As the world’s first network of networks, there is a lot of room for Clearvale to grow and increasingly benefit business users. As head Product Manager, Randy will be sharing Clearvale’s public roadmap and feature information, discussing industry trends and the marketplace, and showcasing unique and innovative solutions.
"The world don't move to the beat of just one drum.
What might be right for you, may not be right for some.
It takes different strokes to move the world."
That quote is take from the theme song to Diff'rent Strokes. Although including this snippet unfortunately reveals something about my age, I felt it was entirely appropriate given the context.
Every Clearvale network is unique. Their purposes, organization, appearances, and members are individual. Clearvale may be your internal enterprise collaboration platform, your partner extranet, your Social CRM solution, or any other number of business uses. How you choose to use Clearvale may be, and probably will be, different than how I use Clearvale.
Based on your business needs, your member use cases will vary. In some scenarios, such as with a private intranet, it may be beneficial to enable all members to have full feature access because they are trusted contributors. In other scenarios, such as with an externally-facing support site, you may want to limit certain functionality to a subset of your members. For example, you may want to restrict community creation and content management to company representatives.
Clearvale currently provides two user types; administrators and members. In the forthcoming Clearvale release, we shall introduce expanded and enhanced roles that enable you to distribute tasks and capabilities to members.
Owner: Each network shall have a dedicated owner. By default, this is the member who created the network. The owner shall have full administrative privileges, including the ability to manage other administrators and make system changes to the network.
Administrator: Administrators shall have full administrative privileges, including general network settings, appearance, content management, and member role management.
Moderator: Moderators shall have full content management privileges, such as the ability to review reported content, moderate posted content, etc.
Writer: Writers shall have all the privileges as today's "member" role, including the ability to publish content and manage their profiles.
Reader: Readers shall the ability to read content, post comments, reply to forum topics, vote in polls, and rate content. However, readers shall not be able to publish content or create/manage communities.
In addition, you'll be able to determine the default role for all incoming members. We plan to also enable you to specify the individual roles for members added via bulk loading.
Perhaps you will use all of these roles in your Clearvale solution. Perhaps you will only use two or three of them. The choice is yours.
"Everybody's got a special kind of story.
Everybody finds a way to shine.
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine.
And together we'll be fine!"
Clearvale is an Enterprise Social Network that provides streamlined and secure collaboration between your employees, business partners, and your customers; enabling you to socialize across and beyond the enterprise.
There you have my Clearvale elevator pitch. It’s succinct, punchy, and (hopefully) invites you to ask more questions about Clearvale. If you’re reading this blog, I assume that you have questions—or at least a significant interest—in what Clearvale can do for you.
As this is my first post on this site, I thought I’d start with something everyone can easily understand: Return on Investment (ROI).
First, let’s start with the investment portion. Clearvale’s pricing is perhaps the best value around when you compare it to that of other vendors. Clearvale is a hosted turnkey solution, with zero reliance on your IT or developer resources to get up and running. Clearvale’s pricing is based on monthly usage, which means no hefty up-front licensing fees. Your investment is low because BroadVision isn’t a startup company with antsy venture capitalists to appease; we can offer you more for less because we have been in the business for 17 years, have a stable customer base, and have a seasoned team with extensive experience building enterprise-grade applications.
But what about the returns? What are they? Why should you invest in an Enterprise Social Networking solution at all? A few reasons:
Let’s face it; the average workforce age is getting older as the baby boom generation nears the retirement years. When they retire, expertise and knowledge will be lost. Clearvale can help mitigate that loss, resulting in enormous savings for your company.
Consider the cost of losing an employee, either to retirement or to the job market. In 2006, Ross Blake published an article in which he associated cost estimates with employee attrition. The replacement cost of a mid-level employee represents 150% of their annual salary. Replacing a senior staff member costs as much as 400% of their annual salary. That’s a huge cost.
When you look at reasons why people voluntarily leave companies, low morale, lack of communication, and a lack of personal investment often factor prominently in HR exit interviews. According to John Dooney, manager of strategic research at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the HR cost alone of losing an average employee is about 40% of the departing employee’s salary. With Clearvale, you can provide a robust communication and collaboration network within your company to keep employees informed, engaged, and invested in your company.
Retirement is another reason why people voluntarily leave companies. Some companies opt for costly methods for coping with this loss of expertise and wisdom, such as bringing retirees back in for consulting stints or extending their employment periods as the replacement hires learn the ropes.
Clearvale offers a cost-effective alternative. You can leave the virtual door open to retired employees who can continue contributing to the discussion, answer questions, mentor new employees, etc. By implementing an ESN solution before the impending retirement bubble hits, you can begin collecting the knowledge and experience of your senior employees in a single, indexed, searchable place; Clearvale.
Clearly, if you are able to retain more institutional knowledge which new employees can use to get up to speed faster, thereby reducing the learning curve and minimizing productivity lag, you can save a tremendous amount of money.
What about these new employees? They are millennials, the Web 2.0 generation raised on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. They are highly adept at using social networking applications for coordinating all their activities. Providing a familiar, frictionless, yet entirely secure, communications environment for your new employees will enable them to work more effectively and contribute more quickly to the discussions and projects that fuel your company’s innovation and success.
