ThoughtFarmer 2011 Best Intranet Competition

Tweet Chris McGrath| September 2nd, 2011 No Comments »

As part of the Social Intranet Summit in Vancouver (Wed, Sept 28), ThoughtFarmer is holding the 2011 Best Intranet Competition for ThoughtFarmer clients. The competition has three categories and winners will be announced at the post-summit intranet administrator workshop on Thursday, September 29th.

There are three categories: Best-looking, Most innovative, and Best collaboration.

This competition gives us the opportunity to recognize and share stories from ThoughtFarmer clients who are exploring the full potential of social intranets. To join the competition, simply submit a screenshot and a 250-word description!

Learn more about the competition

Entry deadline: Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Video: How tags work on a social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 29th, 2011 No 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.

Because a social intranet makes easy content publishing available to all employees, ensuring people adhere to a complex, pre-defined site taxonomy (like most CMSs use) becomes quite challenging.

Tagging lets employees label content with terms that make sense from their own perspectives. While the “folksonomy” generated may have less strict structure than the usual website taxonomy, it is more flexible and provides useful links between related content.

Tags play an important role in ThoughtFarmer. A simple, yet sophisticated tagging interface makes it easy to add the right tags to any page, including employee profile pages.

Tags are indexed by the search engine and fully integrated in the search page and administrators have a lot of flexibility in setting up and managing tagging through the friendly admin panel.

Watch the video for a demonstration of how tags work on a social intranet:

Tagging features in ThoughtFarmer:

• Tags on every page, including employee profiles
• Multi-word tags with capitalization
• Sophisticated “recommended tags” algorithm
• Matching tags show up as you type
• Click a tag to see all pages & documents with that tag
• Tags fully indexed by the search engine
• Use tags to filter down search results
• Special expertise tags on employee profile pages
• Administrator can create custom tag categories
• Open or controlled tagging vocabulary

ThoughtFarmer administrators (and others who manage social intranets with tagging) see the post on Using Tags to Search in ThoughtFarmer for concrete tips on how to use tags to increase content findability.

Information Management: “ThoughtFarmer Social Intranet Connects with Staff”

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 18th, 2011 No Comments »

Information Management interviewed ThoughtFarmer client Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) about their successful social intranet in a new article “Social Intranet Connects with Staff.” From the article:

By fostering employee use and making certain communications more efficient, management at outdoor gear retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op finds that workers are engaged as never before and using a system that caught on and took off in a way the company never imagined.

MEC is based in Vancouver. The retail co-op started in 1971 selling climbing equipment and has since expanded to all kinds of adventure supplies. It now has more than 1,500 employees in 14 retail locations. In what was first seen as a way to centralize information for employees, MEC adopted a social intranet.

Intranets have traditionally struggled as hotbeds of social activity, so practicality comes first. MEC employees use a platform from ThoughtFarmer called Mondo for checking schedules, requesting time off and reordering items. But once employee needs and behavior were understood, it also became a home to popular forums and interest groups. Mondo, administrators say, was functional out of the box, but more success came with customization for MEC staff.

In the six-month period from October to March 2011, users created 9451 pages, made 7932 comments and attached 3198 documents. MEC is now experiencing average usage levels of 85 percent of employees logging in on a regular basis.

Read the complete article.

Demo video: Expertise locator fully integrated in a social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| July 19th, 2011 No Comments »

A searchable people directory is the most common “killer app” on an intranet and this feature kicks butt in ThoughtFarmer, social intranet software. The people directory includes faceted search that lets you narrow down results and the search engine indexes expertise tags on the built-in rich user profiles. Expertise location is easy and fully integrated with the rest of the social intranet. Watch the video to see these features in action.

Key features of expertise locator

• Fully integrated with: Intranet search, employee profiles, activity streams, tagging, group page membership
• Add custom expertise fields for all employee profiles
• Expertise tags indexed by search engine
• Click expertise tag on a profile to see others with the same tag
• Combine expertise tags with other search facets to narrow results

Built-in people search facets

The people directory automatically applies search facets based on employees’ membership in different group pages. If someone is a member of the Pittsburgh office page, she can be found using that location filter.

• Last name
• Location
• Department
• Team, Project & other group types

Default expertise fields

• Languages spoken
• Technical skills
• Certifications

5 ideas for custom fields to add

ThoughtFarmer allows administrators to easily add custom expertise fields. Here are five suggestions that can help companies bend the expertise locator to their specific needs:

• Past projects
• Clients worked with
• Software skills
• Cities lived in
• Past job titles

Demo video: Calendars are friendly & collaborative in ThoughtFarmer 4.5

Tweet Chris McGrath| July 14th, 2011 No Comments »

Along with a host of other enhancements and new features in version 4.5, we gave calendars an extreme makeover. Now you can add events with a single click, drag-and-drop events to change the date or time, color code different types of events, switch between month, week and day views, and see an improved display of multi-day events. Watch the demo video to see these new features in action.

Calendar features

• Create new events with one click
• Simple drag-and drop to change date & time
• Tab between months
• View by month, week or day
• “Today” button
• Color coding for different event types

Plus standard features of all ThoughtFarmer pages:

• Start discussions on any page
• Attach files to event pages
• Edit content of event pages
• Collaborative editing with colleagues
• Add tags on event pages
• Page owner listed for each event page
• Revision history on every page
• Security settings are granular & easy to change

Related: Sign up for our free webinar on July 20th, 2011, “Information Architecture 101: Task Testing“. Use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG.

InformationWeek: “ThoughtFarmer Turns Businesses Into Thriving Communities”

Tweet Chris McGrath| July 12th, 2011 No Comments »

InformationWeek interviewed ThoughtFarmer clients Farm Bureau Bank and Continuum in a new article, “How SMBs Can Embrace the Social Intranet.” From the article:

At Farm Bureau Bank in San Antonio, Texas, [Richard] Hamlin was looking for a way to make the financial institution’s 100-plus staffers feel more involved in their jobs and the workplace. “I wanted to tie all of us together and make everyone feel like part of a community,” he said. “So far, it’s been a huge success.”

On one hand, ThoughtFarmer is a platform for structured knowledge exchange, with each department maintaining its own data repository. The accounting department stores expense reports, for example; HR posts job openings and W9s. Having all of this data available to employees company-wide has dramatically boosted Farm Bureau Bank’s efficiency and productivity, Hamlin said.

On the other hand, the software’s social media-type features provide a virtual town square of sorts, allowing employees to get to know their colleagues and find out what’s happening in different departments both inside and outside the office. Staffers can visit the “Barnyard,” a subsite of the intranet, to post items for sale at the online General Store (baby carriages, gently used furniture, bicycles, whatever); read the Employee Spotlight profiles; scan the company calendar to find out when and where the Farm Bureau softball team’s next game is; and view photos taken at the company picnic.

Read the complete article here.

ThoughtFarmer Releases Cloud Edition. Why Cloud, Why Now?

Tweet Chris McGrath| June 20th, 2011 3 Comments »

I’m incredibly pleased to announce ThoughtFarmer Cloud Edition, a fully hosted version of our social intranet software. Along with Cloud Edition, we’re releasing version 4.5 of ThoughtFarmer — I’ll blog about that tomorrow.

Why Cloud, Why Now?

Up until now, we’ve specialized in on-site intranet deployments, for reasons that continue to be valid:

• Many companies prefer to have their intranet on their internal network
• There is no internet congestion on your internal network
• Easy integration with existing Microsoft based technology stack
• Single sign-on is a breeze, as is 2-way Active Directory synchronization

There is a strong demand for our Self-Hosted Edition and we’ll continue to offer it. But it’s no secret that many companies are moving their systems of engagement, like ThoughtFarmer, to the Cloud. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. In early 2011, ThoughtFarmer saw a significant increase in the number of medium- and large-sized companies who wanted to deploy a social intranet in the Cloud. It’s clear to us that 2011 is the year Cloud services will reach the tipping point. So the timing is ripe for our Cloud Edition.

The Cloud Can Suck

Cloud evangelists make it sound like all your IT headaches will disappear if you switch. That’s just not true. In January, we got burned when our cloud-based CRM provider was acquired. We loved our CRM, and I thought the acquisition would ensure the software would be around for the long-haul. Instead, the acquirer shut it down and announced a re-launch in Summer 2012 (with no means of migrating our data), leaving hundreds of customers scrambling.  Sure, they offered us the ability to download our data, but without the code to run it, it’s not much use.

The timing of this event coincided with our Cloud Edition planning. It left us thinking: what can we do to assure our clients that they will never, ever be left in the lurch?

Our Cloud Edition: Single-Tenanted and Guaranteed To Be There

The answer became clear: keep our Cloud service single-tenanted and back it up with a guarantee: if we stop offering it, you get a copy of ThoughtFarmer and your data, free. Period.

What does single-tenanted mean? It means that each ThoughtFarmer installation is stand-alone. Each client gets their own, dedicated instance of ThoughtFarmer, independent from all other clients.  Your ThoughtFarmer intranet can be upgraded separately from others, and you can choose to migrate to the self-hosted edition of ThoughtFarmer at a later date if your business requires it.

What does “Guaranteed To Be There” mean? It means that if we should ever stop offering our Cloud Edition, for any reason, you get your data and a copy of ThoughtFarmer Self-Hosted Edition, absolutely free. You can then take ThoughtFarmer and install it on any server, anywhere. You can never lose your intranet.

We debated internally whether or not it’s a bad thing, from a marketing perspective, to talk about “Guaranteed To Be There”. Talking about it requires that we broach a negative topic that no software company wants you to think about: “What if we disappear?” But it’s a question everyone should ask themselves about every major software purchase they make — a question I wish I had asked myself about our CRM software.

ThoughtFarmer is fast-growing, nicely profitable and owned by a stable, 16-year-old software development firm. What does our Guarantee accomplish? It means that we’ve virtually eliminated the biggest risk that many organizations foresee when moving software to the Cloud.

Cloud Edition is $10/user/month or less

So what’s the bottom line? 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.

It’s making more sense than ever to move your software to the Cloud. Now, with ThoughtFarmer Cloud Edition, your social intranet can make the move too.

We’re in Boston this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. If you’re in the area, please come by our booth at the Expo and say hi! Or join us for daily 7am runs from the Sheraton Boston.

Darren Gibbons, ThoughtFarmer President, interviewed in Georgia Straight

Tweet Chris McGrath| March 10th, 2011 No Comments »

Vancouver’s news and entertainment weekly, The Georgia Straight, interviewed Darren Gibbons, ThoughtFarmer President, in this week’s issue in the article, “ThoughtFarmer, Google Docs make the workplace social.”

From the article:

“For us, when somebody new comes into the company, they can sit down, they can fire up the intranet, and they can get up to speed with different projects that are going on around the office, see some information about their coworkers—what their strengths are, that type of thing,” Gibbons said. “But they can also go through and look at photos from the Christmas party and that type of stuff too. They can get a feel for a little bit more about the company than they would from just having conversations with an individual.”

Read the full article.

Government & Social Intranet Software: USGS Case Study

Tweet Chris McGrath| March 2nd, 2011 No Comments »

How is government using social intranet software?

Read how the USGS Nevada Water Science Center reduced intranet staffing from two half-time staff to almost nothing by introducing a collaboratively-maintained social intranet: “Water in the Desert: ThoughtFarmer & USGS“.

“ThoughtFarmer has become the go-to resource for everything from HR information, to signing out a digital camera or boat, to checking the budget on a project, to getting a virtual introduction to a colleague on the other side of the state. ‘It has really been even more successful than we thought it would be,’ says IT specialist Shannon Watermolen.”

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

Intranet page to manage a resource -- in this case, a boat -- on the USGS Nevada Water Sciences Center intranet. Click screenshot to read the full case study.

As an agency of the United States Federal Government endorsements of specific commercial products are prohibited. The opinions of the US Geological Survey employees highlighted here reflect their personal opinions and do not constitute an endorsement of ThoughtFarmer or its developer by the USGS.

“Social Intranet”: I think we’re on to something

Tweet Chris McGrath| January 13th, 2011 No Comments »

In March 2009, Darren and I were planning the launch of ThoughtFarmer 3.5 and a new web site. We had previously marketed ThoughtFarmer as “intranet 2.0″, a “wiki intranet”, and as “social software”. But none of those terms felt like they captured the essence of ThoughtFarmer.

Jive had come out with their “social business” positioning. We were looking at their web site, when one of us cried (I can’t remember who), “Social Intranet! That’s what we are!” And in May 2009, we launched our new web site proclaiming ThoughtFarmer as Social Intranet Software.

That’s the first use of the term I had seen. But I’ve been stoked over the last few months to see the term co-opted by many intranet consultants and competitors:

On Google Insights, we see that “social intranet” only began appearing on the radar in 2010 (the spike at “A” is the Social Intranet Summit):

Similarly, our Google Analytics report on visits to thoughtfarmer.com from the term “social intranet” shows steady growth through 2010:

Additionally, our SEO consulting firm Outcome3 tells me that “social intranet” gets about 10% as many searches on Google as “intranet software”. For a new term, that’s impressive.

And finally, ThoughtFarmer, the original social intranet software solution, saw 86% revenue growth in 2010.

All this is a long way to say: I believe social intranets are poised for phenomenal growth in 2011. Indeed, with few exceptions, every new inquiry we get is from an organization looking for a social intranet, whether or not they refer to it as such. I’m glad we had a part in creating this wave; I intend to ride it.