Enterprise

People are increasingly interested in making healthy and environmentally friendly choices at work and at home, and your intranet can support this way of life. Use your intranet to engage and educate employees on greener lifestyles with our top ten tips.

Top Ten Tips for a Greener Intranet

Tip #1: Create a Green Community sub-site

Spearhead your campaign with a Green Community area of the intranet, and then add in collaborative apps like the ones below.

Tip #2: Suggestion box

"Enterprise collaboration projects are almost always risky propositions. Storing and sharing information, potentially across departments and across the world, holds unquantifiable rewards for the business. Yet, if these rewards can't be realized by individuals, then the project risks failure."

- Matthew Sarrel, Tapping the Positive from Social Networks for Enterprise Collaboration, eWeek, November 15, 2010

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a new study of the top five reasons off-the-shelf CMS and social intranet software offer clear advantages over custom-built solutions. The study demonstrates that the functionality and availability of off-the-shelf software makes in-house development obsolete in terms of total cost of ownership, security and associated risks.

• The Coveo Platform 6.5 was released today and includes real-time, personalized and interactive business analytics and dashboards.
• Coveo’s new, easy to configure dashboard widgets provide users with immediate access to 360-degree views of the information they need, across any number of repositories.

This week, Alfresco announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 for download. This new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform for social content management by delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management.

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a survey of the top-10 most popular intranet collaboration benefits that allow organizations to improve internal efficiency and raise workforce productivity.

Based on analysis of 1.000+ real-life installations of Bitrix Intranet among small and medium-sized businesses and many years of implementing social-enabled intranet solutions, Bitrix has shortlisted the most popular collaboration features.

The top ten list reflects the most-used intranet collaboration features and correspond to the most popular adoption patterns. Intriguingly, the priority of listings doesn’t match the wide-spread notion of the customer demand among SMBs. Indeed, task management, shared documents and content search are on the list but concede position to the seemingly less important features like presence tracking, instant messaging and meetings management. This is due to the fact that SMBs normally start the intranet implementation not with the most ‘famous’ features but rather those which are easy to adopt.

The survey confirms that SMBs are mainly interested in simple collaboration tools with the shortest adoption period. The organizations prefer step-by-step intranet adoption that starts from the most commonly used features and ends with heavy-weight functionality. In fact, this process may stretch over months depending on the organization’s readiness, internal governance and c-level support.

Considering the growing popularity of the intranet technology, Bitrix predicts that in the next year this list may undergo a major shift. Many organizations will be one step ahead in the intranet adoption and proceed with implementing more comprehensive collaboration features. At the same time, we believe the market will be notable for greater awareness of the benefits of intranets, as vendors provide better guidance to speed up the technology adoption.

To name names, Bitrix anticipates business processes and records management, social CRM and e-learning to become shortlisted. The leading intranet vendors have already integrated these features to let organizations ease the burden of third-party software acquisition, implementation and maintenance. At the same time, these are crucial tools for effective business management.

"Suffice it to say, we’re in the middle of one of the most important computing shifts in history. And as has happened before with other major paradigm transitions, new businesses will emerge to define and dominate markets."

- Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, 2011: The Enterprise Resets, TechCrunch, January 2, 2011.

In his well-known book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” which is regarded for its timeless insights, Robert Fulghum reviewed some basic lessons of life we all learned as children that are universally true, even at the places where we work and within our social interactions. There’s a reason we invest a good portion of our educational funds in early learning: what we absorb and come to believe during our formative years influences our thoughts and decisions throughout our lives.

If you haven’t thought about each of the ten timeless truths listed below in terms of your business process automation goals, it may be time to rethink your ECM strategy. The payoff for ‘getting it right the first time’ is significant.

Here they are, rephrased a bit to help you make the connection:

1. Remember that everything dies. Hamsters, mice, people, and even company projects have limited life spans. Routine business processes, too, ultimately outgrow or outlive their usefulness. Take time to put everything in perspective. What are your company goals? Are your processes still relevant and in line with your vision? Are there processes you maintain purely because things have ‘always’ been done a certain way? Is anything ripe for change?
    
2. Be prepared. Remember the first day of kindergarten? Probably not, but chances are good that you carried a backpack or bag with everything you needed to address the routine challenges of the day. If you’re investing in technology, give yourself and your staff the time and resources they need to be prepared. You can’t expect miracles from even the best software and hardware. However, if you give your people sufficient time for analysis, planning, and improvement, ECM technology can produce phenomenal results.
    
3. Play fair. Be considerate. Even if you’re starting with a small project, keep the company’s enterprise goals and other departments’ needs in mind. Although you need to remain dedicated to your own vision, being selfish about your needs, simply refusing to make your project transparent, insisting on your own way of doing things, and similar self-centered practices will hurt your company in the long run. You’ll also miss great ideas for improvement that others could offer. You may have terrific ideas and plans, but someone else’s contributions might help them to prosper more fully.

“In progress.” When it comes to government, we hear those words a lot. It’s no surprise: meeting the needs of a geographically large nation with diverse constituents is challenging. Change and progress require time…and patience.

Technology is one area where progress is evident. Change is afoot everywhere, from optimizing government websites for mobile devices, to coordinated healthcare services and discussions about creating a national dashboard to share meaningful information. The goals are familiar:

Yesterday, I received a press release from one of Liferay's marketing people. Instead of just publishing the press release, I thought I'd also include the part of the email that also introduces the product. This is a  good way for you to get an insider's look to how marketing relationships between a site such as CMS Report and the CMS companies are established. Kyle's introduction to the product actually peaked my interest into Liferay more than the press release and may help you consider Liferay as part of your enterprise solution.

Hi Bryan,

Liferay (makers of the Java open source portal that was recently voted a leader in Gartner's magic quadrant), has developed its own support issue tracker that is included in the Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Editions. Liferay used to use JIRA, but needed to make some tweaks to simplify the support process - so they built this using their own Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition.

Liferay is used by hundreds of thousands of developers; as Gartner reported in the report above, a "surprising amount" of enterprises ask Gartner about Liferay's portal.

Press release is below.

Thanks,

Kyle

Liferay Releases LESA to Enterprise Customers

Los Angeles, CA - November 30, 2010: Liferay, Inc., provider of the market’s fastest growing enterprise portal product, recently announced the availability of the Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA), a new multifaceted support issue tracker, designed to simplify and streamline the enterprise support experience for its customers. The web application, available through the Liferay Customer Portal, provides Liferay Enterprise Edition customers a clean and simple interface to improve interactions with the Liferay support team.

LESA features a simplified user interface that greatly improves the support experience for both developers and non-technical administrators. Customers will benefit from having one application that aggregates, organizes, and monitors disparate data and services in the support process. Customers can now search tickets by username, issue severity, due date, and other attributes. This will simplify how customers track open tickets and allows them an efficient escalation process. LESA’s ability to issue multiple assignees also improves productivity by permitting more people to work on a ticket at a given time.

“Customers who have tested LESA have been very pleased with the capabilities and have reported quicker and more accurate resolutions,” said Craig Kaneko, Liferay’s Director of Support and Subscription Services. “Customers report that usability and accessibility are much higher with LESA than what is available from other support systems, including those of the world’s largest software providers.”

Built entirely on Liferay Portal 6EE, LESA, is now available to all Enterprise Edition customers. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com.