Enterprise

How do you do more with less? Reduce your reliance on paper processes and start automating your workflow? Can you really create a paperless office? Why has this been a pipe dream until now?

Myth #1: You can scan your way to a paperless office.

REALITY: SCANNING STRATEGIES ARE MISALIGNED. THE REAL FOCUS SHOULD BE ON DATA CAPTURE, WHICH WILL OVER TIME REDUCE DEPENDENCY ON PAPER.

To really succeed in becoming “paperless,” you have to forget about trying to go paperless, for a few reasons.

Intranet Connections has its roots in business applications. We have added a lot of social and collaboration elements to our social intranet software over the recent years, but we have never forgotten about our roots in providing tools for employees to help improve your business.  We also see a great deal of employee engagement stemming from your company culture and our new v11 is all about leveraging your intranet to communicate that culture, and to expand on the tools you need to better inform and collaborate with your employees.

LOS ANGELES, CA – Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, today announced its plans to further improve ease of integration with third-party ECM document repositories via full CMIS compatibility in its upcoming release of Liferay Portal EE 6.1.

CMIS is an industry standard that unifies ECM and DM repositories and enables easy integration for a wide range of repository types. Liferay introduced CMIS compatibility in Liferay Portal EE 6.0 to its out-of-the-box Document Library. Full compatibility in 6.1 EE will allow users to pull in data from multiple CMIS-compatible data repositories, including vendor-specific products like SharePoint and Documentum.

Boston – June 16, 2011. Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, today announced the availability of a new version of its Case Management Framework. Nuxeo CMF is an enhanced distribution of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), adding functionality to support the flow and use of diverse but related content that needs to be handled and managed in a case or container metaphor.

I'm sitting here in the first session of CMS Expo. I've chosen the track that included the TYPO3 Overview session because TYPO3 is one of the few content management systems at the conference I know little about. Yes, I've heard the name TYPO3 but that is about the CMS. Benni Mack, Release Manager for TYPO3 version 4.4, is speaking. I don't know if you can consider this blogging "live" but I'll update the past as the session goes on.

TYPO3 is a mature, enterprise-level, open-source content management system that has been actively developed for ten years. There are currently over 500,000 installations of TYPO3 worldwide. TYPO3 has over 4000 freely available extensions, has been translated into over 30 languages, and is actively being developed in a community of over 100,000 users. The TYPO3 package has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from Sourceforge and is used by enterprise-level organizations worldwide.

Notable remarks presented in this session:

• TYPO3 is marketed as "THE enterprise CMS in Europe". Forty percent of municipalities in the Netherlands use TYPO3. This CMS is really big in Europe. I hope to ask why they are having a difficult time breaking into the United States market.
• Element-based CMS that sits on PHP and runs on mySQL (and other databases).. Effective Image Manipulation, Flexible Content Elements (Drupal and other CMS users may know this as CCK).
• TYPO3 is completely community driven with backing. TYPO3 released under GPLv2 in 2003 and TYPO3 Association in Switzerland in 2004.
• TYPO3 has a core...with an extension system. Benni has a sign on his slide with "Warning: It's real open source". However, core is definately stable and most extensions work. Extensions can also be installed by one click from typoe3.org. Something we're finally seeing more and more in other open source CMS.
• Media assets handled in some in core, but there is a host of extensions that can handle the variety of multimedia as well as manage it.
• TYPO3 is good in "complicated setups" found in the enterprise. TYPO3 is good for long life cycles found in the enterprise. 

I asked the question on there thought about the limited size of the TYPO3 community here in the United States. Both speaker and an audience member says TYPO3 has started to really push their presence in the US in the past couple years. This CMS is just waiting for its moment to be seen as the platform choice for a larger Web site.

Newly released Bitrix Intranet 10.0 introduces simple and powerful Task&Time management, CRM, Mobile interfaces and integration with Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

CHICAGO, IL — SpringCM® announced the latest release of its award-winning cloud enterprise content management platform. This latest release, featuring new dynamic case management capabilities, helps SpringCM customers deliver more consistent execution, enhance team productivity and increase management visibility of key business processes.

The new release of the SpringCM platform makes it easy and affordable to quickly and securely organize teams, tasks and content by using a simple but powerful checklist metaphor to drive such applications as new account openings, vendor on-boarding and audits. In addition, the new release helps executives and mobile workers perform their jobs more efficiently with new mobile support for iPad that not only leverages an intuitive-gesture interface, but also gives access to powerful cloud capabilities such as full-text search of corporate-content repositories.

As organizations increasingly look to address the gaps left by standard ERP and CRM applications, industry analysts note that these organizations see the need to provide more consistency, visibility and decision-making for knowledge workers. Traditional ECM and BPM approaches are described as too complex and expensive to meet the ease-of-use and responsiveness needed for knowledge workers who accomplish a variety of tasks with fewer and fewer resources while possessing unique organizational knowledge that can’t be explicitly mapped in workflows or business rules.

Sharlyn Lauby, a writer for Open Forum, recently wrote an article called "5 Challenges for Human Resources in a Digital World" which shares the automation challenges that HR departments face today. Sharlyn explains that an array of automation tools is available to HR professionals; however, the adoption of this technology is slow. A great way to overcome computerization issues is to implement an intranet to share and store human resources information digitally.

Once an intranet is up and running, there are exceptional applications that can make HR documents and polices accessible to all business sectors securely.

Justin Olson from the Utah Credit Union, who has been on our intranet software since 2004, created two unique time-saving Human Resources tools on his intranet:

Non-salaried employees clock-in using Hyperlinked logos that are connected to their external time tracking system. Hours worked are tracked through one site so that HR does not have to login to another system. 

Full time employees have a Human Resources widget for health benefits, medical, dental and 401K plan information. Justin said that providing all of the proper documentation in a central area has freed up Human Resources because less people have questions when all of the forms are easily available on the site. 

Practical Intranet HR Tools that can be utilized

• Encourage employees to use the intranet by solely providing HR forms and policies on the intranet
• Use the vacation application to track and manage absence requests from employees.
• Create HR e-forms; all files can be stored and managed in this secured area
• Manage employee course registration with the training application
• Obtain user feedback by adding comments and ratings to the bottom of each widget or application that you create. This way, employees can respond on how things are working.
• Utilize the anniversary and birthday widgets so employees can respond to their coworker’s special occasions

These are a few of the great ways that an intranet can automate HR in a protected and organized manner.  How has your company enhanced Human Resources capabilities via your intranet?

I received an email earlier today introducing me to Foswiki. This free and open source wiki is a fork that began in late 2008 of another wiki you may know by the name of TWiki. Foswiki is positioning itself as the ideal collaboration tool for your project , team or business.

The sender of the email also wanted me to bring attention on the fact that Foswiki 1.1.3 has been released recently. Foswiki 1.1.3 is a release that adds more than 150 bug fixes and improvements making it better than the already stable 1.1.2. Upgrade package is available for upgrading from any earlier 1.1.X version to 1.1.2.

Some of the improvements in this version of Foswiki include:

• Facelift of the history user interface
• Update to the Wysiwyg editor TinyMCE to 3.3.9.3 and further improvements of the Wysiwyg editor has been made
• Improvement of the UI for managing webs
• Default jQuery is now 1.4.3. JQueryPlugin’s form plugin form is upgraded to 2.49 and jquery-ui is upgraded to 1.8
• Fixes in the access controls for renaming attachments
  

"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."

- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way,  AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.