Intranet software creator HyperOffice recently announced the general availability biggest ever upgrade to its HyperOffice Collaboration Suite in its 10 year history. The announcement comes after a 6 month beta involving rigorous testing and thousands of users. HyperOffice claims to be the most comprehensive online collaboration and intranet toolkit laser focused towards small businesses. It includes intranet creation tools, a document manager, an integrated business email service, wikis, online meetings, project management tools, surveys, mobile access features and more. 

The new upgrade rebuilds the entire suit ground up in AJAX, adds a revamped publisher tool, color coding for calendars, a new email client design, wikis, push messaging for mobiles and more. 

Sounds like a good deal. Do check it out! 

I came across a great article on Intranet Journal about how a company can improve intranet software adoption.  Without much ado, these are as follows:-

1)  Allow user created content - Rather than a top-down information broadcasting approach, users should be allowed to upload their own content. That way, users will have a greater stake in the intranet, and a greater feel of involvement. If you are worried about content quality, you can put a review system in place.

2)  Allow content comments - User commenting is a feature people are very used to in their usage of consumer internet products and sites. Enabling user comments is another great way to engage and involve employees, and spur discussions.

3) Consider viral content - This is another lesson from the consumer internet world.  For example, semi work related content - a Dilbert comic strip relating to office related issues. Such content is really popular with users, and they are likely to share it with others, attracting more users to come to the intranet in turn. 

4) Use a Microblog. Using twitter like microblogging features  is good for users who are averse to a content heavy intranet, especially novice users. Microblogging features allow them to quickly look at latest company information and news.

5) Stop selling and start teaching.  Companies sometimes spend just too much time marketing their intranet. Conducting training sessions, and actually showing employees how the intranet will help with their work is likely to improve engagement. 

6)  Focus on users and processes. This one goes without saying. Don't focus on intranet tools, but emphasize how these tools can help employees with their work, and help streamline business processes.

Great pointers. Go ahead and implement them in your company!

I read a great article by Mark Morrell on "Five steps to a good intranet wiki/blog". Useful as a new intranet initiative may be, doing it wrong invariably leads to it gathering dust, with employees not engaged and involved. Here are Mark's prescriptions to make your intranet wiki initiative a success:-

Sponsor

The sponsor needs to be someone in a powerful position. This will make people stand up and take notice, and give the initiative importance. Know the stakes and objectives of the sponsor, make sure they're in line with yours. 

Culture

An open, flat and communicative organization is most likely to succeed in these initiatives. Mechanistic organizations with strict hierarchies wont be very open to wikis ad blogs. 

Technology

You need to agree with your IT partners on the technology to use.  Your intranet software should be cheap. But in from the IT department is critical and this will help with that. 

Plan

Start small with your wiki, don't be too ambitious. Rather than spending too much time and effort testing an elaborate wiki, it is best you start live with a small wiki.  Just have one template for users to contribute.  Invite people who you know have a need or interest from different parts of your organisation to test it out.   

Next

If the beta testing is successful and the objectives are being  met you then have the justification to develop it further for wider use.  If you need to apply for funding you have evidence to support from request.  Again, keep the next stage small to start with, publicise with users who will benefit or be interested and WILL contribute.  Sit back and watch it grow but……….make sure you respond to any feedback from users so that continues.

I came across a very enlightening article on the intranetjournal.com site titled "The Intranet Model: Strategy for Success". The article lists our four main objectives of an intranet:-

1) Communications -- e.g. News and events

2) Business Processes -- e.g. Absence Booking workflow

3) Knowledge Management -- e.g. Best Practice documentation

4) Collaboration -- e.g. Cross-department working group discussion board

According to the article, early intranets were mainly communication driven, but slowly evolved to include productivity tools to encompass these other areas.

Let us assess HyperOffice, a popular web based intranet software on these four counts.

Communication - HyperOffice has an inbuilt email tool, as well as has the ability to publish company events, announcements and news on the group dashboard.

Business Processes - They have an inbuilt database management tool, which enables users to set up automated workflows for common business processes like lead tracking, order processing etc. It may be argued that the tool lacks sophistication, but on the other hand, their target market - small businesses - don't need to set up very complex workflows, and ease of use is a very important factor for them.

Knowledge Management - HyperOffice includes document storage features, and the ability to customize the structure and content of group pages from which links can be provided to specific documents. It may be noted that it is not sufficient to simply have knowledge stored away in a document repository. It is equally important to provide content around knowledge and make it more compelling for users. The ability to create customized group pages with links to documents goes a great length in acheiving this.

Collaboration - HyperOffice includes the ability to collaborate on documents with features like versioning, notifications, document locking etc. They also include th ability to collaborate through wikis, a popular modern collaboration technology.

All in all, HyperOffice does account for itself pretty well against the criteria of the internet model.

HyperOffice recently announced the private beta of its award winning online collaboration software, which rebuilds the entire suite ground up in AJAX. According to company sources, the new version is a result of 2 years of rigorous R & D conducted on tens of thousands of HyperOffice clients scattered around the world.

The company is specifically targeting the small business end of the now explosive online collaboration market which includes players like Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS, SalesForce Chatter, IBM LotusLive, WebEx Mail and Acrobat.com. The company brings one of the most comprehensive feature sets in the market, and certainly the most comprehensive in the small business segment, integreating email, collaboration, database applications and online meetings in a single solution.

According to Shahab Kaviani, VP Marketing, HyperOffice, there are many good collaboration solutions in the market, but most of them are "point solutions" meaning they serve only one aspect of the collaboration problem - calendars, document sharing, project management etc. Using multiple solutions leads to confusion and the inefficiency of data lying in the compartments of different solutions. HyperOffice solves this problem by bringing most of your tools in a single solutions, where data and freely flow back and forth between different solutions.

This new developement has been widely recognised by the tech media, with coverage from eWeek, Readwriteweb.com, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, CMSWire and many other well known online publications. It is being seen as a formidable competitor for Google Apps and IBM in the small business market. Check out a video of their new version:-