The purpose is :

“To create beautiful and powerful digital workspaces that are a pleasure to use and make a real difference to your business”.

This kind of simple sentence masks the decade of hard work that has gone into defining exactly what we do.

Almost every word in that sentence caries a real meaning to us and our customers, so I wanted to take the chance to talk about that – and in essence I think it distils down to 6 concepts that really help to define us as a company.

Create : We do think about what we do as creation, rather than manufacturing.

Not just in the artistic sense – because of course we are always taking your ideas and crystallizing those into something tangible – but also in the sense that what we do is making something complex simple, and that is a fundamentally talented and creative process.

Beautiful : Claromentis offers the opportunity to have a really talented design team create something for you that is actually quite beautiful. You can check out some examples in our design gallery.

Powerful : There are a number of solutions in the web platform space that are really slightly shallow in their functionality – for example they may provide a social networking solution with little business logic beneath it. Our approach is always to deliver solutions that leverage our significant code base and expertise – so that powerful functionality is always there to make a difference to your business.

Pleasure to use : we have fantastic information architect and UI skills in our teams – and we really do produce digital workspaces that are a pleasure to use. You need your users to enjoy the platform, and that comes down to a combination of significant functionality, great design and excellent site architecture.

Make a real difference : It is our customers prerogative to set the business expectations for our platform, but where we excel is in making a real difference to the way you accomplish your business goals.

Your business : when we engage with a new customer we recognize that your business is your own, and your expectations and requirements are unique.

We offer a wealth of expertise and experience – but we really do listen and understand – it is our number one value – our job is to make a difference to your business and the only person who can measure if we succeed is you.

In summary – after 14 years we now have a 21 word purpose that really does define what we do and how we contribute to our customers goals. now why was that so difficult??

In recent years we have developed and extended the Claromentis platform; building exciting applications such as Innovate, our corporate social networking app, and significantly enhancing others with new features and capabilities, such as Document Manager. Our new website allows us to coherently communicate the modules and applications which make up the Claromentis web platform.

We hope you enjoy the new website and find it interesting, informative and fun!

This multi-language capability allied with our extensive experience, were the main contributing factors in launching the Claromentis Partner Programme.  The primary aim of our global partner programme is to offer the best partner opportunities to organisations that are equally as passionate about offering real value to their clients. Since the launch, we are proud to say that we have successfully established partnerships with companies in Malaysia, Mexico and Japan.  

The success of the Claromentis Partner Programme is attributable to its flexibility to facilitate partner needs and preferences. We also work with each partner to provide them with complete support throughout the entire project. 

One such company that has recently joined the Claromentis Partner Programme is IT Geeks.

IT Geeks – Based in Malaysia are well known for their high quality technical skills, experience and professionalism. Their mission is to provide their clients with cutting edge technology to enable them to excel in their businesses, and to strengthen their competitive position. 

IT Geeks’ Business Development Manager, Vicknoben Visuvanathan comments:

“Claromentis is an amazing partner to work with. They are fast, spontaneous and very helpful; it’s as if they are here working with us hands on and not thousands of miles away.”

Interested in joining the Claromentis Partner Programme

An initial demonstration was followed by calls to discuss the project, and this led to our client forwarding us a series of drawings that he felt captured what he was looking for.

Our client apologized for the quality of his drawings – but our team all felt they were excellent.  They convey perfectly the kind of layout he was thinking about – and the main functional areas which in this case are :

• Banner Area with branding and menu
• A custom application to show sales staff and their team leaders how they were performing
• A series of useful calculators that the staff could use to provide illustrative figure to potential customers
• News and corporate social networking

This sketch, and the information provided on the calls, enabled our project team to come back with a mock up which perfectly captured the idea.

The client was really pleased -

“Good Job!! Ricardo – I really like how you went with an image as the banner that ties into our website feel, good job. … I am having our graphic designer resend us a logo – I am going to brand the intranet ‘Silvercloud’ “.

Incidentally we always support giving a corporate web platform an identity – usually an appropriate name and possibly a logo.

He also found that the mock up enabled him to progress much further with his thoughts : “Now that we have a mockup I think I can expand on what I was trying to project on the sketches”.

The improved version was approved, and we are now producing the visual interface for the system – together with the custom applications needed.

I really enjoy these kinds of interactions, where Claromentis listens, understands and an exchange of visual ideas through sketches and mock ups endure that the client is getting exactly what he wants  from the platform itself, and any custom applications or components that we develop for them.

So, below are 7 characteristics fundamental to a successful intranet.                                                        

Communication – The intranet must support various communication channels, such as information from the management team concerning strategic aspects of their organisation or collaboration amongst project teams and departments. These formal and informal methods of communication are equally important. Therefore essential to have an in-depth look at the communication tools on offer. 

Maintenance and Updating – It is inevitable that your intranet will require frequent updating and maintenance to ensure that the information provided is both relevant and accurate. Adding an image or changing content should not be a difficult process, nor should it be time-consuming. Surprisingly, many intranet systems require the help of technically skilled people to perform these tasks.

Analysing your Intranet – You may not have time to monitor the entire intranet, and this may not be something that as a company you would be interested in. However knowing which documents are popular and what users are searching for provides you with an insightful window into future improvements.

Search – An effective search function is important in building and maintaining trust with the corporate intranet. Hopeless search queries which do not render anything helpful can be both frustrating and inefficient.

Business Processes- For some organisations the need for electronic forms and workflows on the intranet may not be immediately obvious. It is only when a breakdown in the ability to effectively and efficiently perform processes that an alternative is sought.

Access flexibility – Accessibility by either a laptop or desktop is no longer acceptable, as not all employees perform tasks and activities at their desks. Certain job roles require employees to visit clients, and regular off-site meetings are becoming more common. Therefore flexibility in accessing their intranet on mobile devices and tablets should facilitate and not compromise their ability to perform tasks on their intranet.  

Online Workspace – It is important to think about the functions and daily tasks carried out by each department within your organisation, as each department varies considerably in terms of what they need to successfully do their job. For instance, the ability to create Wikis may not necessarily be important to the sales team but the IT department may find it useful for sharing technical information.

PROBLEM

They have a collection of corporate videos currently stored  within a simple share drive and they have no way of  knowing if a video has been approved, sent to an external agency or used in a publication. In this blog post, I am therefore going to discuss 3 of the largest video hosting providers in the current market .

VIDEO HOSTING

Typically video hosting solutions require a seperate approach entirely, as you know video comes in various format which may or may not be web-ready. There are many solutions out-there but in this blog post I am going to review the following 3 options:

VIDDLER

https://www.viddler.com/

YOUTUBE CHANNEL

VIMEO GROUP VIDEO

But for this post I just wanted to look at one of our playground intranet designs – so a design that we provide potential customers with so that they can use the software on a cloud server and get to know it’s capabilities. It is an abstraction – not specifically based on any actual company but reflecting the requirements of a certain type if intranet customer – one that likes our corporate social media application and also business processes to get things done quickly and efficiently.

The design is shown below :

In my view it is a great starter design – with some news channels prioritized to a central slider for greater visual impact, normal news channels for regular internal communication updates, corporate social networking using our innovate application and of course completely flexible components that can be added as required – like in this case “What’s New”.

But the subject area for this post today is the top right area – the three rows of icons that we think illustrate some of the great themes of modern intranets and web platforms. Lets take a zoomed in look at this functionality:

This area is encouraging me – as a user – to participate, to make a difference.  So  we have from top to bottom :

1. Fast access buttons – permission based – guides the user towards applications that based on their company role should be beneficial for them. These can be Claromentis applications, other web apps integrated through our support for single sign on, or any simple area such as an image album that might be of interest. Gateway access to relevant cloud and internal applications is certainly raised in many of our intranet launches.
2. An attractive applications slider
3. A badged series of icons where company processes that need my attention are presented to me. So here I can see that there are no Health and Safety issues that need my input, but there are 5 support tickets and 9 sales leads that do.

These kind of interfaces encourage and guide me, in real time, to where I can make a difference. They are really becoming powerful, and are available throughout the Claromentis 7 platform.

They are completely customizable and make a significant difference to the way the web platform is used by your users in your company.

Naturally in your own intranet, the processes will be yours and what BPM projects appear on the Activity Desk is completely configurable.

What do you think? Are real time activity areas helping your users to engage more with the web platform?

]]> http://www.claromentis.com/blog/intranet-user-engagement-through-an-activity-desk-concept/feed/ 0 http://www.claromentis.com/blog/intranet-user-engagement-through-an-activity-desk-concept/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intranet-Software/~3/aTzB-KxwrEo/ http://www.claromentis.com/blog/drag-and-drop-documents-from-you-desktop/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:27:24 +0000 Paula http://www.claromentis.com/blog/?p=3706 Drag and Drop… from your Desktop may sound like an unpretentious catchy slogan, but it is in fact a new feature of our Document Management System (DMS).  Documents can be easily transferred from your desktop to the DMS by simply dragging them with your mouse – saving time and increasing efficiency

There are those who believe great ideas are the product of inner tranquillity and enlightenment, interestingly, this was not the case in the development of this particular idea – it stemmed from our head designer’s sheer frustration and intolerable attitude toward time wastage.

So here it is…

Collaboration

Claromentis provides organisations with an extensive online workspace that enables users to effectively work together by providing them with a central environment to create and share documents, and effectively communicate with geographically diverse users. This comprehensive workspace also provides teams with a structured environment to store and distribute knowledge.

Our core collaboration tools include:

• Corporate Social Networking – An intelligent platform allowing users to interact, engage and collaborate, assisting in the development of a unified, fully-informed team.
• Intranet News - Create, categorise and publish newsworthy content, users can also comment and participate in these news based discussion.
• Document Management - Users can check documents in and out and users can roll back to previous versions.
• Business Process Management - Enable users to implement online business processes through form-based workflows.

Intranet Regulation

The comprehensive permission system provides intranet administrators with complete control over the entire intranet framework, ensuring that the environment in which users operate is appropriate to their specific needs. As soon as the appropriate permissions have been put in place, intranet administrators can be confident that users can navigate through the entire intranet site, and also utilise the numerous applications whilst adhering to the relevant permission settings.

Further access can be restricted by overlaying these permission settings with additional security settings.

Automate Business Processes

Organisations with a limited IT infrastructure are managing business processes manually and have no other option but to use paper-based workflows. This leads to a number of errors, longer cycle times and a drain on internal resources.

The Claromentis Business Process Management (BPM) application enables organisations to implement online business processes through form-based workflows. Users can also be notified if their participation is required at various stages in the process. User permissions can also be edited at each stage of the process.

Reduce dependency on your IT department.

The intranet allows users to perform tasks that would traditionally be associated with the capabilities and skill-set of employees based within the IT department.  Workflows and electronic forms can be created without any technical ability or understanding. The IT department often supports those individuals responsible for publishing new content, updating information, implementing minor changes to content layout, and the addition or removal of images from the intranet. However, the content management application eliminates this reliance on the IT department, whilst also empowering appropriate users to make and implement necessary changes.

Information Hub for all Users

If employees are unable to locate relevant information in an efficient manner, productivity will undoubtedly decrease. All employees, regardless of their role, position or department will at some point need to access corporate information. This information will enable them to successfully complete tasks on a daily basis.

This information can be accessed by users with appropriate permission settings. System administrators can also allocate relevant users with the ability to create and add further information.

To find out more information about how Claromentis can help your organisation save money, click here to contact us.

Having discussed with our clients their thoughts and experiences, we have developed the following points as a guideline to help organisations deploy a truly social intranet:

Communication

• Aligning your intranet communication strategy with your company’s culture and business needs ensures that employees are being exposed to meaningful content
• Simply providing users with mundane information on a regular basis does not constitute a social intranet, and it will lead to a fall in intranet usage
• Don’t overlook tools such as polls and surveys on your intranet, these tools can be a starting point for some apprehensive users, and you will also gain some valuable feedback on a range of issues

Change Management

• During the intranet launch, management should lead dialogue to promote interaction – if employees believe that management does not endorse the new social intranet, it will send out a negative message to all employees, and discourage usage.
• The development of a user-guide will make clear, that all employee participation and contribution is encouraged. This will also remove any doubt or uncertainty regarding an acceptable level of participation amongst all employees
• A long term strategy of regular engagement is essential for success

Technology

• Key social features include rating, user comments and the ability to follow users
• Most employees, if not all should have the ability to utilise these social intranet tools -enabling certain groups will most definitely defeat the purpose of deploying a social intranet
•  Users should be able to access the intranet on mobile devices

Claromentis 7 has been meticulously designed to enhance usability and optimise employee productivity. Core applications such as the document management system still encompass their fundamental functionalities, but they have been significantly enhanced with new features and capabilities.

Take a look at some of the new features below:

Responsive Layout
The visual interface responds and adapts to the viewport size of the device or computer being used. Whether this is a smart phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, the intelligent system will adapt its layout to display content in the most appropriate way for each device, without compromising on experience or functionality. This eliminates the need for an organisation to adhere to a specific hardware policy.

Drag and Drop Files
Users can efficiently and effectively upload files from their desktop by using the clever drag and drop functionality. File upload is achieved through an inline upload process which begins as soon as the user has selected a file.

Document Preview
Users can browse the content of a document without having to download. This is of particular benefit when the ability to modify or access the original document is not permitted to a particular group or user. Users can also scan the content of a document in an efficient manner without ever having to download the actual document.

During the last four months, tired computer screens have been replaced, working late into the evening has become the norm, and Alexander our lead architect from Russia – has become a permanent resident of the UK.

We are really excited to announce that there are just 27 working days left until we release Claromentis 7! Check out my blog on Friday to find out what the new release will consist of in terms of features and updates.

These 3 views are suitable for

• Users that require a corporate, read and consume information based intranet
• Users that would like to keep an eye on our corporate social media activities
• Users that get significant value from corporate social media

I think this is completely fascinating – as new clients have varying views on the value of internal corporate social networking, from complete evangelists to unconvinced skeptics.

They are now able to easily allocate the appropriate intranet experience to various sets of users, and even allow users to instantly change between them as they wish! They can pilot corporate social media to defined sets of users – for example according to their job roles or locations.

Internally at Claromentis we are using each of the middle and extreme social interfaces for 7 days each – so far, based on user engagement – in our company social wins!!

Unsocial Intranet

Slightly Social Intranet

Completely Social Intranet

You may wonder why an organisation would replace such a previously vital method of communication with one that is relatively new in comparison. However this communication method encourages collaboration whilst also creating a crucial information resource for its users.

Take a look at some of Innovate’s features and see how organisations are embracing our corporate social networking application.

You can control through permissions which channels are available to which users, in this way guiding the topics and making expertise available where needed. Information can be made available to people within certain departments – therefore channelling relevant information to the right people.

Users can follow people that interest them and ‘like’ comments and post comments into various channels that you set up to support your business. Facebook-like functionality encourages collaboration and allows users to express their ideas and opinions efficiently.

Users can easily engage in conversations with links to relevant information – for example asking for feedback on a particular design or document. Articles from external sources can be referenced through the addition of links.

As intranets evolve to become enormously powerful gateways to the digital workplace we have seen the argument shifting away from low level functionality such as ‘can I book a taxi using your system?’ to much higher level discussions that really make a difference to what a client can achieve. And that’s what we so enjoy.

When clients look for real value from a web platform they are really, it seems to me – asking some perfectly valid and basic questions about capabilities in the following areas :

• Information management – full indexing of version controlled documents, a variety of file types, record management, configurable metadata – and a world class permission system.
• News and internal communication – permission based news systems, announcements and blogs.
• Compliance – policy must reads, full auditing, audit management modules.
• Design – can the design be really, truly inspirational or just a logo and a style guide?
• Corporate social media – does the platform offer true engagement to get the users really engaged with the information.
• Business Processes – we have a lot of processes that are not the most efficient – can we move these onto the web platform and produce powerful form based workflows that help us to understand our process workloads, requirements and increase our efficiency.
• Mobile – is your offering capable of reaching out to our modern workforce with a range of needs on multiple devices.
• Deployment – do you offer truly global, cross platform, cloud or perpetual in house offerings?
• API – can we reliable and efficiently call out information to use in our own applications – for example using REST.

What we have noticed in the last couple of years is that our clients are enjoying the combination of these powerful capabilities. “It’s great to have simple business processes like recruitment that can call on document management resources, all within a permissioned process portal”. “Extensive business logic, with a corporate social media interaction available on top”. “A communication platform with commenting and Facebook style status updates and micro blogging.” “Great – Active directory integration combined with being able to log in with my Google ID.”

A Web Platform

This is indeed powerful, and for us as a partner in these spaces really exciting. By all means start with the web platform functionality that meets your short term urgent business needs, but then add significant areas to work in a combination that is truly powerful, and makes a significant difference to your business.

The functionality discussion is moving up to truly interesting large scale areas of business needs. To me this is a natural extension of the debate, as the workplace goes digital, social and mobile and more and more fundamental business tasks and requirements are met by cross platform browser based web platforms that can grow with your business -  like Claromentis.

And by the way, in case it’s raining out there – yes you can book a taxi – you just need a very simple business process for that task – with notifications, assignments and service level agreements.

Training & Development Intranet Records

Custom Form Design

What we need to store about our training records is appropriate to us, and different to other companies. Using Business Process Manager means we design our own  form and evolve that over time, with version control.

Granular permissions

It is easy to assign managers permissions to review the training requests of their own teams, and to allow users to review just their own training records.

Custom statuses

We can set whatever statuses we need for our training records.

Notifications

In our case managers of course need to be notified when an employee submits a request – but later on in the process – on approval – so do HR and accounts.

Reporting

The in built statistics allows us to review our training attendance over time and by status.

Auditing of all data

As an ISO9001 audited company training records are  inspected ever year, and we benefit from being able to review with the external auditor the complete changes made to ever request, down to individual field level – who changed what and when.

And to think that – just like many of our new clients – we used to do this on spreadsheets on shared drives!

After much speculative discussion, we have decided that there are only 3 viable explanations for this strange occurrence.

The first…
In a bid to finish Claromentis 7, someone in our office concocted a devious plan to ensure that we could not leave the office, leaving us with no other option but to return back to our desks. Needless to say this plan failed miserably as we could still open the door.

The second…
This was an act of protest by the door handle – He believes that his ideas and opinions are never taken seriously, and every so often he would like to receive an invite to one of our team meetings.

The third…
In an attempt to fix the broken door handle someone sacrificed rationality for functionality.

I personally would have to agree with the latter as it is the least absurd. But we shall never know!

When mobile phones were first introduced to the market, they were a revolutionary product, unleashing us from the constraints of a curly wire. Their poor design however soon became apparent – they were gargantuan in comparison to your head, they claimed a gravitational pull similar to that of a small planet, and their sheer weight burdened their owners.

At Claromentis, we believe that every intranet should encompass intelligent design and functionality, and this can be clearly seen from the snapshot below, taken from our upcoming software release Claromentis 7. Key functionalities are prominently displayed in an elegant manner, with ingenious design and usability incorporated into every detail.

The top bar allows the user to effortless access important information relevant to their organisation and it has been developed to remain on the page regardless of where the user navigates within their intranet.

One relatively simple one to discuss is how do we make sure users can find what we assume they will be looking for – an also how can we encourage them to visit an area that they might not think would be interesting or relevant?

One part of the answer is through what Claromentis describe as “fast access buttons”

These are significantly sized buttons that provide a visual pull to certain areas of the intranet. They are also – like everything else in Claromentis – permission based so that certain groups of users will see different icons. In this way we can try to predict what should be of interest to those users, and encourage them to take the actions we require.

Andy Briggs from our custom design team recently produced a great document on intranet design, and this is a diagram from the section on fast access buttons:

Intranet Design : Permission based fast access

For interest I also show the access areas that are promoted for me on our own Claromentis Intranet.

Lets look at the 10 buttons that are presented to me and summarize each one :

• Company Policies – Claromentis has a duty to ensure I have every chance to read our policies, and this button is extremely appropriate for discharging that responsibility
• Audits – we are a quality managed ISO9001 company and I have access to all of our internal audits, and the actions arising from them
• Dev Wiki – even in sales it is great to have access to internal technical resources!
• Discover Claromentis – our support portal – allows me to review any issues or enhancement requests that my clients may have filed
• Webex – we provide private tours for anyone interested in our software and I use this every day
• Live demo – access to our standard live intranet and business process management demonstration system
• Blog Admin – as you can see I write blogs and I don’t want to remember another set of credentials!
• Marketing database – exactly the same – provides access to a web based system that I use extensively
• Google Analytics – useful to periodically review our traffic sources and what they are looking for
• National Rail – access to the live departure board at Brighton station – I commute by train and this is just a convenience for me.

So fast access buttons provide :

• Single sign on access to other web applications – the intranet provides a gateway to your digital workspace.
• Convenience for the user
• A way for the company to encourage my participation in certain applications or information areas.

This had been an issue for us, as our live intranet demo actually locks down the users permissions in order to maintain the integrity of the site.

So using our cloud servers we now have available an intranet trial where you can request an instance from our sales team, who once they know your requirements can make your own personal trial instantly available. There is nothing to download – it is a fully functional Claromentis web platform that is ready for you to use immediately.

The official release day is Monday – but I happen to know its available from Friday – so if you would like to evaluate a professional intranet environment, just get in touch!