Proactivity is not (yet) a proper word and although you won't be able to click on it anywhere on our website, it does describe the best feature of lynxNET; it creates one team out of the entire workforce by drawing everyone into a single collaborative, & therefore even more effective, community with common goals - customer satisfaction & ongoing prosperity - financial & functional - for the company.

Portfolios are the core structure of lynxNET. There is almost no limit to what a Portfolio can cover; anything from the Research & Development of a new product to the Kitchen Rota, plus any & everything else staff need to know are all suitable subjects for a Portfolio. Some Portfolios can range across the company, Health & Safety, News & Announcements, General Policies & Procedures for example. Others can be specific to a department or even a section within a department. If your company gets involved in events like Red Nose Day, Children in Need, Help for Heroes,  Jeans for Genes or any of the other multitudinous good causes in need of support, then you can run a Portfolio to cover that too.

Roles - there are five levels of membership to each Portfolio; Administrator, Moderator, Publisher, Viewer & Public. The Administrator sits at the top & keeps a guiding & watchful eye on how the Portfolio is running. An Administrator, in the context of LynxNET, may well be overseeing a number of Portfolios. The Moderator, of whom there should be one in each portfolio, oversees the day to day running of the Portfolio. It is they who approve membership & oversee changes in membership levels. Moderators also check each item submitted for publication, even suggesting changes should any be needed in the interest of accuracy and also to avoid distress or libel! A Publisher, of whom there can be many, is an active contributor to the Portfolio. This can take two forms, creating an article for publication or commenting upon an article via a 'thread'. Viewers are those who want to know more, or to be kept informed, about the Portfolio but who, at this stage, are content to read rather than participate. In terms of LynxNET, the Public level of membership equates to the rest of your staff &, possibly, any customers you wish to be kept informed of developments. It is possible to keep sensitive information out of the Public domain.

Articles are the lifeblood of each Portfolio. If you build machinery; you can create a Portfolio for every machine or device you manufacture, a Portfolio that contains all the information anyone working on or with that machine, as well as the tweaks & enhancements it receives, will ever need. Should your skills lie in the field of repair & maintenance, your Portfolios could hold the information on every piece of plant you have ever taken a spanner to & any idiosyncrasies it may have developed over the years. The same concepts, slightly tweaked, also apply to the service industry. All the information you will ever need to be the best in your field can be held in your Portfolios while still being directly available to the people who need it the most, as & when they need it.

Media files - sound, video, photographs, diagrams etc. - can be added to any Article. If one of your clients is based somewhere difficult to find via satnav alone, directions - with photographs if needed - can be part of the information accessible by your travelling staff; which means an end to asking a 'native' for directions that may not always be wholly helpful. It would also mean an end to missing scheduled appointment times & provide an aid to staff visiting that location for the first time. The Article(s) could also hold information on particular installations you have to work on that are not exactly 'as per spec'. The variations & the ways of dealing with them can be recorded, put into the system & be available to any & all members of staff who needs them, not just the ones who been there & done the job before.

Threads, these, much like the ones on the Internet, enable someone to comment on an article, or to enlarge upon a particular point in one. If this page were an Article you could comment on the use of words (or pseudo-words) like Proactivity. This is all part of LynxNET's capacity to make all your information freely available to everyone who needs it.

Forums, also as used on the Internet, are places for public (public within the secure, closed environment of LynxNET) debate. Once the subject matter has been decided, anyone in the organisation is able to contribute to the discussion.

Moderation is what keeps LynxNET legal, decent, honest & truthful. Each Portfolio has a Moderator, whose job it is to check & monitor, not censor, all contributions before they are published. It may be there will be a need to moderate the fiery posting of a Publisher who could be unfairly castigating a fellow employee who, through no fault of their own, was unable to purchase the preferred brand of biscuits for a meeting!

Management of resources is crucial to success in any venture. LynxNET's Portfolio based design also makes it a wonderful management tool. Because of its collaborative nature, ideas can be discussed, papers examined & opinions aired prior to the meeting taking place. When the meeting convenes, much of the work has already been done &, probably, some very good ideas that may otherwise have been lost actually make it to the table. At this level, LynxNET can be used by senior management looking at the way forward for the company. It can also be used as a project management tool for new ventures. Those responsible for staff training will have, on their desk, information about training needs, some of which staff will have added themselves, allied with general & particular areas your organisation would like to address, from First Aid to In Service Training. The process is simpler, less pressured & more effective than the Annual Review because the instead of being a one off event, the process continues through the year & it can be monitored & maintained. LynxNET takes what has been complex & cumbersome but necessary, moves it up a gear, then streamlines & simplifies it for you.

Membership & Multi Memberships - technically there is no limit to the number Portfolios one can join. Some staff may choose to restrict themselves to their own area of expertise & developing that while others may have wider ranging interests, seeking out information to augment their understanding of the company & its work. It is quite feasible to limit the number of memberships available.

Benefits - by now you are probably thinking, "All this sounds very good but what do we actually get out of it?" At the most basic level, you get efficiency savings which will ease the strain on your budget, & on you & your staff. You will also become more effective as an organisation because everyone who needs access to the information will have via their desktop, laptop or mobile phone. The days of documents being lost, then spending ages looking for them, reprinting & redistributing them will be gone, forever. You will save a fortune in printer cartridges alone! The other great saving will be in time, &, as everyone knows, time is money. As documentation will be Cloud based, papers for a meeting can be uploaded to the Portfolio where members can read & respond to them, prior to the meeting. The net result is that meetings, where needed, are brief & productive as much of the 'fat chewing' will already be done. It would be entirely possible (but somewhat radical) to conduct business via the Portfolio site without a meeting actually being required. Multiply those savings across every management Portfolio & the numbers soon become very attractive. Harder to define but no less real is the impact LynxNET will have on staff. Participation in LynxNET increase the sense of 'ownership' staff feel toward their work & the company as a whole. Collaborative software, like LynxNET, provides a place where every voice can be heard & where each voice is heard it is easier to sing in harmony. By drawing all staff together, LynxNET effectively ends the 'wage slave' culture of turning up, doing the absolute minimum & going home again. In this collaborative environment, no one is excluded. Finally, Collaborative Software is coming, in ten years everyone will be using it; why deny yourself the advantages now & have to play 'catch up' in the years ahead? Give yourself the edge!

Safety & Security issues are, rightly, always to the fore when looking at Internet & computer use. LynxNET has been rendered as safe as we can possibly make while still being easy to access & use. As LynxNEt is a 'closed' system, unlike the Internet, it is a much safer place to work. Again, because it is a Cloud based 'closed' system, Management Portfolios & what used to be known as paperwork can be kept secure & almost impossible to lose. LynxNET has a regular & extensive Back Up protocol which means even were something quite catastrophic to happen, your data should be safe.

Flexibility - unlike many systems which lock you into an inflexible contract, your LynxNET status is easy to change. Contact us & we will help you work out the best option for your company. There is even a short term facility for 'hovering' between membership levels while you gauge the pros & cons of changing your membership level.