Combined Website and Intranet Solution

Most medium to large sized companies struggle (to some degree) to make the right information available to the right people at the right time. Also they need to improve the ability of people around the company, possibly in different regions and sometimes including external resources to work together.

While email was an improvement over paper based communications, email volumes can grow to become difficult to manage; it is counter productive to have your employees working with their emails most of the day instead of their jobs - the tail is wagging the dog.

In addition there is often another major email headache in terms of the impact of large volumes on the company network/LAN - especially with file attachments, which can be very large, or have multiple versions and copies floating around unmanaged.

The problem with many copies of each document in many places is not only the masses of wasted storage, but the risk of obsolete versions being used and causing embarrassment or loss to the company.

Here are a few of the many uses of a typical Intranet ...

Publish company policies & processes in one easy to locate place. Include an FAQ section. All of this will reduce the HR and other department's workload and help standardise.

Have all the company forms available online, sent automatically to the right department after being completed. For example annual leave requests, submitting expense claims...

Maintain a single source of company contact details - a 'rogue’s gallery' with all contact information and search capability, manager & department links etc. Just click to send an email to individuals or groups....

Educate! Publish blogs, integrate an online training package (we can do that for you). Have the company newsletter online, including the ability to go back into the archives. Have a bulletin board to publish company notices, details of important events etc., easily make information available to staff to reduce gossip and speculation.

Take surveys - integrate a simple to use survey system to quickly and easily gauge the staff's opinion and be able to publish the results. This could be used on the external website to survey clients / customers as well.

Have a discussion board or forum - to promote discussion within the company.

Maintain a calendar with important company dates - such as launches, training courses, reporting dates, pay dates - anything you want the company to be able to find online instead of forgetting or having people answering the same question many times.

Add a simple 'help desk' ticket system (we can do that for you as well), where the ticket is automatically allocated to the right person/department by subject.

Have a number of elegant photo galleries, which different departments or people can maintain themselves. These could also be available to external clients or on the web generally.

All of these can be placed either in the Intranet, on the website - or both.

Technology First:

(At Simply Good we much prefer a business driven IT solution)

There are some highly automated and full functionality products on the market that can be employed to manage the above types of issue, such as IBM's W3 and Microsoft's SharePoint - plus many others.

These 'premium' products are typically very expensive, costly to maintain after implementation, and implementation can take from 6 months to a number of years.

Typically specialists are need to configure the wide range of options available, and specialists are also needed to maintain the package and the Intranet produced from it - ongoing maintenance can thus add significantly to the overall cost of ownership. If this is the route you are going then fine, but please be very careful to choose the right package because it's the type of decision that once committed to, cannot easily or cheaply be changed.

A danger to be aware of is that there is often so much 'wow' functionality in these packages, that you can loose sight of your actual business goals and end up implementing functionality for it's own sake, especially if the project is run by 'techies' rather than the business.

Business First:

Logically if the business is to drive and own the Intranet, the tools must be able to be used by the business with a minimum of training, and with technical assistance limited only to the initial implementation of the software and resolving problems that are technical in nature.

The groupings within your organisation (department, project etc.) must be able to manage their own section of the intranet with minimal inter-dependence, but also be able to overlap in a simple way when required. Standards need to be simple and effective, but not limiting.

In short the business must be able to focus on the content and not be distracted too much by the technology in use.

This is as easy as it sounds!

Simply take a good Content Management System (CMS) - easy to use but powerful enough to satisfy most needs for either an Intranet or the company website.

Make sure the CMS employs a modular approach so that adding on additional functionality can be as simple as integrating a software module, or if there is nothing available that satisfies a stringent set of requirements - build your own module.

Finally make sure that the developers of the CMS have an on-going commitment to enhancing and improving the CMS - so as to keep up to date with new developments in business and technology both.

We believe that in ACE.corp we have exactly that.

Our CMS (ACE.corp) continues to be developed - and minor releases are free. ACE.corp is regularly enhanced to fix any bugs or inconsistencies, but especially to keep abreast of the latest developments in technology and business.

We also supply a variety of additional functionality (plug-ins or add-ons) that come in 4 forms:

Type 1. Modules that are already fully integrated with ACE.corp, for reasons of popularity.
Type 2. We have a list of 3rd party modules that satisfy our standards and approach, and that we have previously integrated successfully with ACE.corp - so we know we can do the same for you.
Type 3. There are a huge number of modules for all sorts of applications available today - and there will be more tomorrow. We can integrate pretty much any stand alone software into your Intranet, although it will obviously have it's own admin screens etc. But we can make sure it is completely integrated from the user's perspective - it will look like just another page.
Type 4. Custom built. We can build pretty much any software to your specifications, or integrate software that you had built yourselves or by a third party.

Type 1 includes:

> A simple web form builder.
> A simple database management tool - you can view or edit database records, you can also easily load to and from Xcel or CSV files (There is a backup and recovery tool as well :-))
> A Simple photo gallery
> Basic traffic statistics
> An event calendar
> A file manager - load files to and from the server
> A simple site search facility
> Google's Web Analytics

Type 2 includes:

> BLOG manager
> FAQ manager
> Shopping Carts
> Ticket management systems (help desk)
> Forums, bulletin boards, discussion boards
> Event management
> Enhanced photo galleries
> Automatic site map generator (website use) that updates Google and Yahoo every time you add / rename or delete a page.

If your company is already using email and working with electronic documents (Microsoft office etc) - then there is no reason not to take the bulk of your paper into the electronic age as well. A very useful module to add to your Intranet if you process a lot of paper, is a Document Management system (DMS).

All documents could be scanned on entering the company and thereafter managed as an electronic document, with the additional usefulness of the DMS to simplify the processing and minimise the cost and time of processing. Most documents within a company are either scanned or copied at some point, so the cost of doing this can be viewed as negligible - although there will be some gains because the scanning will be more structured and purposeful.

To a large degree the DMS will enable your company to automate the routing of documents, also it can be configured to add properties ('Metadata') to the documents as they are scanned; some manual intervention is going to be certain, but almost certainly much less than is currently required (How many 'hands' does each document really go through? How long does it take and what is the impact of delays?)

The other main benefit of a DMS is in finding - documents can be searched electronically based on their properties, destinations, a variety of dates...and more. The searching is now at electronic speed and with a degree of completeness not possible for people.

The DMS has many additional features - too numerous for this page - suffice it to say that a combination of an experienced installation and a little staff training can:-

> Significantly lower the risk of documents being delayed or even lost
> Significantly increase the chances of a document reaching the correct destination, including multiple destinations without needing to be copied
> Provide audit trails, for example who saw a particular document and when
> Reduce the load on the network because documents will be stored centrally and accessed less often - because of increased accuracy in identifying the correct audience
> Reduce the problems of storing paper documents (labour costs, effective filing, retraining new staff because of personalised methods of document handling, storage costs, fire hazards, finding documents - especially if old, damage through use and abuse)
> Reducing the effort around compliance
> Increase the organisation's ability to survive a disaster - imagine if some or all your paper documents were lost in a fire, flood or other disaster.

KISS (as most people know) stands for 'Keep It Simple, Stupid'.

An extraordinary number of projects, especially Intranet projects, have failed because of over-complexity, or being over-ambitious.

Another well-known maxim is How to eat an elephant? Answer - one bite at a time.

With our CMS and approach to Intranet projects, we can have you already using a basic Intranet within a week or two, instead of months.

With usage comes experience; with experience comes understanding - and a surer sense of what is really needed, and what is needed next. This reduces the risk of rework, priority clashes and of buying stuff you later find you don't really need.

The Content Management System / Document Management System discussed in the above points will satisfy most genuine company requirements. More importantly, the modular approach means that your company will be able to start Simply and expand from there in a series of easily managed improvements - at your own pace.

Perhaps just get one or departments going the first weeks - to get a better feel for how best to achieve the overall company goals. Add the blogs, databases and other modules, as you need them - and not trying to implement it all in one 'big bang', or waiting for phase I of a long project to complete before there is anything usable.

Whatever approach you prefer - we can fit in with it and hold your hands to the degree that you feel comfortable with - some companies are more computer literate than others.

And what if your company eventually outgrows the CMS / DMS ? Then you have a polished prototype to use as requirements for whatever step you want to take next. What can be bad about that?

The corporate version of ACE looks exactly like ACE to the user, and is a full-function content management system with both Intranet and website building capability - completely appropriate for medium to large companies. Your company can thus build both a Website PLUS an Intranet - with the same powerful but easy to use package.

ACE Corporate also has a lower price tag than the premium Intranet packages and is generally very low in maintenance requirements. We licence ACE for corporate based on simultaneous logins - for example if you have 25 people in your organisation that might manage content at some point, but you estimate that not more than 5 will ever be active at the same time - then you only pay for 5 licences, not 25. We are sure that our prices are competitive enough that we would outsell our competitors - even if we did not have as good a toolset as we do :-)

ACE can be largely self-administrated, but we provide appropriate levels of support. ACE can be installed in-house, or we can host it externally for you on business quality hosting - in general, this will save you both in labour and server capacity.

With ACE you can create any groupings (departments, projects, regions etc.) and assign multiple user logins to one or more groups. You can then link any group to any combination of pages on your Intranet or Website. On any page it is extremely simple to link to (or embed) documents, multi-media files, images - files of all types.

With this Simple approach, you can ensure that the right people have the right access to the right information - and it doesn't require a degree to manage.

Why email a file, when you can provide a simple link instead - also making it easier to manage versions.