Discover Microsoft 365 Intranet’s connectivity, cost savings, and innovation advantages in this three-part mini-series.
Are you wondering if digital application synchronicity will help your organization’s upcoming or ongoing digital transformation? We hope to shine a light on that question in the rest of the article as we answer why Microsoft 365’s ecosystem of applications can benefit your digital workplace strategy.
One of the most significant advantages of using SharePoint for your Intranet is that it comes pre-integrated with many other Microsoft technologies. SharePoint Online has an app launcher in the top left corner of the suite bar at the top of every SharePoint page. This means that one click away is the entire Microsoft 365 suite and other apps/experiences you have integrated with your Microsoft 365 digital workplace.
Microsoft’s rich integration across these other applications is the primary reason for Microsoft’s SharePoint being the basis for the majority of Intranets in the market today. With this rich integration, you can bring your Intranet to the user where they work or inside of your Intranet, where you can get them to your Intranet pages.
At 2toLead, we have a slogan which is ‘You will love the way we work. Together.’ This isn’t just about customers loving the way 2toLead works, but also how we work with a significant ecosystem around Microsoft.
We have worked with hundreds of partners, and many have hired or look to our team for advice. We continually lead and contribute to user groups and communities whose membership represents millions of developers, IT professionals, architects, and analysts. When you think about the power of that ecosystem being brought to bear in your organization, it’s hard not to appreciate just how much more it can do ‘Together.’
The Microsoft 365 or Office 365 ecosystem of applications makes it easy to integrate your existing technology with the stack, switch between apps, create an integrated experience and bring your workplace on the go with mobile features. Connectivity across the entire suite can help enhance your employee experience and much more.
You can liken the experience to one found as a consumer with Apple’s ecosystem. The difference is that since Microsoft 365 is a business solution, it can also easily configure to fit your specific companies look and feel and built to fit your organization’s needs.
The number of vendors who support Microsoft 365 integration is staggering. It is arguably the most integrated SaaS service on the market today and is considerably easy to integrate with other SaaS or enterprise vendors. Whether you are looking to integrate with common enterprise systems like your ERP, CRM, or HRIS, you have many options from first-party vendors.
As a first-party vendor, Microsoft has many ways to integrate common enterprise systems and services like your ERP, CRM, or HRIS. The third-party ecosystem extends and improves upon this with excellent examples like Layer2 Solutions having a sync model that integrates with an incredible number of systems to bring them into SharePoint list data.
List data in SharePoint is already integrated with many other systems in Microsoft. So sometimes, you don’t even need to tie your Intranet directly to the other system. Copying filtered data to secure places in your Intranet today and then surfacing that in the existing Intranet investments can be a significant win.
Doing things like ensuring users can quickly switch between Outlook and OneDrive for Business from SharePoint is much easier when powered or running on Office 365. Consider how easy a team member can trigger an instant message via Microsoft Teams from anywhere in your company Intranet where a person is referenced. Empowering not just email, but the ad-hoc discussion can turn into recordings that can be exposed or connected to the Intranet in Microsoft Stream.
It also makes it much easier to integrate contextual experiences where they can add value based on where the user is interacting in your digital workplace. As an example, consider how referencing a news post or page on your Intranet is easy to do out of the box in other related digital workplace experiences such as in Microsoft Yammer or Microsoft Teams.
You could even take this further by customizing the news experience to highlight the number of times Teams or Yammer references a page/news post. Enabling users to see, at a glance, when there are related discussions that go beyond the page comments themselves across the organization.
Continued investments are being placed into responsive design pages (news) and sites. There is also an incredible wealth of mobile experiences that are targeted and work across platforms for Office 365 users. From OneNote to some of the new app experiences like Microsoft Teams and Modern SharePoint sites. When your Intranet is powered by Microsoft 365, many of these app and mobility experiences tie into how users can manage, author, or collaborate in an employee Intranet.
Now that you’ve learned of the connected experience provided by a Microsoft SharePoint Intranet, get our definitive Microsoft 365 Intranet guide to learn everything there is to know about your new modern Intranet.
