Want to know what's really happening on your intranet?

Or what your employees are really doing? Are they collaborating? Are they sharing their insights and knowledge? Are they even communicating with each other?

At Telligent, we use Community Server Evolution to power our intranet (and we also have Microsoft SharePoint). Since we're all fairly busy these days, it's useful at times to look at statistics (provided by Harvest Reporting Server) to get a quick sense of what my colleagues are working on and what hot issues they're dealing with.

From the Harvest Dashboard shown below, I can see that our forums are being used as much as our media galleries, and upon looking at the detail stats, the media galleries are being used mostly for posting mockups and screen captures. I can also see that 71% of all registered users (i.e. employees) have been active since Jan 1, 2009 and that total contributions have increased 20% compared to the period of Nov-Dec, 2008. Lastly, I can see who the top contributors are (good to know that I'm #2 amongst real users), and quite interestingly, what the overall sentiment fluctuations are (for which, of course, I just need to dig deeper).

The negative valley of sentiment around the end of January really bothered me, and by zooming in on that area of the chart, I can see from the chart shown below that, in fact, a whopping negative 142 sentiment points were reported by Harvest.

To find out exactly who, among my colleagues, had all this negative sentiment and for what issue, I drill into the specific date of Jan 28, 2009. I see in the chart shown below that our CEO, Rob Howard, registered a -6 sentiment on this date. Well, when my CEO is unhappy about something, I'd sure like to know what it is. :-)

With Harvest's click/drag/click UI, I drill into Rob's sentiment details report and see the 4 specific forum posts (which he had sent in as email from his iPhone via Evolution's built-in Email Gateway) about a competitive situation that he wasn't overly upset about but he was definitely not happy about. Since I had missed that particular thread, it's quite insightful for me to read Rob's responses to the issue and chime in if appropriate even though it's been a couple of weeks since it happened. Without Harvest, I probably wouldn't have found that thread and in turn would have lost the opportunity to gain the insight that might help me in dealing with similar competitive situations in the future.

To finish off this blog entry on a positive note, by looking at the Harvest Scorecard report for activity within the various groups in our intranet, I can confidently declare and proudly reveal (in the report shown below) that we at Telligent just love dogfooding our own products and that we readily share both post-sales and pre-sales information via the "Support and FAQ" and "Sales Engineering" groups, respectively. If I wanted to, I can quickly drill into this report just like I can with all of the other Harvest reports. But what makes me happiest about this Scorecard is that it shows our Sales folks being much less active on our intranet because (and yes, I'm making an assumption here) they're busy interacting with our existing and prospective customers. And once we have our Telligent Sales Network (powered by Community Server, of course) up and running, I'll be able to confirm that assumption with Harvest as well.

So, wouldn't you want to know what's really happening on your intranet? With Telligent's Community Server Evolution and Harvest Reporting Server, you can!