When Graymont Limited went looking for a tool to help it “transcend the continent” and get far-flung employees working together as if they were just around the corner from each other, they turned to the enterprise 2.0 technology in ThoughtFarmer. 

As one of North America’s largest producers of lime, the essentials of Graymont’s business haven’t changed in 100 years. They operate facilities on sites that have been in operation for 200 years. But the company’s philosophy around information and technology is absolutely 21st century.

“We believe that sharing information everywhere possible will help us do a better job and be a lower-cost producer,” says director of IT Ron Ogilvy. And part of that philosophy is that every employee be included in the collaborative environment, especially those who come to work in steel-toed boots and only occasionally sit at a computer.

Graymont planned to implement a company intranet as a binding element in its seven-year strategy to build a common set of information tools for over 1000 employees in several dozen locations across the continent. Ogilvy briefly considered Microsoft SharePoint for this crucial role. “But we came quickly to the conclusion that to do what we wanted in SharePoint, it would be a very large, expensive and long project.”

Last year, he trialed several “intranet in a box” products – plus ThoughtFarmer. ThoughtFarmer won hands down. “Its ease of use and the look and feel were huge attractions. We were amazed how quickly we could set up a complete and very effective tool,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet home page

Today, three months after launch, myGraymont, the company’s ThoughtFarmer-based intranet, is the portal to most of the applications, tools and information resources employees use, including the Web-based JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system. It’s also the primary interface to the company directory. Employees are responsible for keeping their own listings up to date on their personal myGraymont pages, which they’re encouraged to personalize with pictures and information about themselves.

And ThoughtFarmer is the company’s document management system too, its database already populated with thousands of items – policies, instructions, how-tos. Employees can edit and correct most and post their own. “So you have a continuously evolving, self-healing base of information,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of ThoughtFarmer page for the Pilot Peak quarry

The payback? Easier access to information and tools will make employees more productive – and less frustrated – and also reduce the management burden for IT. “But the big values,” Ogilvy says, “will come in areas outside IT – when a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he’s done that saves the company $10,000 or $20,000; or when an informal discussion group is established amongst maintenance workers or kiln operators across borders and geography. We expect those things will happen regularly.” 

Just using myGraymont to interact more personally with distant colleagues can be an end in itself, he adds. “If it helps create a new relationship, the value of that relationship will be the payback.”

A photo gallery of a lime plant from Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer installation.

Today, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, we’re announcing the third generation of our wiki-inspired intranet platform: ThoughtFarmer 3.0 Multilingual. Read the official press release.

Localized interface and multilingual content management

ThoughtFarmer now supports a localizable interface, easy language switching, and multilingual search. Pages automatically display in your home language, if available, or intelligently fall back on your secondary language preference. Watch a 90-second video overview.

Create blogs

Create department blogs or employee blogs. Use them for project reports, status meetings, and for sharing your latest insights and ideas.

Create and share calendars

Create multiple event calendars. Share launch dates, project schedules or important deadlines. Control who views and edits each calendar.

Create forums

Now, in addition to inline comments on any ThoughtFarmer page, you can create dedicated discussion forums.

Support for high-capacity, load-balanced deployments

ThoughtFarmer 3.0 contains numerous performance enhancements that results in drastic speed improvements in all environments. Data replication across distrubuted data centres is now supported.

ThoughtFarmer 3.0 contains over 100 enhancements and improvements, as well as minor bug fixes. A full list of changes will be available in the release notes.

From June 9th to 12th, Darren and I will be descending on Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

At 12:15pm on Tuesday, I’ll be presenting on the following topic:

Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy Steps

In this fast-paced, entertaining presentation, intranet consultant and ThoughtFarmer co-creator Chris McGrath will share the 10 not-so-easy steps to convert an impossibly complex, seldom used corporate intranet into Intranet 2.0: a simple, social intranet that helps employees collaborate, share ideas and find information.

Come by the demo pavilion to catch the presentation, or stop by our booth. Send us a message on Twitter if you’d like to schedule a meeting with either of us — we have some available time when the expo hall is closed.

It’s shaping up to be a great conference for anyone interested in next-generation collaboration tools for the enterprise. Hope to see you there!

I used to work for a company that took pride in encouraging open dialogue. They had an excellent intranet, and a few years ago they wanted to implement forums to promote productive conversation.

After 3 major revisions to the forums over a 4 year period, usage was still sporadic at best. The technology worked, the culture was right, and the company was big enough (over 500 employees). What was wrong?

When you have a small base of users (say, under 10,000), everything has to be perfect to create effective discussion forums. Here are 6 guidelines:

1. ATTACH A FORUM TO EVERY PAGE.

Instead of just providing a centralized location for forums, allow discussions to emerge on any and every intranet page. It’s impossible to know what will spark a conversation.

2. PROVIDE AN AGGREGATED, PRIORITIZED VIEW OF DISCUSSIONS.

This page should list every active discussion on the intranet, showing:

• Title of page where discussion is happening
• Owner of page
• Number of posts to the discussion
• Date & time of most recent comment (best expressed in relative terms, i.e. 2 hours ago)

Sort by date, placing at the top the discussion with the most recent post.

3. INTEGRATE FORUMS WITH THE COMPANY DIRECTORY.

Forums shouldn’t require registration. The intranet should be able to personally identify each user (usually via Windows integrated authentication).

Link the name of each commenter to his or her employee profile in the intranet directory.

4. STRIP THE INTERFACE TO THE BASICS.

On the actual page containing the discussion, all you need for each comment is:

• name of commenter (linked to his/her intranet profile)
• date & time comment was made (best expressed in relative terms, i.e. 2 hours ago)
• the comment itself

Not needed:

• No multi-level threads
• No comment-level subject (a single subject at the top of the page is sufficient)

Sort comments with the oldest at the top, so the discussion is easily read.

5. SIGNAL PARTICIPANTS WHEN A POST IS MADE.

This is perhaps the most important step to effective discussion forums.

As soon as a post is made, send an email to the page owner and to everyone who has participated in the discussion so far. (If your user base is technically savvy, you can provide an RSS feed instead.) This keeps the discussion moving and keeps all participants involved. Otherwise, days can elapse between comments, and the conversation dies out.

6. ENGAGE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S THOUGHT LEADERS.

If you can get the leaders at your company to use the forums to share opinions or ask thought-provoking questions, others will follow.

It takes all 6 steps to create effective discussions on your company’s intranet. Has your company made a success of forums? Do you have any other ideas on how to make them work? If so, I’d like to hear about it. Post a comment below.

The May 2008 edition of Canadian Lawyer magazine features an article by Gerry Blackwell on how lawyers are using wikis to collaborate and organize.

ThoughtFarmer customer Hicks Morley was interviewed extensively for this article. An excerpt:

After looking at six or eight products last summer, [Hicks Morley] settled on ThoughtFarmer (www.thoughtfarmer.com), server-based software from Vancouver’s OpenRoad Communications Ltd.

Colman is pleased with the decision. “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that it’s really important to select a tool that’s very easy to use. We did look at some products that had tons of features but we thought they would be too overwhelming [for users]. That’s why we picked ThoughtFarmer — it’s intuitive, it has a nice clean look, and it’s easy to pick up.”

Colman also liked the Web 2.0 features that some other products didn’t have, such as RSS (really simple syndication) as a mechanism for notifying participants of changes, and tagging, a simple way to group pages by subject or theme making it easier to browse a document base. ThoughtFarmer also lets individual Hicks Morley users set up their own personal wikis to store links and documents they use all the time. It also lets them search for documents across all of the firm’s wikis.

After running a six-week ThoughtFarmer pilot project with one small practice group, the firm gave Colman the go-ahead to roll the product out across the firm. She is now helping transfer already-built wikis from DominoWiki to ThoughtFarmer, and to build new ones.

Download the entire article in Acrobat format (1.1MB).

New feature in ThoughtFarmer 2.5.5: TF Uploader, a Windows desktop client for uploading files and folders. Watch the video:

We intended it to be an administrative tool primarily for initial content migration. You clean up a shared drive, drag it onto the Uploader, and it queues up and transfers to your intranet.

The other thing we’re finding it useful for is photo albums. Drag some pics from your digital camera onto TF Uploader, and within seconds you have a nice neat photo album in ThoughtFarmer.

When IDEO needed something better than a wiki for internal collaboration, they turned to ThoughtFarmer.

IDEO is the company that designed the Swiffer Sweeper for Procter & Gamble, the Palm V personal digital assistant for 3Com, and the first mouse for Apple. They devised the “Keep the Change” account service for Bank of America, the Windows Home Computing concept for Microsoft, and the Coasting Bicycle design strategy for Shimano.

Recently, IDEO embarked on a new project to empower their internal communities to create and manage their own online collaborative spaces. With more than 500 employees in eight offices around the world, they sought better ways to share knowledge and collaborate across physical distances.

“We knew that wikis promised much of what we were after,” says Gentry Underwood, project lead for the initiative. “But most of the tools on the market are too difficult to use. We wanted something intuitive and straightforward, that our communities could pick up and start using without training.”

Gentry’s team tested more than 20 systems in search of one that would be both simple and powerful enough to provide their community with basic online collaboration and communication abilities. In the end, they chose ThoughtFarmer.

Today, IDEO’s ThoughtFarmer installation is an eclectic mix of ideas, conversations, reference documents and project materials. The content is fluid and constantly changing: every day edits are made as pages evolve, new discussions emerge and new files are uploaded.

“Our ThoughtFarmer system has been a big success within the organization,” says Gentry. “After only six months, we’re seeing literally hundreds of times more activity than any other wiki-like tool we’ve ever used. It’s already become an integral piece of our intranet.”

(This is an excerpt from a presentation I did this week to an industry analyst. She wanted our “elevator pitch”, and I decided the simplest way to describe ThoughtFarmer was to compare it with SharePoint, which most of our customers also consider before deciding on us.)

ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social SharePoint.

It’s a SharePoint that people can actually figure out how to use.

And it’s one that puts the social network front-and-center – so everything in the system revolves around people, which makes it so much more useful and interesting.

Virtually every knowledge company with more than 100 employees has an intranet – a place where you can find company news, find a phone number, download a form… but these intranets are suffering with the appearance of department-level wikis and blogs. So the intranet team is saying, “Hey, we still need an intranet, a company portal – but we’re ready to learn from these wikis and blogs. We’re ready to open up the authoring to everyone, and we want to make it social.”

So they’re considering SharePoint for this. Every single one of our customers also considered SharePoint. Intrawest considered SharePoint. But they went with us because ThoughtFarmer is simple, and it’s social.

And almost every one of our customers also uses wiki software and blog software. NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) in London – they also use wiki software and blogging software. But they still need to tie it all together into a single destination that’s set as every employee’s home page – and that’s ThoughtFarmer.

I said it’s a simple SharePoint. How is it simple?

We’ve removed every possible barrier to content contribution:

• Add a page in 2 clicks
• Navigation is automatically built for you
• The new page is listed on the home page as a recent change, by you
• Add a comment in a click. The author is alerted by email or RSS
• Add micro-content – Favouriting or rating a page influences search results and improves system quality
• Add content by email – just send any email to ThoughtFarmer, and it matches the from address with your personal spot on ThoughtFarmer and creates the page

And from an admin perspective, ThoughtFarmer is ready to go out-of-the-box. Ask eHarmony. They had ThoughtFarmer up and running as their intranet platform, all content migrated, all employees trained, in 5 days.

I said it’s a social SharePoint. How is it social?

Absolutely every piece of content is clearly tied to a user. When you add a page, it’s linked to you. If I click your name, I see your profile and all the other content you’ve created. I can browse your social network in the visual relationship browser.

When content is put in a social context, it’s so much more meaningful.

Simple vs. Complex.

Social vs. Machine.

I think ThoughtFarmer’s an easy choice (but I’m biased).

ThoughtFarmer is a finalist for Intranet Journal’s Product of the Year in the “Document Management / Collaboration Product” category. Other finalists are:

• Central Desktop
• Clearspace X
• Hyper Office
• MindManager 7
• Clarizen

If you’re a ThoughtFarmer fan, please put in a vote for us!

Relationships are funny things. A combination of formal and informal roles, responsibilities, and feelings, they’ve given the designers and users of social software a hard time. How do we make explicit something as subtle as friendship? How often does “friend” just not seem at all like the right term to be using in Facebook to describe an acquaintance? The result is often not very pretty.

In a business setting, enterprise 2.0 tools have a slightly easier time of things. Relationships can be formally codified within an organization. He’s my direct report. She’s my boss. That’s my department. This is my project team. These are relationships that, while they may change, don’t vary or depend on my day to day emotional state and how I feel about them (wish as you may).

So we’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be useful to utilize those relationships to tune your notifications from the intranet?

Keeping abreast of what’s happening in your organization through monitoring the activity of your intranet is something that we’ve been working on in the design of ThoughtFarmer for a while. The current incarnation is fairly basic: we have a simple filter of recent changes on the home page that shows who’s updated their status (People), what pages have been edited (Pages), and what comments have been made (Comments). It’s enough to provide you with some signals that stuff is happening and you may or may not be interested in that stuff.

What we’re working towards in an upcoming release of ThoughtFarmer is a model that provides somewhat more fine-grained control of what’s happening. Our current model, if there’s lots of people in your organization, is a bit coarse: seemingly random noise from the knowledge repository of your company. To help us refine that concept, we’ve sought inspiration from the real world and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet.

Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.

These then represent a nice lens through which we can look at the relationships we have with each other, our company, and our content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.

Individuals, groups, their activity, and their content have a gravity to each user. Like Grover from Sesame Street, some are near, others are far. We acknowledge this model doesn’t take into account the interpersonal ties and informal social bonds that exist throughout an organization, but hope that intranet proxemics will help provide a subtle and useful mechanism for keeping aware of what’s going on within the organization.