own developers who can fix many problems, but to address a problem may take 5 minutes if the problem is occured on our software whereas it may well take 5 hours to address the same problem on some other software, if you are not familiar with it, and we are not talking about couple of hundred lines of code. This third party software is huge, so its’ codebase.

The other unspoken concern, which again I agree with, was the feeling we will have from the result. If the client loves this third party solution and sends their greetings to us, we would not feel the same level of satisfaction and proud as much as if they did the same for our intranet software, because simply what we delivered is NOT ours. We may have done a good job on finding the correct solution, customizing it and deploying it, but these are not actually what the client is requesting. These are expected standard results whereas the capabilities of the software are the requirement itself.

The second option is creating a partnership with a local social networking software developer and work on the actual software itself together. By doing this, there will be a mutual level of knowledge sharing. On our side, we will be learning how to deal with social networking management and implementation of these kind of platforms on corporate environments. And so many other stuff that I am not able to share with you for the moment. Because this will be a partnership, the provider will be reachable, therefore it will be possible for us to mash both of our solutions on one platform. Our client is already using our intranet solution and they are happy with it. Rather than giving them a complete new solution, which does not have the same look and feel as our own software, may be seen confusing to them (which is what may happen with the first solution, but again it is an open source software, so we should be able to customize it).

There is already one company we are considering to have a partnership for this project and we are in talks with them. I can not give you more details about this for the moment.

The third solution is a less likely to achive in a timescale given by the client. Our own software has years of experience and development history and as I said at the beginning of my article, it was not developed as a social networking platform. The strange thing is our software can do many of the client’s requirements on an individual basis, but was not designed to use these features on a public website with social networking ideas in mind.

You are probably asking “So, which option did you go for?“, well, we are still considering these and other  options and there are no decisions as of now. What I wanted to share with this article was what may be thought when we hear the word “open source“.

Can/should open source be considered as professional? How far professional and successful it can go? Can commercial products be open source and if they are open source, are they still commercial? Is open source turning out to be a marketing term because of the success of Mozilla Firefox?

Probably harder questions to answer than the meaning of life.

Solutions Old - Open Source Intranets, open source, Social, Social Networking