ThoughtFarmer Blog


Financial Post: Launch a project with a ThoughtFarmer social intranet

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Ephraim Freed| October 24th, 2011 No Comments »

The Financial Post interviewed ThoughtFarmer client Karo Group about their successful social intranet in a new article “Launch a project with a social intranet.” From the article:

A social intranet is just the ticket for a knowledge-based company that needs to pull together diverse employees for individual projects, says Alex Berenyi, director of systems and technology for Karo Group, a Calgary-based creative agency.

Karo, which has 62 employees in Calgary and Vancouver, built its own intranet several years ago, but never had time to add functionality to it, and so it languished, he said. “It just wasn’t compelling enough for people to use it the way it should be used,” he says.

“But for a project-based company like ours, we needed the ability to put a group together quickly. The intranet also needed to be able to find specific expertise among our staff, and to allow others to throw in their ideas, if they saw that they could be of help to the project, without going through an intermediary. When we decided to upgrade, we found it was easier to lease a social intranet system like ThoughtFarmer than to try to do it ourselves.”

Berenyi said a social intranet also can act as an accessible central repository of company information that is more effective and easier to use than traditional systems in which relevant company information is stored in a series of emails, or in a central folder.

“It’s searchable, so people don’t have to plow through dozens of folders trying to find the right information,” he says. “It improves communication and information flow, which is essential in a business like ours. There is a clear benefit in an intranet for knowledge businesses, because it facilitates better project management, improves productivity and reduces cost.”

Read the complete article.

 

Posted in Customer Stories, Featured, Intranets, ThoughtFarmer  

Announcing ThoughtFarmer 5.0: An intranet in your pants

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Chris McGrath| October 18th, 2011 2 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

ThoughtFarmer 5.0 is here! With a host of functional improvements plus the launch of the ThoughtFarmer mobile web app, ThoughtFarmer 5.0 continues to set the bar for social intranets — and now, it fits in your pocket.

ThoughtFarmer Mobile: An intranet in your pants

The biggest change in ThoughtFarmer 5.0 is the addition of a mobile-optimized version of ThoughtFarmer. Access your intranet content from modern Android, iOS or Blackberry devices: navigate or search pages, browse the people directory, update your status, comment on pages, view attachments.

Rather than a simple port of the browser version, ThoughtFarmer Mobile was designed from scratch to support the mobile context: hurried usage, screen glare from the sun, one-handed operation and touch screens. Unique mobile-specific features include:

  1. Plain-text comment entry at the bottom of every page
  2. Photo albums that support touch gestures
  3. Search-as-you-type employee directory
  4. User profiles integrated with device’s phone and maps
  5. Home screen that focuses on key tasks
  6. Full support for the iPad

We also snuck in a beta feature: full content creation and editing support for iOS 5 when you use the full version (not the mobile version). For most uses, you’ll want to stay in the mobile version, but if you want to create or edit full pages, click “Full version” in the footer and edit away.

ThoughtFarmer Integration Kit (TIK)

In ThoughtFarmer 5.0, we’ve improved our API and built even more ways you can extend the functionality of ThoughtFarmer.  We’ve packaged it up into a new system called the ThoughtFarmer Integration Kit (TIK). With the TIK, you can:

  • Move information into and out of ThoughtFarmer, using our simple REST API. Create pages, export content, sync customer profile information with external HR systems.
  • Enhance ThoughtFarmer with new functionality by embedding your code into page templates. Create dashboards showing content from external systems, like Zendesk or JIRA
  • Provide single-sign on to services that provide a remote authentication API. For example, integrate ThoughtFarmer with Zendesk to allow your users one-click single sign on to your help desk.

The REST API is accessible by any language that supports HTTP and XML or JSON content. Embedding code in ThoughtFarmer is done with C#. We recommend Platinum support for customers building solutions using the TIK. Our Professional Services team is also available for consulting on your ideas.

Intranet in the Cloud or Self-Hosted

ThoughtFarmer Mobile works in both the Self-Hosted and Cloud editions of ThoughtFarmer 5.0. The Cloud Edition, a fully hosted version of our social intranet software, is single-tenanted and Guaranteed to Be There (see ThoughtFarmer Releases Cloud Edition).

The monthly cost for ThoughtFarmer Cloud Edition is $10 per user, dropping gradually to $4 per user for 1000+. See complete pricing. This includes everything you’d expect, like support, upgrades, and backups; and a few things you wouldn’t, like free administrator training and free intranet skinning to reflect your organization’s brand.

More Enhancements in ThoughtFarmer 5.0

  • Don’t Rate It, Like It. Star ratings are gone in ThoughtFarmer 5.0, replaced by the more intuitive “Like”.
  • Sharing Bar. A new “sharing bar” appears underneath the page title on every page. It includes all the features you might use to share or indicate your interest in a page: Like, Favorite, Export to Word, Export to PDF, and Email.
  • Page Info box. Metadata about a page — owner, created date, updated date, version history, and tags — is now consolidated in a single “page info” box in the right hand margin.
  • Feeds improvement. External RSS feeds can now be added to the home page and to group pages and will appear just like news items and other internal feeds.
  • New machine translation. The Google Translate API is being discontinued by Google at the end of 2011, so we’ve replaced our machine translation with the Microsoft Translator API.
  • Multilingual labels for custom profile fields. The labels for custom profile fields, used to add extra information to employee profiles, are now multilingual.
  • Change comment sort order. Opt to sort all comments in reverse chronological order (newest first) instead of chronological (oldest first).
  • New attachment and image uploader. No Flash required; supports drag and drop.
  • Bulk export users, bulk import users. Bulk export users and bulk update users are both now supported.
Chris McGrath

Join me for a live tour of ThoughtFarmer 5.0 on Thursday, October 20th

Webinar with ThoughtFarmer Co-founder, Chris McGrath

Join me for a live tour of ThoughtFarmer 5.0 this Thursday. In addition to a walk-through of ThoughtFarmer Mobile and our new ThoughtFarmer Integration Kit (TIK), I’ll also show you the award-winning intranets from the Best ThoughtFarmer Intranets competition. You’ll be able to see what people are really doing with ThoughtFarmer.

  • Thursday, October 20th, 8:30am Pacific / 11:30am Eastern / 4:30pm UK
  • Register now

Are you already a ThoughtFarmer client? Visit the ThoughtFarmer Helpdesk to schedule an upgrade.

Posted in Intranets, ThoughtFarmer  

Social Intranet Summit in review: Balancing practice, theory and inspiration

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Darren Gibbons| October 13th, 2011 3 Comments »

Post-conference: Like finishing a marathon

The Social Intranet Summit in Vancouver (SISV) has quickly become a favorite time of year for the ThoughtFarmer team. We get to see our clients, some of our favorite colleagues in the industry (whom we happen to invite as speakers) and plenty of other great people interested in social intranets.

Andy Jankowski and members of the ThoughtFarmer team enjoying Manhattans in Vancouver (Carolien Dekeersmaeker, Selma Zafar, Bryan Robertson, Amanda Bremner)

Things get a little hectic in our office, with long hours and mythic levels of multitasking. Gord’s wife and baby even left town for a few days so he could freely work his crazy hours in the run-up to the summit.

ThoughtFarmer head honchos Chris McGrath, Gordon Ross and Darren Gibbons - handsome, friendly, social, just like ThoughtFarmer

We love the summit, but once it’s done we take a huge collective sigh of relief. The presentations were great, people enjoyed the food and the after-hours networking was a blast. We bask in the glory of so many great insights, conversations and connections for about a day, then jump back into the fray of normal work and try to catch up on sleep.

We prepped and prepped and prepped and then the summit came and went. We’re happy to have been pushed and challenged and are both relieved and sad now that it’s over. If you didn’t make it this year you missed a great event, but we’ll try to make as much of it available as possible. For starters, check out the highlights below and keep your eyes peeled for upcoming SISV speaker webinars.  Don’t forget to set aside budget to attend next year!

Balancing practice and theory

One of the challenges we most enjoy about SISV is putting together a captivating agenda that appeals to our full potential audience. The trick is to balance helpful practical presentations with those that provide deeper insights into the science, psychology and management theory linked to social intranets.

These all came together in a presentation from Deane Barker, who turned out to be the sleeper hit of the conference. Deane isn’t as widely known as some of our other speakers, but his presentation struck the perfect balance and he left attendees with helpful, concrete tips.

Deane blogged about his experience as an SISV speaker (How to Make Conference Speakers Love You) and posted his presentation to SlideShare:

What C-Level Execs Are Afraid Of When It Comes to Social Intranets

Melding science with inspiration

A key theme from this year’s presentations was the growing body of evidence showing that building positive work environments and fostering employee engagement are good for business and good for employees.  Two of our presenters, Andy Jankowski and CV Harquail, explained the links between social intranets and employee engagement and have posted their presentations online:

The Science Linking Intranets to Happiness

Why bring social media into your organization harquail sisv

Relive it through retweets

Our audience pounded away at their keyboards during the summit, capturing snippets of insight and wisdom from presentations. Here we’ve noted a few tweets that highlight key points and themes from SISV:

As if you were there: Music, videos and photos

During breaks the ThoughtFarmer team played a hand-selected mix of energizing music and at the end of each break we played a fun video to lure folks back to their seats. You can find a list of the funny and stunning videos from summit breaks on the ThoughtFarmer website and listen to the soundtrack to SISV 2011, courtesy of Grooveshark:

On Flickr you can see photos from the summit (if nothing shows, view it on Flickr):

Stay tuned to the ThoughtFarmer frequency to hear about upcoming webinars featuring speakers from the Social Intranet Summit.

A final word of thanks

On a personal note I’d like to thank all the speakers and attendees who joined us in beautiful Vancouver, and especially the wonderful ThoughtFarmer team. Without great speakers and engaged attendees there would be no summit and I’m lucky to work with the cool kids on the ThoughtFarmer team on a daily basis. Hope to see you next year!

Gentry Underwood and a conference attendee, probably wishing they had a boat

Posted in Events, Intranets  

What message does a social intranet convey?

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Ephraim Freed| October 10th, 2011 No Comments »

On Friday we were inspired by a tweet about Marshall McLuhan to ask a question:

@thoughtfarmer ”The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan bit.ly/nV5JWj | What message does a social intranet convey? 7 Oct

We quickly received several great responses worth sharing broadly:

@jonhusband @thoughtfarmer < What message does a social intranet convey? > that “the medium is the meaning we consume & create together”? 7 Oct

@conniecrosby @thoughtfarmer teamwork, openness, collaboration, willingness to let employees have some of the control, innovation 7 Oct

@bar2cci The organization values transparency RT @thoughtfarmer: “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan http://… (cont) deck.ly/~WQLTl 7 Oct

If Marshall McLuhan was right that the medium is the message, then what is the message of a social intranet and how does it differ from the messages conveyed by more traditional intranets?

Please share your thoughts here and on Twitter using the hashtag #intranetmsg.

Posted in Intranets, Social software  

Speaker profile: Toby Ward, Intranet Strategist, Social Intranet Summit #SISV

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Ephraim Freed| September 22nd, 2011 No Comments »

Toby Ward, CEO, Prescient Digital Media

The founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media, Toby is a senior Internet and intranet consultant with particular expertise in the area of Internet and intranet planning and communications. Toby has led his company to many awards in recent years including an illustrious Webby Award. His clients include: Harvard, HSBC, Sony, Pepsico, RBC, USAA and dozens of others.

Toby’s Topic at the Social Intranet Summit:

Social Intranet Study 2011: Prescient/IABC Report from 1400 organizations

Wednesday, September 28th at 9:45 AM

Find out the state of the art for social intranets with Toby Ward as he presents the findings from the 2011 Social Intranet Study which surveyed over 1400 organizations from around the globe. Initial findings show that about 2/3 of organizations how have at least one social media tool on their intranet. Shockingly, there are some pundits that still think social media is a fad. Gain insight into how your company compares with its social intranet efforts.

Highlights from the 2011 Social Intranet Study

  • Social media tools such as blogs and wikis have become mainstream communications channels on the corporate intranet:
  • Nearly two-thirds (61%) of organization intranets have at least one social media tool on their intranet
  • Fewer than 10% of organizations have no interest and no plans for implementing social media
  • Blogs and discussion forums are almost common-place – of those organizations that use social media:
  • 75% have intranet blogs; 65% have intranet discussion forums; 61% have intranet wikis
  • Of those that have social media on their intranet, 55% claim to have a social intranet (A social intranet is defined as: “An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other social media tool with at least some or limited exposure on the main intranet or portal home page.”)
  • SharePoint is also a major contributing factor to the rise in intranet / enterprise 2.0: 55% that have social media use SP to power their intranet 2.0 tools.
  • A social intranet is not as expensive as believed. Of those that have implemented 2.0 tools, almost half (38%) have spent $10,000 or less (34% have spent between $10,000 and $100,000; 26% have spent $100,000 or more)

Get to know Toby

Recent choice tweets

Join us for the Social Intranet Summit

Read the full schedule for the Summit and Workshop, and register online now.

Posted in Events, Intranets  

Speaker profile: Andy Jankowski, Enterprise Collaboration, Social Intranet Summit #SISV

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Ephraim Freed| September 21st, 2011 No Comments »

Andy Jankowski, Director, Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Andy Jankowski is the Global Director of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. During the last 16 years he has served as an advisor for Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, Ernst & Young and Andersen in the areas of enterprise communication and collaboration. He is a frequent conference speaker, a student of positive psychology, and an avid road cyclist. Andy enjoys connecting people and dots.

Andy’s Topic at the Social Intranet Summit:

The Science Linking Intranets to Happiness

Wednesday, September 28th at 11:30 AM

Inspired by Tony Hsieh’s best selling, Delivering Happiness Book and Jenn Lim’s groundbreaking Delivering Happiness Movement, Andy combines current Positive Psychology research with his many years of experience working with intranets to explore the link between intranets and employee happiness.

Get to know Andy

Recent choice tweets

Join us for the Social Intranet Summit

Read the full schedule for the Summit and Workshop, and register online now.

Posted in Events, Intranets  

Speaker profile: CV Harquail, change management, at Social Intranet Summit #SISV

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Ephraim Freed| September 20th, 2011 No Comments »

CV Harquail, Consultant, Authentic Organizations

CV Harquail is an “entrepreneur of insight”, uniquely positioned at the intersection of organizational change, management practice, and communications media. She brings together academic research expertise, change agent experience, and new media fluency to help organization members and leaders think differently about the relationships between technology, organizations, individuals and systems.

CV has her PhD in Leadership & Organizational Behavior from the Ross School of Business at The University of Michigan. She was a professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia before moving to Montclair, NJ and starting her consulting practice. She continues to teach and speak to MBA & EMBA students, to corporate groups, and to professional & scholarly groups.

CV’s Topic at the Social Intranet Summit:

What’s the purpose of ‘social’ in organizations?

Wednesday, September 28th at 10:10 AM

In this presentation, CV Harquail will focus on how social tools can help organizations flourish by engaging us individually and collectively in the pursuit of the organization’s purpose. She’ll explain how systems of organizational engagement – systems that that help us Enable Identity, Foster Voice, Activate Agency, Cohere Community and Catalyze Purpose — not only meet basic psychological and sociological needs, but also move us to invest our energies in our collective work.

CV will also link the lofty concept of collective purpose back to the organization’s day-to-day tasks, so that participants can articulate a ‘business case’ for comprehensive, purpose-supporting systems of engagement.

Get to know CV

Recent choice tweets

  • @cvharquail: Org Culture is syncretic by-product, conflation of traditions/ideas chaotically combined.  http://bit.ly/nU7B4N Hmmm 15 Sep
  • @cvharquail: RT @deb_lavoy: is it telling that there are several powerpoint objects for hierarchies and none for networks? 14 Sep
  • @cvharquail: Of course, social change in organizations, social media as a tool for advocacy, etc. doesn’t excite everyone. #ThoughItShould 10 Sep
  • @cvharquail: RT @fierce_inc: Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening … when you’d have preferred to talk. 9 Sep

Join us for the Social Intranet Summit

Read the full schedule for the Summit and Workshop, and register online now.

Posted in Events, Intranets  

Best ThoughtFarmer Intranet Competition Closes Friday: Win an iPad!

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Chris McGrath| September 19th, 2011 No Comments »

Win an iPad 2!Have you considered entering the Best ThoughtFarmer Intranet Competition? Fame and fortune may await! A contest submission could bring you:

  • Bragging rights
  • Glory and accolades from your peers
  • A line item for your CV
  • An “attaboy!” or “attagirl!” from your manager
  • an iPad 2

There are three categories:

  • Best looking
  • Most innovative
  • Best collaboration

Entering only takes a few minutes — just submit a screenshot and a brief description. All submissions will be entered into a drawing for a brand new iPad 2. Winners will be announced at the Social Intranet Summit intranet administrator workshop on Thursday, September 29th.

Contest closes Friday, September 23rd, 2011.

Learn more about the competition

Posted in Events, Intranets, ThoughtFarmer  

Speaker Profile: Mark Fidelman, Social Business Strategy, at Social Intranet Summit #SISV

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Ephraim Freed| September 19th, 2011 No Comments »

Mark Fidelman, General Manager at Harmon.ie

Mark Fidelman’s experience includes more than two decades of technology sales and marketing with organizations including A.T. Kearney, EDS, CT Space and Autodesk, most recently serving as Executive Vice President of Sales and Customer Success with enterprise social knowledge base provider MindTouch, Inc. He is also a contributing writer to multiple publications and holds a patent on a system for tracking mobile electronic loyalty cards.

Mark’s Topic at the Social Intranet Summit:

What if Richard Branson Led a Social Intranet Initiative at Virgin?

Wednesday, September 28th at 1:00 PM

Where do you begin to learn from one of the world’s most famous billionaire entrepreneurs? How do you follow your dreams and passions and create an empire around them? Famous for the mantra “Screw it, let’s do it”, Sir Richard Branson has pushed the boundaries of business, entrepreneurship and successful brand engagement. But he also taught us for decades that success starts from within; putting employees first (before customers and shareholders). With such great success and creativity, how would Richard Branson lead an E2.0 initiative?

This presentation will teach you how Richard Branson would lead an Enterprise 2.0/Social Business initiative. We’ll walk in Branson’s shoes while he builds the case, executes on the strategy and sees the results. What strategies would he use to overcome internal political challenges? Which Virgin companies would he use to kick off a Social Business pilot? Which technologies would he use? How would he integrate the strategy across Virgin Brands?

NOTE: A former employee of Virgin and advisor to Branson has worked with Mark to create this presentation.

Get to know Mark

Recent choice tweets

Join us for the Social Intranet Summit

Read the full schedule for the Summit and Workshop, and register online now.

Posted in Events, Intranets  

Speaker profile: Rachel Happe, Community Management, at Social Intranet Summit #SISV

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Ephraim Freed| September 14th, 2011 No Comments »

Rachel Happe, Co-Founder & Principal at the Community Roundtable

Rachel Happe is a Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable, a peer network for social media, community, and social business leaders. She has over fifteen years of experience working with emerging technologies including enterprise social networking, ecommerce, and enterprise software applications. Rachel has served as a product executive at Mzinga, Bitpass, & IDe, and as IDC’s first analyst covering social technologies. Rachel started her business career as an analyst at PRTM. Rachel is a GigaOm Pro Analyst and serves on Social Media Today’s Blogger Board, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board, and as an Isis Parenting Fellow.

Rachel’s Topics at the Social Intranet Summit:

The State of Community Management in 2011

Wednesday, September 28th at 1:30 PM

Community management is an essential part of optimizing a social approach to business and while it has existed for some time online, it is now becoming a mainstream discipline of general management as well as a specific role assigned to the person who does the front line engagement. As a result, the discipline is changing and maturing rapidly. Hear Rachel share the latest best practices and lessons learned, compiled from the leading practitioners in the space.

Community Management 101

Thursday, September 29th at 1:00 PM

The use of social technologies is fast approaching mainstream adoption but the process and management changes required to fully utilize the potential of these technologies has not caught up. Community management is an essential part of optimizing social approaches but as a discipline it is not universally well understood. Rachel will explore what community management is, the risks of not using it, and some best practices and examples.

Get to know Rachel

Recent choice tweets

Join us for the Social Intranet Summit

Read the full schedule for the Summit and Workshop, and register online now.

Posted in Events, Intranets  
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