Some common applications allow staff to:

• process pay and leave submissions
• log support calls with IT help desk
• order uniforms.

Other more complex applications may:

• calculate superannuation termination payouts
• stock levels of exhaust pipes in the factory in Brazil.

Applications can be:

• fully integrated
• stand-alone
• provide front ends to back end databases.

While applications are sometimes developed by intranet teams, they are more often developed by other IT teams or external software vendors. Intranet teams may have little influence on how these applications are built.

[September 2010 article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

Their needs were fairly straightforward:

• Take documents stored in the RMS, select the desired ones via the CMS, and publish them seamlessly to the public website.
• Locally cache copies of the documents to reduce the impact on the RMS, and automatically refresh the local copy when the RMS version is updated.
• Allow site visitors to fill in online forms, and store this data directly in the RMS to meet recordkeeping requirements.

It’s lucky that this project has been going very slowly, as a year ago (when they last had time to consider getting a new CMS), there were almost no products in the market that could meet this need out of the box. Thankfully there are now a (small) handful of solutions that can do this, mostly Australian-developed products.

This is a common requirement, amongst government agencies, local councils, and compliance-driven firms. This would be slam-dunk during the sales process for these types of organisations. At yet, capabilities in the CMS marketplace are weak at best.

Why do more CMS products not offer simple integration with records management systems?

When they do have this capability, why don’t they market it?

Post 1 of 10. This is the first of a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

Workflow inbox and more
CRS Australia (Australia)

CRS Australia provides vocational rehabilitation services and assistance for people with disabilities, injuries or health conditions.

The CRS intranet, CRSNet, is a central channel for this dispersed organisation, and is tightly integrated with SAP. It provides detailed information and advanced functionality for staff and managers, wrapped within a seamless user experience. For CRS Australia employees, CRSNet is designed to be the single online operating environment.

It is the integration with SAP that is so remarkable (and unusual). It allows a range of powerful features to be delivered, including:

• CRSNet workflow (top-right in the screenshot above) provides a single task interface for common managerial tasks in SAP, as well as thirteen other intranet-based application. Updated in real-time, this gives a seamless mechanism to track and complete tasks.
• Managers dashboard that integrates with financial information in SAP to provide key KPIs as easy-to-read graphical displays. These are presented at the top of the homepage for relevant managers, ensuring they are always in mind.
• Powerful staff directory that uses HR information in SAP to automatically display staff holidays, public holidays and figures for management. At a glance, a manager can see when their team is available, and this information is always up to date.

Integrating with SAP eliminates duplicated information management, and eliminates much of the need for staff to manually update details. SAP as the back end, intranet as the front end, this is something that every organisation should be doing, but few are (as yet).

(For full details, obtain a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

A common pattern when you want to present highly structured, relational data on a website alongside managed content is to manage those data outside the CMS and then use the CMS to organize and augment them. I have seen this pattern used for years but it didn’t occur to me until Will Ezell (from dotCMS) mentioned that this was a direct application of the Decorator Pattern.

(Warning: this article is fairly technical in focus.)

Over time, more sites started to include a range of rich interactive functionality. This included publishing content from a database, providing online ‘calculators’, or incorporating interactive Flash-based elements.

The immediate challenge was working out how best to create and manage these sites. Many sites ended up being entirely custom-developed, including both the front end and back end.

Then products such as portals came along, offering a single platform through which all functionality could be delivered. These were particularly popular on intranets, promising to simplify the delivery of interactive features.

Content management systems also became richer in their capabilities, providing much more than page publishing out of the box. They too offered a development platform for custom development.

Organisations are now confronted with many different ways of delivering custom code and interactive features on a site. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.

This article outlines three major approaches, and summarises the characteristics of each.

In practice, these can be mixed, and individual circumstances will dictate which approaches fit best. The goal of this article is therefore to provide a guide for decision making, and to encourage further research.

[February KM Column, read the full article]