The Noko Blog

Noko offers Umbraco open source content management system

2010-06-15T10:17:00.005+01:00

We’re really pleased to announce that after a lot of research we’ve adopted Umbraco as our open source content management system of choice.

Why Umbraco?

We selected it for several reasons:

Well written with great functionality
It is straightforward for site editors to use and offers powerful web content management capabilities
Doesn’t enforce any design restrictions
Provides Noko with an excellent (and cost effective) platform for delivering interactive web projects
Has a professional developer community (which we’ll be looking to actively support)
Has an excellent range of site implementations (http://umbraco.org/tour/sites-running-umbraco).
Is written in ASP.NET, which complements our implementation skills and experience

Why open source?

Open source offers a cost advantage of course but we’re also enjoying the approach and openness that a professional open source culture delivers. When it works (as it does with Umbraco), it works really well.

As experienced web developers with many years experience implementing web content management and collaboration projects it’s amazing to see how far open source .NET content management systems have come in the last few years.

Our next job is to start working towards Certified Solution Provider status!

If you’d like to learn more about the features the Umbraco team have recently uploaded an excellent set of videos:

If you'd like a demo of Umbraco's capabilities we'd be pleased to hear from you.

Revised website released for Touchstone Group

2010-04-19T12:39:00.005+01:00

Noko has successfully released a revised website for the Touchstone Group, reflecting their new digital marketing strategy.

Touchstone are a leading UK provider of business software and consultancy services. The company recently revised their strategy to focus on three key areas: Infor FMS SunSystems financial management, PROACTIS spend control and the Microsoft Dynamics range of business management software.

The Touchstone site is built on the Alterian CMC content management system. During the project the flexibility of the CMS made it straightforward for Touchstone to restructure the site and write new content whilst Noko concentrated on the design and interactive functionality.

Noko delivered a revised site design, navigation layout and homepage. In addition the content management system was extended with plug-ins to enable site editors to build relationships between products and supporting content including news, events, case studies, testimonials and downloads.

The new site has a home page and product area that create a highly focused experience for site visitors. The site also delivers a platform for flexible content management, enhanced search engine optimisation and implementing Touchstone’s social media marketing strategy.

The website can be viewed at http://www.touchstone.co.uk/

New Personal Injury website released for Field Fisher Waterhouse

2010-03-08T13:35:00.009Z

Leading European law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse has released a redesigned Personal Injury website, built by Noko and the Field Fisher Waterhouse marketing team, utilising the Alterian CMC content management platform.

Personal Injury is a competitive area of law so it is critical for Field Fisher Waterhouse to promote their PI website effectively and differentiate the professionalism and experience of the Personal Injury team in a crowded market.

The key to this successful new PI web presence is the ability to make regular content updates and build content relationships across the site. This capability was provided by the Alterian content management system (CMS), which provides the Field Fisher Waterhouse marketing team with in-house site ownership.

The new website also needed to:

Reflect Field Fisher Waterhouse's updated online identity and brand values
Deliver an effective platform for organic search engine optimisation and social media marketing initiatives
Provide comprehensive content yet still be intuitive for visitors to navigate
Build relationships between the services offered and the lawyers, news, cases and publications featured on the website

The new Field Fisher Waterhouse Personal Injury website can be viewed at http://www.personalinjury.ffw.com/

A guide to developing mobile/smartphone websites in Alterian CMC content management system (formerly Immediacy CMS)

2010-02-19T19:30:00.008Z

With the recent explosion in smartphone platforms we've seen a growing interest in building mobile websites and intranets. Developing a mobile site can be quite a challenge so we thought we'd put together a post on our experiences so far: content planning, design considerations, tips and tricks, plus information on how we built the mobile version of our own website using Alterian CMC (Immediacy CMS).

Noko are a partner for Alterian CMC and we've been building advanced B2B sites on the platform for several years.

We'll cover both general decisions that we made about the mobile version of our site, and also some quite specific instructions on how we set up the site in Alterian CMC.

Here's a link to our mobile site http://m.noko.co.uk, although you can also point your Smartphone at http://www.noko.co.uk and you should be redirected to our mobile site (more about that later on).

Content and Navigation Decisions

We started with the question: "which content can be re-purposed?" In other words; which content can we serve from the desktop version of our site directly to a new set of mobile Alterian CMC templates so that we're not managing two sets of content when we need not be? We're quite lucky that most of the content can be served to both the full site and the mobile site, but we did have to reorganise a table of data on one of the pages of our desktop site so that it was more adaptable to a small screen.

Our full web site has 6 main navigation options consisting of 11 words in total. We reduced this to 4 navigation options consisting of 4 words which gave us the option of keeping a horizontal navigation bar.

The next question was: "which content is inappropriate or needs to be replaced?" The result was a separate mobile-specific contact page, removal of some unnecessary content on all pages that hindered, rather than added to the mobile experience, and a review and cutting-down of content to make the home page more easily digestible on a mobile device.

The final question was: "what needs to be added?" We added a map, phone, Blog RSS, and "full site" links to the footer of all pages that take advantage of many modern phones' intelligent use of phone number links, Google maps links, and RSS feeds. The "full site" link is an important addition that I'll tell you more about later on...

Mix and Matching your Content in Alterian CMC

I can think of a few basic options of how to manage sharing or replacing your content between your full site and your mobile site in Alterian CMC. You can use one or all of these in combination:

Have the same page served through a mobile template
This allows you to edit a page once and for that content to update instantly on both sites
Create a second version of a page with mobile-specific content
Use this idea when the content you have is simply inappropriate to serve to a mobile device (long contact forms for example), and deserves to be rewritten from scratch.
Create a second version of a page and use the Alterian Shared Content plugin
In some situations you might need to have a separate version of a page (for example, where you must have different meta-data applied to the page on the mobile version of the site), but want to grab existing content so that you're only writing this content once. In this situation use the Shared Content Plugin to grab content from an existing page.
Create a completely separate web site
This is appropriate if most of your content needs to be re-written, or you need a separate team of mobile-aware people editing and reviewing content before it goes live. You could use the Immediacy Cross-site Shared Content plug-in to serve some content from your main site to your mobile site (see the caveat below)

A Note on Sharing content between sites

Be careful! Re-templating existing content or using the Shared Content plug-ins needs careful management. Be aware that you need to educate editors that some content they edit on the desktop version of the site will also be published to the mobile site. It's easy for an editor to accidentally publish a page which contains content that's too wide, or is generally inappropriate for the mobile site.

If you've built a completely separate mobile site and you're using the Cross-site Shared Content Plugin to pull content from your desktop site remember that anyone approving content for the mobile site will not be given the opportunity to review the shared content before it is published.

Creating Mobile-Specific Navigation in Alterian CMC for the Noko Site

We created a hidden page called "Mobile Main Navigation" in the Alterian CMC Editor and created our mobile navigation structure inside. We then used one of the Menu Plug-ins to render this navigation in the mobile theme templates by setting the plug-in's StartPage parameter to the Mobile Main Navigation page.

"Mobile Main Navigation" pages relate directly to the main navigation bar on the Noko Mobile site

On the Noko mobile site the Mobile Main Navigation section consists of 3 "link" pages (with our shortened titles) which link to existing areas of the site, and one page (our mobile-specific contact page) which contained our replacement content for the "Contact Us" page. This is an example of how you can mix and match your content between your main site and your mobile site; reusing some content, and making mobile specific versions of other content.

Creating the Alterian CMC mobile templates

Alterian CMC (the content management system we use for our website), handles multiple templates out of the box which Alterian call "themes". Originally designed with printer friendly and accessibility templates in mind, the "themes" feature can also be used for creating a mobile template (which we, unsurprisingly, called "mobile"). So step one is to copy your default theme and rename it "mobile" before starting development. To view your site in a different theme, just append ?theme=[the name of your theme folder] to the end of any Alterian CMC URL.

Start with a copy of your default template and rename it "mobile"

Next review every piece of XHTML in your mobile templates, stripping out anything that is not needed before starting to build your style-sheets. Be ruthless at this stage as you're saving bandwidth with everything you remove!

XHTML considerations

In the <head> of our templates we added the following tags:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; ">

<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true" />

<link href="images/apple-touch-icon.png" rel="apple-touch-icon" />

Viewport lets the device itself decide how wide it should set it's viewport in order to display the page. If you set the width parameter to a pixel value (width=480 for an iPhone), other devices tend to either ignore this or use it in an inappropriate way (and subsequently, what looks good on one phone looks either much bigger, or much smaller on other devices).

HandheldFriendly tells devices (in particular the Google spider) that this web site is handheld-friendly. In some situations Google will display a small mobile phone image next to a search result to indicate that a site is mobile friendly, although I honestly haven't worked out Google's logic of when this icon is displayed and on which devices!

rel="apple-touch-icon" is a link to a 57px by 57px PNG file that will be used as the icon if a user bookmarks the web site onto their iPhone screen.

You don't need to add the rounded corners or glossy highlight to your icon; the iPhone automatically creates those effects for you. (If you don't want those effects, you can specify a "precomposed" icon.) The icon should be named either:

"apple-touch-icon.png" or
"apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png"

Now is also a good time to set up a separate Google Analytics or other statistics tracking account if you want to track your mobile stats separately from your main web site.

CSS Style-Sheet Considerations

Once you have your bare-bones XHTML I would strongly recommend clearing any style-sheets and starting from scratch for two reasons. Firstly to encourage you to reconsider how every single element should both look and be built on a mobile device, from body text to headings to beautifully designed curved boxes. Secondly to encourage the building of a lightweight style-sheet that starts from the ground-up, rather than adding bandwidth-consuming overriding style definitions.

If you usually create several .css files in order to help you organise your CSS development, it's worth remembering that consolidating these into as few .css files as possible will reduce the number of HTTP calls needed to serve the page to a mobile device.

A good way to begin initial template testing is to view your development site in Safari appending ?theme=mobile the end of your home page URL to force Alterian CMC to serve your mobile template. You'll get an excellent approximation of what the site will look like on an iPhone. There are also plenty of mobile device emulators out there for Windows, Blackberry and Android phones. http://www.browsercam.com/ also offer a screen-shot service that now supports some mobile devices.

Use Liquid Layout

One method I would suggest when creating a mobile style-sheet to fit a variety of screen sizes would be to build your style-sheet as a liquid layout. This ensures that it can resize itself to each individual device's standard screen width and resize itself if a phone is rotated between portrait and landscape mode.

Use liquid CSS layouts to ensure your site works across different devices and orientations

By liquid layout I mean your main root DIV tag should not have a width associated with it, and all content DIVs within this DIV should also be left to resize themselves as appropriate.

Your layout will have to survive in widths from around 300 pixels to 500 pixels.

Stop the iPhone from resizing your text

The iPhone (and other Webkit based mobile browsers) will try and resize text to a more readable size if it thinks your text is too small (useful for when the iPhone is looking at web pages that are not optimized for mobile). As we're developing a specific mobile style-sheet your text should be set to a readable size anyway and you probably don't want the iPhone tinkering with it.

body{

    -webkit-text-size-adjust:none;

}

Resize Images Using CSS

If you are repurposing content originally intended for the full version of your web site then you may well have images within pages that are far too wide to fit on a mobile screen and push your liquid layout very wide.

If you have many large images like this then you should ask yourself whether you should serve smaller images for the mobile site, reduce the size of all images on your main web site, or create mobile-specific versions of problem pages.

If your large images are few-and-far between, and you understand that you are sacrificing bandwidth to make editing your site a less labour intensive process then you can use the following style-sheet rule to target all images within the main body of your pages in order to resize them appropriately:

#mycontentarea img{

    max-width:100px;

    height:auto;

}

A Note on Rounded Corners and drop-shadows

Rounded corners are a popular feature on many sites these days so it's possible that you (or someone you know) has a particular attachment to them. Creating rounded corners that work in every possible desktop-browser generally means one or more of the following:

Generating extra XHTML mark-up to hang images from (which is a bandwidth-hog)
Using JavaScript (which is not available on some Smartphones)

To avoid the above issues and have rounded corners that work on many of today's phones with minimal development costs you might wish to consider the CSS3 border-radius and box-shadow rules.

This technique will work on iPhone, Palm Pre and the very latest Google Android phones (with the use of the -webkit CSS selectors), and will degrade to clean, square-cornered elements on Windows Mobile or Blackberry. The inclusion of the CSS3 proposed rule should ensure that when these browsers catch up, they will start rendering these lovely additions. The -moz-border-radius rule is included as Mozilla offer a downloadable version of the Firefox browser for some Nokia and Windows Mobiles which uses the same Geko rendering engine as their desktop counterpart.

.roundedCornersAndDropShadow{

    padding:10px;

    border-radius:10px;           /* CSS3 */

    -moz-border-radius:10px;      /* Geko (Firefox) */

    -webkit-border-radius: 10px;  /* Webkit (Safari on iPhone, Newer Google Android phone browsers, Palm WebOS) */

    box-shadow: 5px 5px 6px #999;

    -moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 6px #999;

    -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 6px #999;

}

If you decide to go down this route, ensure your design still looks acceptable on Windows and Blackberry phones with squared off corners and no drop-shadows. There is an argument that rounded corners should not be attempted in any other way on mobiles as the development and testing costs involved in getting them to work in all phone browsers would be very prohibitive.

Mobile Device Detection and Site Redirection in Alterian CMC

Earlier I touched upon the need to detect mobile devices coming to your web site and forward them to your mobile web site. At Noko we've created a .Net-based extension to the Alterian content management system which manages mobile device detection.

If there is sufficient interest then we may offer this code along with some instructions and make it available to existing Alterian customers. Drop me an email at steve.attewell@noko.co.uk if you think you could make use of this code.

Here's what we're trying to achieve:

If I'm viewing www.noko.co.uk on my desktop nothing happens
If I'm viewing www.noko.co.uk on a mobile device then I got forwarded to the m.noko.co.uk mobile site.
When Viewing the mobile site I have the option of clicking on the "full site" link and, as I move from the mobile site to the full site, I see instructions embedded into the full site home page on how to always see the full site on my mobile device.

Here's how we did it:

On www.noko.co.uk (desktop site)

On the full, desktop version of our site we detect the browser's User-Agent and use the freely available Mobile Device Browser Definition file at http://mdbf.codeplex.com/ to see if the User-Agent is an appropriate Smartphone device.

If a Smartphone is detected then the visitor is redirected to http://m.noko.co.uk/default.aspx?theme=mobile

If mobile=NoThanks is detected in the query string on www.noko.co.uk then

a custom plug-in renders extra mark-up at the top of our homepage telling the visitor that they can bookmark the current page http://www.noko.co.uk/?mobile=NoThanks on their mobile device to always come to the full version of the site.
A session-cookie is set to stop the visitor being forwarded back to the mobile site during this session.

On m.noko.co.uk (mobile site)

To ensure that the mobile theme is always served on the mobile web site: If the sub-domain of the current site is "m" and the "mobile" theme is not being displayed, redirect the visitor to the current URL with ?theme=mobile appended.

Note: you should not enforce the "default" theme on the full version of the web site; doing so would potentially stop you being able to use other themes on your main site.

We added a link to the "full site" in the footer of all templates with the URL: http://www.noko.co.uk/default.aspx?theme=default&Mobile=NoThanks

In Conclusion

This overview should give you a good place to start when considering a methodology for creating a mobile site with Alterian CMC or any other content management platform.

I hope you now have some ideas for

Which content you can re-use and which content needs to be mobile-specific, or dropped altogether.
The beginnings of a practical development methodology and what needs to be considered when building the XHTML and CSS for your mobile site.
An idea of how you will treat mobile device users who visit your full web site, or do not wish to be forced to see the mobile version of your site.

If you are an existing Alterian CMC or Immediacy customer and are interested in the mobile device detection system we've built, drop me a line. If there is sufficient interest we will almost certainly make this development available to others in some form.

Enterprise wiki and blog example use cases

2010-02-15T17:26:00.004Z

Enterprise wiki and blogging software can be used to solve an extremely wide range of collaboration, knowledge management and communication challenges within an organisation. They’re so flexible, though, that it can be difficult to know where to start.

We’ve put together a few practical examples based on our client work, which are designed to help you out if you’re looking to introduce or extend the use of enterprise social software and concepts within your organisation.

(Note: We’re an Atlassian partner and there are mentions of the Confluence Enterprise Wiki and associated plug-ins below, but the usage examples will be of use whichever product you use)

Getting started

First off here are the three steps we recommend to clients:

Understand the capabilities of enterprise wiki and blogging software – It’s simple to get online accounts with most vendors to evaluate the software
Identify a business challenge or pain point related to collaboration, content publishing or knowledge management
Solve it with enterprise social software

Simple, right?

Practical wiki usage examples

Here are some help and ideas for points 2 and 3 above:

Current awareness publications

Overview: Many professional services firms (such as law, accounting and business consultancy) keep colleagues updated with developments within their practice or specialist area.

Business issues: The process for current awareness is usually ad-hoc between departments and often involves mass emails and various different document attachments. The emails often get sent to the wrong people, information is not centrally stored or archived and is difficult to search. Mass emails clog up email boxes and servers and there is no mechanism for adding commentary or additional resources which might be useful to colleagues.

Solution: Use a blogging platform to create and deliver current awareness and share the content via RSS news feeds, either direct to news readers or to your intranet. Consider adding social bookmark functionality so that colleagues can store and share their online links and related content firm-wide. Finally, ensure that content creators label articles effectively and encourage colleagues to comment on items and add their own related resources.

Benefits: Current Awareness publications become consistent across the organisation, centrally managed, easier to filter and search. Inbox clutter is reduced. The publications are more collaborative and evolve into a firm-wide knowledge base of articles, commentary and links to resources. The solution also introduces staff and fee earners to the concepts of labelling, commenting and social bookmarking. Effective post tagging enables trends to emerge over time.

Supporting field sales and support staff

Overview and issues: Staff working away from the office need access to a large range of information and resources. They also need organising and managing remotely.

Solution: The web based collaborative nature of a wiki makes it ideal for managing and collaborating with distributed colleagues.

Benefits:

Centrally organise and manage sales literature, sales techniques and experiences
Build client, product and competitor knowledge bases
Use the wiki to set and manage tasks (an interesting extension for Atlassian Confluence called TaskDoc (http://www.taskdoc.com) can help)
Manage reporting – Staff can use the relevant wiki spaces to submit reports and status information
Enable team collaboration –Remote colleagues can collaborate with each other
Support knowledge bases – Build searchable knowledge bases that expand with new knowledge and experience over time
Information and updates – Keep staff up to date with the latest news, information and updates

In addition most wikis use templated page designs that can be adapted to make them respond effectively over lower bandwidth networks (such as 3G) and via mobile devices.

Collaborative document creation and cross-department projects

Overview: There are many scenarios where a team needs to come together to collaborate for a client, an internal project or a sales bid.

Solution: The collaborative editing and management features of a wiki can make it an ideal solution.

Benefits:

Using a wiki can provide your teams with a much more effective way of working. As an example, a sales team working collaboratively on a bid can use a wiki project workspace to:

Manage and discuss customer intelligence and potential competitor bidsStore the ITT documents
Collaborate on the bid document itself
Gain and manage project/bid feedback
Manage task assignments, timescales and milestones (TaskDoc for confluence can help)
Share links to relevant resources

If you’re using Confluence it’s also possible to pull customer intelligence from SalesForce.com via a commercial plug-in from CustomWare

Once the project has been completed a project review team can assess the knowledge gained from the bid and store it for later use.

Managing knowledge bases for support, product information and manuals

Overview: In most organisations there’s a need to provide easy access to knowledge bases for everything from using the phone system to solving software support issues.

Solution: A wiki is an ideal way to build and manage knowledge bases that enable interaction and extension over time.

Business benefits:

Effective knowledge bases enable staff, partners and customers to serve themselves
Wikis can easily be updated with new issues, resolutions and knowledge
Effective labelling enables related information and common issue patterns to emerge
For support teams a wiki can be a great way of accessing technical knowledge bases, documentation and product downloads remotely when onsite with a client
The wiki can also be used to build documentation over time (I know that in an ideal world this shouldn’t happen but let’s face it – It does)

Note: Many of the examples above can also be amended to suit collaboration scenarios with suppliers and partners.

Final tips for encouraging buy-in from the business

Avoid using jargon – If you’re selling these concepts to the business (which you probably will be) it can be worthwhile avoiding the terms blog, wiki, enterprise social software and enterprise 2.0. Just concentrate on current challenges, solutions and benefits to the business.

Avoid using the term ‘social’ – Although I always think of the word social in terms of a social business culture that fosters collaboration and engagement, it’s worth noting many people instantly think of ‘socialising’ (or Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc) which generally has a negative impact.

Designing great email marketing - good inbox vibes

2009-12-09T14:49:00.008Z

I would be quite rich now if I had a £1 for every time I’ve received a piece of email marketing and thought, “Stupid people, don’t they know? Lots of little red crosses where the images should be, and no readable text, why should I waste my time. ” I often delete emails like this because I don’t have the time or inclination to download a load of images to view or, more importantly, to read an email.

The obvious conclusion is that I’m subscribing to the wrong lists I hear you cry, but no, companies that I am potentially interested to hear from, blogs I read, and websites I visit regularly are sending me information in a format that is not “working” for me or for them.

This is an example of a beautifully laid out image rich email from a company I have subscribed to, I can’t read any of it without downloading images!

So how as email marketers do we grab people’s attention in the right way in their email preview pane, during the half a second they glance at the email with their finger over the delete button?

1. Target your audience

I keep reading that the most important thing about email marketing is “Targeted Emails”, but what is a targeted email? If I have subscribed to your mailing list, or I’m a customer of yours, then I have an interest in you or your products, and that makes me part of your target audience. This is not the same as sending a “Targeted Email”. Think carefully about every angle of what you are sending; is the content interesting and valuable to the people you are sending to? Think about the layout and design; use cell background colours, and good clear headings that are meaningful and interesting. Think carefully about how your email will look in the Outlook preview pane, I know I’m not the only person who makes that critical delete button decision based on what I can see in the preview pane every morning!

2. Make sure that it can be read

If you’re going to the effort to send me something make sure it’s interesting enough to get me to read the email, more importantly make sure I CAN physically see and read the email content. All too often the content text is locked up in images, yes I could turn on images, but that’s not how I want my email set up. Make the content visible with images off, and make it worth my time.

Here’s a good example that I received recently of how not to do email marketing...

Being inbox-tastic

When tasked with designing an email template for the Noko Newsletters I spent almost 2 days carefully working out the design which might sound crazy when in the end it was such a simple design. Make sure you take your time testing in different email packages and spam checkers, and remember in the case of email marketing ....less is more.

The new template is a very basic table with text content - carefully written and informative content, I hastily add. There were only 3 images, one logo, one strap-line image, and one narrow header image for those people who do work with their images switched on. The design was kept to a narrow width (to fit in most preview panes), a clean content rich design that still works without any images switched on.

The resulting feedback has been fantastic, all of it positive, with requests to be added to the newsletter mailing list from people who were forwarded the email from colleagues who weren’t on our original mailing list.

This design worked well for a B2B communication, but you can still apply the same principles for an ecommerce email, you may need more images to back up your text, but let the key message be exactly that - TEXT!

Noko newsletter with images switched off, and with the images downloaded. The message is clear in both versions.

It’s all too easy to press the delete button – or worse UNSUBSCRIBE!

If I want something, anything from reference material to goods I’ll Google for it. When you make a decision to send me an email please send me some valuable information I can read without images switched on and don’t send emails just for the sake of sending them.

Remember : Why are you emailing? What is your message? Is it valuable information? And make it easy to read!

If you would like my help with your next campaign, please feel free to get in touch.

Combining SharePoint and Web Content Management to manage web publishing, data capture and collaboration

2009-10-26T14:54:00.000Z

We’re finding many organisations are adopting Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as their platform for managing documents, collaboration and processes.

As this adoption continues we’re seeing a growing requirement to ensure that other online services can integrate successfully with SharePoint.

We’ve recently been working with several clients to integrate web content management systems with SharePoint, enabling documents and list data to be viewed and manipulated within their wider website and extranet environments – The big payback here being the centralised management of extranet and website communication from within SharePoint.

It’s an interesting technology because it lets you combine the powerful document and list management capabilities of SharePoint with the excellent web publishing, standards compliance, site optimisation and interactive services provided by a good CMS – Useful if you don’t want to go to the development, infrastructure and license expense of delivering a full SharePoint environment to clients (or a particular group of employees).

We thought we’d share some of our experiences of how the SharePoint Connector for Alterian CMC (previously called Immediacy CMS) is being used and the value it can deliver, which you'll find interesting if you're currently using Alterian CMC and reviewing SharePoint, or are a SharePoint user interested extending SharePoint's reach out to your web and extranet sites.

Features overview

The main functionality provided by the SharePoint Connector for Alterian CMC is the ability to display and collect SharePoint lists data within your website, intranet or extranet environment.

The connector works in either live or disconnected mode to:

Export list data and documents from SharePoint and transfer them to your web environment
Transfer updated information from your web environment back to your SharePoint server and import it

Scenarios

Here are a few scenarios showing how we’ve used the technology:

1. Client extranet: Publishing, receiving and collaborating on documents

If you regularly collaborate or share documents with clients / partners outside your organisation you can manage this via a SharePoint document list exported to your extranet.

Screenshot: An exported SharePoint document list within an extranet environment.

Document lists can be displayed on your website or extranet and, if you let them, clients can also upload new documents or download, amend and return documents to you.

You can then use the notification and workflow features within SharePoint to be informed of items needing attention and manage any workflows or processes associated with a document.

You can also associate comments or other information with a document by adding custom fields to the SharePoint document list.

2. Form data management

Submitted website forms can be placed directly into SharePoint making the information easier to manage, process and audit.

Screenshot: An example event registration form based on a SharePoint list.

Screenshot: Results come directly into SharePoint and can be filtered by their status and contain additional fields to allow for internal processing.

Completed forms often have internal processes associated with them which can be managed within SharePoint, e.g.

Lead processing: you can use SharePoint to manage the contact process for new leads coming in from the website.
Event registration: you can export a view of a registration list from SharePoint to your website for completion by web visitors. You then use additional internal fields in the list and SharePoint Workflow to manage your internal processes on the completed registration forms, such as tracking follow ups, sending confirmation letters and printing attendee badges.

Screenshot of an exported SharePoint list being used as the basis of an email merge in word

3. Client extranet / intranet: Providing information and status updates

If you work with clients in situations where you need to provide regular status or performance updates these can be exported directly from a SharePoint list.

For example: project status updates can be delivered to clients by exporting a custom view from a SharePoint task list across to your extranet.

4. Custom development: Extranet user management

The SharePoint Connector for Alterian CMC provides a development interface that enables us to develop additional functionality and integrate it with SharePoint.

Example: extranet user management – One of our clients operates a range of extranets for several different user groups. New groups are added on a regular basis. Approving access requests from new applicants was a complicated process because each extranet is managed by a different person.

Solution: We developed a .Net role provider for the extranet that utilised the SharePoint Connector to enable extranet user accounts to be managed via SharePoint.

Access requests from new users are automatically added to a custom SharePoint list, enabling SharePoint workflows to route approval requests depending on the specific group access requested by the registrant.

Screenshot: Extranet user requests now come in to SharePoint for approval.

The biggest payback: streamlining website and extranet management

If your organisation has taken the strategic decision to use SharePoint internally then we're finding the biggest payback from a CMS based SharePoint Connector is coming in the form of streamlined site management. Managing your extranet becomes integrated into the flow of daily work processes, making it more straightforward to maintain larger extranets.

It will be interesting to see how the capabilities of SharePoint Connectors evolve, especially with the iminent arrival of SharePoint 2010.

Atlassian Mini Confluence for iPhone Review - Hands-on

2009-10-26T14:06:00.002Z

I've just installed and set up Atlassian's Mini Confluence for iPhone, linking it up to our Confluence wiki install. It's available now in the Apple App Store for £2.99.

On first-run Mini Confluence prompts for a username and password, and the web address of your Confluence installation. You need to enable the Confluence Remote API in your confluence install before the app can connect, and I needed to set up a VPN connection on my iPhone before I could connect to our company Confluence install.

Once you've logged in you're taken to your dashboard which, in Mini-terms, means a list of the latest content changes. Don't think of this as a copy of your web-dashboard that you may have heavily customised; here Mini Confluence give you a simpler window onto the latest content updates.

Along the bottom of the app you have quick links to Dashboard, Spaces, People, and (most importantly) Search.

Dashboard: List of latest content updates

Spaces: A list of the spaces to which you have access

People: A neat cork-board display with people's photos and names, along with a "Search people" box

Search: A very familiar search interface.

If you've ever searched and typed something on an iPhone, you can't go wrong here!

The first thing to appreciate is that this is not a fully featured Confluence editing and management application; it is a window onto your wiki giving you access to information you need when you're on the move. It seems quite acceptable to not want to administer your Confluence installation through an iPhone, but some may question the omission of the ability to edit content. However when you consider that you are getting quick, easy access to all your wiki content whenever you have your phone in your pocket the issue of editing becomes less important. In the future it would be good to see even a wiki-markup-only editor for those determined enough to write significant amounts of content on an iPhone which, in itself, would not be a pleasant experience no matter how good the interface.

You can, however, view and post comments on any articles in the iPhone's portrait mode which is a welcome feature.

Search

This is the important bit! The big question is: can I find content quickly and read it easily? The pleasing answer to this question is yes. The search facility is implemented simply, works perfectly, and is easy to use. It appears that Atlassian has concentrated on the most important aspects of why someone would want to access their corporate wiki which are finding colleagues and finding content fast and without fuss. This being the first version of Mini Confluence, any other criticisms aimed at the new app have to be balanced against the fundamentally simple search and viewing functions.

Currently the search box is very static, requiring the user to submit the search before seeing results. A future improvement would be to have a more dynamic search which filters the search results as you type in the same way that the full version of Confluence shows you relevant pages before you've finished typing. The Wikipanion app is a good example of this search method in action which works well even when restricted by a standard phone network connection.

Navigating around content

As I've said above, the main method of navigating around content you'll use is the Search option. In many ways you're forced to use this option as the structural element of Confluence is a bit hit-and-miss inside Mini Confluence. For instance, you can browse to a space and see the list of all content within that space sorted alphabetically. If you have the {children} macro on a page to display it's child pages you can navigate using that. However there is no breadcrumb, or indication of where you are within the wiki's structure, and the {pagetree} macro does not appear to render at all. An odd choice given that it is such a commonly used macro.

The lack of a breadcrumb looks like a space issue: an iPhone just isn't big enough to display where you are within the app, as well as where you are within the wiki, especially given how long some of the page names can be within a Confluence installation. It's a shame that the Pagetree macro is not supported though.

Overall you'll be searching for content rather than navigating around content, and you'll be consuming content rather than editing it. Mini Confluence handles searching and consuming of content very well indeed and I've already been using it to check information while off-site.

Wish list

In the future I'd like to see multiple log-ins for those users who have more than one Confluence installation and, given that search is the fundamental way in which users are required to navigate content, a more interactive search system that offers suggestions as you type.

As it is, Mini Confluence is well worth the price of admission if you need to review and comment on your content while out of the office.

You can find out more about Mini Confluence here. Or purchase Mini Confluence in the Apple Store here.

New logo, new identity, new website

2009-08-30T17:07:00.002+01:00

It’s exciting times for us here at Noko. We’re really pleased to be launching our new identity, strategy and focus on Enterprise 2.0.

Ever since Steve and I started the company way (way, way) back in the Autumn of 1995 we’ve always been fascinated with how the web can be used by business to improve communication and collaboration.

We originally started building websites for a somewhat sceptical client base (I’m sure I’ve still got my “What is the World-Web Web?” and “Why the Web is not passing a fad” presentations on a network drive somewhere), but quickly moved on to creating intranet and extranet applications that used the Internet to connect staff, customers and partners more effectively.

Web Content Management

We soon realised that manual website editing was becoming a bottleneck for many companies and so began a partnership with Immediacy and their excellent Web Content Management system (now named Alterian CMC), which enabled us to deliver far more useful and complex sites.

Enterprise 2.0

A while ago the rise of enterprise social software caused us to sit up and take notice. We’ve always been cautious of jumping on the next ‘Internet bandwagon’ but the more we investigated, the more we liked and the more interested we became.

We’re sold on enterprise social software

We're convinced that over the next few years the use of enterprise social software (Enterprise 2.0) will fundamentally change how many workers interact with their colleagues and the wider business world, removing many of the more rigid and traditional collaboration barriers to create a more collaborative, knowledgeable, mobile and people oriented workplace.

That’s why we’ve refocused Noko around a new strap line of Knowledge. Collaboration. Communication.

Ok, but what's the business value?

On our travels we meet many organisations facing similar business challenges:

Information overload
Managing an increasingly mobile and geographically distributed workforce
Managing team collaboration and information sharing
Capturing the knowledge, experience and wisdom of the organisation
Managing complex intranets, extranets and websites

Applied intelligently Enterprise 2.0 will help solve these challenges and deliver more knowledgeable, collaborative and profitable organisations.

We’re looking forward to taking both existing and new clients on this new journey so if you’re interested in finding out more why not get in touch.

Using a throwaway wiki to get I.T. and management buy-in

2009-08-04T13:01:00.014+01:00

So how do you get your organisation to think seriously about implementing an Enterprise Wiki? Why not take it upon yourself to take the first step?

Using a throwaway test wiki is a proven wiki adoption technique also known as Flying Under the Radar (FUR), or the Wiki Ninja technique.

Jakob Nielsen recently posted the results of his research into Social Networking on Intranets and how large companies are coping with the buzz around Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

He makes an interesting point about the most successful initiatives:

[...] in our studies, successful social media initiatives at many companies emerged from underground, grassroots efforts. This might be surprising, as companies often keep a tight rein on technology initiatives and force all employees into a standard desktop build, right down to a mandated version of the Web browser. Underground adoption of off-the-shelf Web 2.0 tools seems a little out of character, but users are more likely than executives to see the tools' value and translate that value to an internal use.

...He goes on to explain that his research into organsiations such as Sun Microsystems, BT, IBM and AXA UK has thrown up the following points that are of particular interest for those of us striving to encourage adoption of social software within large organisations:

Underground efforts yield big results
Frontline workers are driving the vision

In this post I'd like to encourage the use of these guerrilla tactics in order to introduce the concept of a Wiki to your organisation. We'll be looking at how to implement one without stepping on the toes of your management or IT team, and some practical uses of a Wiki in an enterprise environment.

What is a throwaway test wiki?

If you're interested in introducing team wiki collaboration into your company but are finding it hard to convince others of the usefulness of a wiki, or lack experience in how a wiki might be used in practice you should try setting up a throwaway test wiki.

The basic idea is to:

set a wiki up "under the radar" (i.e. no IT dept or executive involvement) using one of the many free or low cost on-line services
test it's practical use with a small team and project (or even just part of a project)
get other team members familiar with the concept of a wiki
use the experience to provide a case for wiki adoption to senior management
be able to throw the wiki away (after exporting any experience or knowledge you want to keep)

The concept of the wiki being throwaway is important for 2 reasons:

It encourages experiment; it doesn't matter if you try something and it ends up not working because you're going to throw it away anyway
If your I.T. dept find out that you've been storing project information outside of the normal channels you can reassure them that you are making regular copies of the definitive version of the information contained on your test wiki and storing it in the normal way.

Setting up your throwaway test wiki

We'll suggest some wiki services in a later post (if you have any ideas, please do comment), but you're looking for a free-to-register hosted wiki service that will allow you to:

Add several team members to a workspace
Create wiki pages that your team can collaborate on
See document history (check how easy it is to see the differences between each document revision)
Export, or at least copy-and paste the content of your pages back into the work-flow that your organisation regularly uses

What are you going to use it for?

First, a caveat: Be sensitive to your organisation's information policy. Ask yourself if the information your team will be working on is too sensitive to have a copy of it stored outside your company's network. Pick a scenario that is suitably safe!

I'm going to suggest that you try collaborating on a document that requires several people's input. For a Noko project, for example, we set up pages for initial project requirements and the specification document. From there several people can collaborate on the document, or make comments for others to review. So something like a project spec, or a piece of documentation would be a good bet - anything that several people need input on and may well get updated over an extended period of time.

During the project, rather than discussing changes to spec over email, update the project spec wiki page and drop an email to all the team members if you need to notify them of the change (or get them to subscribe to the RSS feed of that wiki page). You may also find your free hosted wiki offers to email your team for you each time you make a change.

Choose the wiki content carefully. Ideally you want to ensure everyone on your team can edit the wiki page, that it's appropriate for them to do so, and you don't need to keep registering new users who are outside your core team. For instance, if you run a development team and want to use the wiki to prepare meeting agendas / notes then using it for your development meetings that involve your close team members would be fine. However if you start using it for a high-level project meeting you might find it inconvenient to start giving lots of other people access to your test wiki to whom you are not so close.

Encourage your team to use the wiki for any other documents that they wish to collaborate on.

Team rules

If required, take a regular version of the wiki content and save it outside of the wiki in the way your company expects you to save that information. This is obviously something you wouldn't need to do if you had an official company wiki, but you're covering yourselves here. Internally you may as well keep the project appearing as normal as possible. You're using the wiki as an experiment on the side, not a replacement (yet!). If you explain it this way to your IT department before you start, and tell them you won't need any support from them, and you're going to throw it away afterwards in order to come to them and ask for advice on a corporate wiki they will likely love you forever!
Experiment! You're going to throw the wiki away afterwards so encourage your team to experiment with any sort of collaborative document, even if it ends up not working. Set up a page on the wiki that lists the scenarios that your team have tried, whether they did or didn't work, and get the team to contribute their findings to that page.

Using a throwaway wiki to get I.T. and Management buy-in

Once you have your Wiki in place and have proved it's worth as a tool you are in a much better position to explain the benefits to others using practical use examples that are relevant to your own organisation. It's time to take the Wiki higher up the ladder to sell the concept with a view to, at the very least, promote discussion, or in a perfect scenario have your organisation begin the process of discovering how a Wiki can be of use before implementing their chosen Enterprise Wiki.You may even be able to use the Import function of the new Wiki to import your work from your throwaway Wiki project.

If you have already implemented a Wiki in this way, please let me know how it went and if you have any insights to add.

Good luck!

Enterprise 2.0 Case Study: Intel’s Enterprise Social Computing Strategy

2009-08-11T09:45:00.010+01:00

An interesting new whitepaper from Intel’s Social Computing team discusses their approach and experience of planning and delivering the first stage of their enterprise-wide social software initiative.

Intel views enterprise social software as central to addressing some of the most important organisation-wide business challenges facing their business: improving collaboration, sharing information, creating professional networks and fostering innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 planning

As well as covering key business challenges the case study also discusses the team's approach to finding the current collaboration pain points of their colleagues, achieving management support for initiatives, assessing the risks and (most importantly) a review of the functionality.

It’s definitely a worthwhile read if you’re currently planning a business case or researching how enterprise social software can be exploited within your own organisation.

Conclusion: Phase one was a “moderate success”

During the initial stage Intel limited itself to delivering improved versions of existing capabilities such as blogs and forums, and starting to add some professional networking capabilities.

The overall conclusions are interesting. The project team report that the first phase has been a ‘moderate success’, citing improvements in the dissemination of information and innovative ideas as the main benefits (they discuss how one particular blog post generated an overwhelming response from throughout the business).

Delivering a subset of social technologies may provide limited value!

The Intel team have concluded that it's extremely important to implement the full 'social computing stack' to achieve the maximum enterprise-wide value, and have decided to accelerate delivery of the project.

Planning for success

It’s worth bearing the above point in mind when planning your own projects – If you’re beginning your enterprise 2.0 journey by implementing an enterprise wiki (for example), it is important to try and find specific collaboration challenges within your business to solve and set realistic expectations of the results.

That way you'll be able to gain management buy-in to expand the implementation and introduce enterprise 2.0 to a wider audience - and that's when you'll start to see the true business value of enterprise social software: an environment where colleagues can share knowledge and expertise, collaborate effectively, find experts and build wide ranging professional social networks.

You can download the full case study here from the Intel website.

If you're currently researching enterprise social software it's also worthwhile taking the time to review some of the many enterprise 2.0 tools on offer and see how they can be combined to create a social computing environment (the Booze Allen Hamilton video case study that I blogged about recently is a good place to start).

Gaining business value from Enterprise 2.0: Booz Allen Hamilton's portal

2009-07-21T10:13:00.000+01:00

If you're interested in seeing how an enterprise 2.0 intranet actually works in practice I'd recommend you watch Walton Smith's presentation video about hello.bah.com, Booz Allen Hamilton's internal portal, which is posted on the Atlassian website (hello.bah.com uses Atlassian Confluence to power the wiki).

The portal recently won the Open Enterprise Innovation Award at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It's especially interesting because Walton delivers a live demonstration of the functionality and also discusses specific examples of how the portal has delivered real benefits to the business.

The video gives any organisations employing knowledge workers an insight into the business value of Enterprise 2.0 and how the much talked about principles (freeform collaboration, tagging, wikis, expertise search, notifications and social bookmarking) actually work in practice.

During the presentation Walton also describes how the firm uses both Microsoft SharePoint and the social portal together to manage different classes of information and knowledge - useful information for anyone considering how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy might fit with a SharePoint deployment.

Of further interest might be Stephen Walling's interesting article on Read Write Web: "Becoming An Open Enterprise: Five Lessons from Booz Allen Hamilton"

Interactive Intranet created for Field Fisher Waterhouse

2009-05-07T16:16:00.001+01:00

Noko is pleased to announce the delivery of a new interactive and customisable intranet for London law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP, providing fee earners and business support staff with fast and convenient access to the firm’s information, knowledge and business services.

The new intranet is the focal point for delivering FFW’s internal communications strategy and forms a central part of the firms future plans for delivering interactive services online to members of staff.

Powered by Alterian Immediacy Web Content Management, the intranet gives internal staff complete control over web content and structure using the intuitive Immediacy CMS site editor.

The intranet features a customisable ‘page flake’ drag-and-drop interface enabling staff to personalise their view of the firm and select the news and information streams relevant to them.

The use of RSS and other web standards ensure that new enterprise 2.0 social, collaborative and search applications can easily be integrated into the new intranet as they are introduced within the firm.

New Intranet features include:

‘Pageflake’ interface enabling staff to personalise their home page
Customised internal and external information feeds powered by RSS
Creation and syndication of FFW’s current awareness publications
Systems for managing firm wide news and announcements
Complete control of content and structure using Immediacy CMS
Integration with the HR system and other web self service applications

Moving forward, Noko are working with Field Fisher Waterhouse to support the intranet and implement new features and functionality as the firm’s requirements evolve.

New Partnership: Atlassian Confluence Enterprise Wiki

2009-04-30T17:26:00.007+01:00

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve signed up to become a partner with Atlassian, the leading provider of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools.

After an in-depth search we identified Atlassian Confluence as the best fit for clients who require enterprise strength features and functionality from their wiki and collaboration software.

Confluence is ideal for organisations that have many teams working together across departments or offices who need features such as multiple workspaces, straightforward editing, blogs, notifications/syndication, discussions, tagging and search – combined with enterprise level user management LDAP integration.

SharePoint integration

In addition to being an enterprise strength Wiki the product also has a SharePoint Connector enabling you to combine Confluence’s free-form wiki collaboration with the document management and workflow strengths of SharePoint.

This fits in with our strategy of helping organisations extend the value of their investment in SharePoint.

For more information about Confluence or advice on implementing an enterprise wiki within your organisation, please get in touch.

Using wikis in a law firm: Replacing practices and procedures manuals

2009-07-16T10:54:00.013+01:00

There's lots of in-depth discussion online regarding wiki and enterprise 2.0 strategies for law firms (and many other professional services organisations), but it's often difficult to find specific usage scenarios discussed along with how successful (or unsuccessful) they were.

These examples can be really useful when considering how to introduce your own wiki projects or promote user adoption as they demonstrate how a directly relevant business issue can be solved or improved using enterprise social software.

In our experience good examples (especially if they include social concepts such as collaborative editing, commenting, tagging and notifications) give colleagues a much better understanding of the overall principles of enterprise social software (and how they're not really that scary after all).

An interesting article by Doug Cornelius on his experiences with wikis at Goodwin Procter discusses the wider implications of wikis and document management systems but also highlights one particular use of a wiki that gained good results within his firm - Putting traditional practices and procedures manuals on a wiki. He writes:

"One great use of a wiki is to replace a practices and procedures manual. One of the first questions I hear when a group creates a practices and procedures manual is how will they know when it changes. The typical behavior is to draft the manual in a word processing program, save it into the DMS, then email the group when it is complete. The recipient will then print it out or refer back to the email when using the manual. With the manual in a wiki, the notification of changes happens as soon as the change is made. The manual becomes an active flow of information rather than the republishing of a manual."

You can download Doug's full article (in Adobe Acrobat / PDF format) here: Wikis and Document Management Systems at Law Firms.

Whilst having a company-wide strategy for enterprise social software is great I think practical examples like this are invaluable in helping people 'get it'.

Another interesting area that highlights the difference between the 'Enterprise 1.0' and 'Enterprise 2.0' approach is the area of current awareness (internal information and knowledge updates) - I'll be posting about this soon.