What really is a legitimate boundary for intranet software?
We have had so many discussions recently about how to establish legitimate boundaries for modern intranet software.
At a recent vision setting meeting at Claromentis we did decide that we would never produce accountancy software – but the only reason seemed to be because Nigel thinks its boring and no-one else in the room understood much about it. Hardly a valid rule for deciding when business functionality should be excluded form our product set looking out beyond Claromentis 6.0
If you think about it, as well as the API for bespoke applications, we now have major application sets for:
Information management across every imaginable file type through to online
Collaboration and Innovation
Sales Management
Project Management
Image Management
MarComms
Across the board Quality Management solutions
As we move into a world where it seems the browser can deliver just about anything to the desktop and client software is dying faster than newspapers, it seems that at Claromentis the only rules we can find for a product line in our intranet system is :
It makes a difference to a business
It is aesthetically beautiful and highly usable
It leverages the permission system
Can anyone come up with a better rule for helping us not to deliver accountancy software as part of an intranet? Seriously – where should we stop? How can we say – “but that is just not what an intranet should do”?
A friend of mine was having difficulty doing a simple Cut and Paste in an email client in Lotus Notes, an IBM product collaboration tool. A google search for help reveals this article: http://dbaspot.com/forums/lotus-notes-misc/170604-problem-copy-paste.html which I found really hilarious, especially this part.
“OMG! You want to use a feature such as copy and paste in Lotus Notes?
Remember you are using a highly sophisticated email client, and you
will need to relearn some of the more rudimentary tasks you performed
so easily in outlook. The highly educated developers of Lotus Notes
want to make sure you don’t mistake this application for a tool that
simply sends and retrieves email, which is what 99% of the people
forced to use do, they want to harp on the programmability of Lotus
Notes.”