Intranet Blog

Interact continues to lead the field in intelligent intranet software.  This intelligence combined with the easiest interface in the marketplace and new enterprise 2.0 tools helps organisations promote best practice and reduce duplication of effort.

Interact 4.6 includes many new features and tools to improve productivity, collaboration, communication and knowledge management.  We recently conducted a survey of the users of Interact and many of these requests are included in version 4.6.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

Collaborative Staff Directory
One of the most exciting areas of new development is a new collaborative element to the staff directory.  This incorporates more powerful Enterprise Networking tools in addition to all the previous intelligent features.

It actively promotes internal communication, collaboration, idea sharing and cross participation by using facebook/Linkedin style micro-posts and news feeds. These two new concepts live alongside each other in the central column of the page. It allows staff to post their ideas, sites and documents, submit suggestions to each other, comment on others ideas and suggestions as well as view what another staff member is working on via their status update. This can increase productivity by giving users a method for receiving fast, efficient answers to their questions.

Benefits include;

• Clearer layout – with no wasted space – more items clickable
• Easier and more flexible way to collaborate on documents
• Unify all departments / business units
• Replace email for intra-office communication – great way to share nuggets of information
• Stay up-to-date with others and what is happening in your organisation
• Ask questions and get answers from people quickly
• Reduce duplication of effort as everyone is in the loop

Within the status update we have also incorporated the ‘Clever Linker’ – giving users the ability to intelligently link to other objects on the intranet such as staff members, articles and forms.

The Clever Linker is a popular feature in Interact. When you hover over a staff member or follower their business card details, such as name, dept, phone number etc, are displayed making it easier for you to retrieve their contact details, improving communication and collaboration. 
 
Within the new enhanced Staff Directory page you are also able to post comments directly to other members of staff, simply by clicking on their profile and selecting ‘Only this person’ in the messaging board. This allows you to have a direct conversation with the individual without it being posted on their wall for everyone to see.

As with everything in Interact all of the content on the new profile page is searchable under Interact’s Intelligent Search, so you can be confident that the knowledge stored here can be retrieved in the future.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

by Nigel Danson, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

If you go to any content website now such as the BBC then rich media forms a crucial part of delivering the message.  Images, movies and interactive flash diagrams add to the users experience to provide a complete picture on the story being told.  An intranet shouldn’t be any different and it is crucial that intranet managers and content champions take advantage of all forms of media now available.

Interact v4 Media Manager - manages all the images, videos and flash presentations in your Intranet

Interact’s Media Manager has been designed to make it easy to add images, videos and flash files in content throughout the intranet.  This powerful tool allows users to add these rich media files in blogs, wikis, documents, news articles, homepages, calendars, forms and any other content they wish.

Media Manager Tools - Tools are available to easily crop, resize and rotate images so your don't need expensive software on your desktop

When we sat down to design the Media Manager we used our experience and knowledge of the problems content editors have to ensure that uploading and embedding media was easy and required no technical expertise.  It was crucial that these editors and users of the system could modify the media without having image editing software on their PC.

Media Manager Videos - You can easily add videos with controls into any content (articles, documents, blogs, wikis, calendars etc...) on your site with no specialist skills