Having been selected as one of 5 companies to represent the Centre, CEO John McGuire showed David Cameron the company’s cloud-based compliance software package, TeamPoint. TeamPoint has been developed in Daresbury and, in May 2011, became the first UK software application to be integrated into IBM’s LotusLive suite.

Afterwards, the Prime Minister spoke to staff from the 100 companies that are in the Centre and said,

“It’s great see how people here are building and creating for the future. I have seen some brilliant businesses.”

Announcing that Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus would become one of the 11 new Enterprise Zones in the UK, he continued,

“It’s a successful model for collaboration between sciences and businesses, and the enterprise zone can make it even more successful than it is today.”

Most organisations have quite a few policies and procedures, and normal practice is to publish these key controlled documents within a team, department, or the entire company. This makes sense because these organisation groups reflect responsibilities and roles within the organisation. However when an organisation is accredited to one or more ISO standards, there is a requirement to demonstrate how this library of policies and procedures complies with the standard.

Standards Tagging within TeamPoint now allows users to tag each controlled document against a clause in one or more ISO standards, and then display a list of controlled documents ordered according to the structure of that standard. This means that proving to an Auditor that you comply with the standard is incredibly easy. The Audit module also gives you a visual check of any requirements of the standard which you do not yet have covered in your policies and procedures.

For more information about Standards Tagging, start a free trial of TeamPoint today, or contact us.

If you need to provide someone with Administrator rights, click the Users tab, click the name of the person you want to grant Admin rights to and click “Grant Admin”.

TeamPoint has 6 Roles which reflect your level of authority in a particular organisation group. These are:

1. Member – A member can see all documents published within an Organisation Group, and any subsidiary groups “owned” by that Organisation Group. A member will also receive notifications and reminders from TeamPoint when a document has been marked as “Must Read” until that user confirms they have read and accepted the contents of the document.
2. Create – This means the User can set up a new document in TeamPoint within the Organisation Group, and any subsidiary groups “owned” by that Organisation Group. This means the User can decide who should Write, Approve and Publish a document within this part of your organisation. Users who are able to Create a document are automatically able to Retire a document.
3. Write – This means the User can participate in writing and editing the content for a document.
4. Approve – This means the User can be added as an Approver for documents in this part of your organisation.
5. Publish – This means the User can publish documents for this part of your organisation.
6. Retire – This means the User can retire documents in this part of your organisation. Note, TeamPoint does not allow you to delete documents. When you retire a document, the document is no longer visible on your list of controlled documents, but a permanent record of the document remains in the Audit module.

1. Click on the Users tab, find the user you want to edit and then click on their name
2. Click the “Edit” button
3. Click to expand the “User Roles” section
4. Click the “Create New Role” button

A user can be a member of as many groups as you want, and can have different rights in different groups. For instance, a user could have rights to create and approve documents in one group, and have read only rights in another group.

To find out more about what the different roles in TeamPoint mean, see the Support entry titled “User Roles in TeamPoint”.

Here’s how to add individual users yourself:

1. Click on the Users tab
2. Click “Create New User”
3. Add the user’s name and email address; you do not need to add phone numbers if you don’t want to
4. Click “Create”

For information about how to add a user to an organisation group, see the Support entry titled “Editing User Rights”

This screenshot shows a typical organisation structure. You can create as many groups as you like, and once you’ve got a structure that makes sense, you can add your users into one or more groups.

To create a New Organisation Group:

1. Click on the Organisation Groups tab, and then click “New Organisation Group“.
2. Now choose the “Parent” folder. This is where your new organisation group will sit in your structure. You can build as many levels in your organisation as you want, and define who has access to each level.
3. In the Name field, enter the name for your new organisation group.
4. Click “Create” to save your new organisation group.

To find out how to add a user to an organisation group, see the Support entry titled “Editing User Rights”

To find out more, visit www.teampoint.com/lotuslive

I just came across this Scott Adams (aka Dilbert) quote on Michael Rasmussen’s blog (www.corp-integrity.com), and it’s such a great summary of the problems that many organisations face. Especially talking to customers in the mid-market space (which we software types define as 100 – 1000 employees), I am very conscious that these people have been on a journey from a very small, focused organisation to a much larger and more complex business. When you’ve got 10 people in the business, you can afford to focus on the problem, fix it and move on. As you grow, you need to develop repeatable processes and procedures, and you need to be able to prove that you follow them. When you get to 50 employees, things are already look much more complex, and as you continue to succeed and grow, that complexity keeps on accelerating.

In the field of compliance, the first reaction you see in most organisations to this complexity is to throw people and generic software solutions at the problem. Actually maybe that should be the other way around? Smaller organisations often start by trying to use Excel and Word to manage their compliance effots, but rapidly find that making this approach work needs lots (and lots) of manpower. It’s inefficient, and because there are so many points of interaction, it is prone to human error.

Cloud computing is incredibly helpful in addressing this complexity, because it gives organisations – of all shapes and sizes – the ability to centralise data, and rapidly, affordably, access applications which fix their specific problem. So let’s bring this down to specifics. You might currently be running your Management System, Health & Safety and HR policies using a combination of Word (to create content), Email/Intranet (to distribute content), and Excel (to record version history). But this process means each person in the organisation must manually update their records with the new version; and someone else needs to record the version history – especially tricky when multiple people are involved in the creation and approval of content; and trying to record acceptance of a policy or procedure is a further challenge, all too often ignored because it’s just too difficult.

TeamPoint sticks to the KISS mantra. It’s easy to centralise all your existing documentation ensuring that everyone gets to see the right version. It’s easy to manage and track the creation and approval process; and equally easy to chase and track acceptance of policies and procedures by staff. All through a web browser, with nil set up costs and no time required from your (overstretched?) IT guys.

I really think that simplicity is the key because if you make a process easy to follow, people are much more likely to follow it. Maybe that’s “motherhood and apple pie”, but it never ceases to amaze me how many organisations find themselves wrapped in the spaghetti of inefficient, unconnected, manual processes. Cloud really is the answer!

For example: the latest Employee Handbook which got published to everyone in the company 2 months ago, they get in their TeamPoint account. The Health & Safety policy which everyone has to sign – they are automatically asked to read and sign. Procedures which have been published in their department only, they get to see.

Everything they need, provided in an instant. No risk that you’ve left anything out.

It really is that simple, and if you’re a manager we think it’s going to save youa lot of time every time you recruit someone. Maybe more importantly, you can be certain that your new starter has all the documentation they need, and TeamPoint will chase them for sign-offs where required.

We’ve all been raised on email, and it’s second nature to share a file via email. So what’s wrong with that? Well, the moment you send a file out via email, you create one or more uncontrolled copies of that file. Each person you send it to has their own copy, which they may file away in a folder in their email client. Maybe they’ll also download a copy onto their local computer, filed in Documents>Other Documents>Another Level etc! And whether they’ll remember where they put it is just the start of the potential problem. What happens when someone wants to amend the document. Someone you’ve sent it to sends an amended version back to everyone else. Then someone else amends the amended version.

A quick calculation: You send 1 file to 5 people; each one of those people amends that file once. You already have 36 local copies and 6 versions! It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how this problem tends to mushroom out of control, and you’ve almost certainly experienced the problem first hand.

On the other hand, “Click to Share” eliminates the problem, and it’s a concept that underpins IBM’s LotusLive, and our very own TeamPoint. Upload your document into TeamPoint and tell TeamPoint who you want to share it with, and you have no uncontrolled copies and no version problems. TeamPoint sends out a link to everyone you want involved, and that’s what “Click to Share” is all about. That’s a big deal if you’re trying to prove you comply with a statutory requirement or an ISO standard. Maybe even more importantly, it saves time, and the more documents you are talking about, the more people involved, the more time you save.

So here’s a prediction for you. In 2 year’s time, you won’t be sending files by email any more. Whether you’re using TeamPoint to share your policies and procedures, or LotusLive to share your project plans, or Facebook to share your photos, the whole concept of using email to share files will seem antiquated really quickly. Welcome to the world of “Click to Share”!