Modern HR, Communication, & Leadership Best Practices With Microsoft 365
Intranets are about more than just getting key corporate messaging out. Communications have changed just as IT and HR have changed. Communications leaders have shifted...
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The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience with M365 and Viva
Looking to understand Employee Experience and how Microsoft 365 and Viva solutions can help? Our 80+ page whitepaper covers it all, so don't miss out and download today.
Overcoming SharePoint Creative Blocks & Challenges
Creative blocks happen to the best of us, but with the help of Brandon Pittman and Richard Plantt, you can minimize how often SharePoint is the root cause.
Ideas That Will Transform Your Digital Employee Experience...
Today, the Digital Employee Experience matters more than ever. Download our eBook for ideas that can help maximize resources, and efficiency in your organizations.
The Future of Employee Management
Join Richard & Asif, two Microsoft MVPs and internationally recognized experts on Microsoft 365, as they share insight on how to better plan for, prepare for and benefit from the future of employee management.
The Future of Employee Collaboration
Join Richard Harbridge, a Microsoft MVP and internationally recognized expert on Microsoft 365 and the Digital Workplace, as he shares insight on how to better plan for, prepare for and benefit from the future of employee collaboration.
The Future of Employee Communication Roundtable
Join James Robertson, from Step Two author on digital employee experience, Suzie Robinson, author of the ClearBox report, and Richard Harbridge, as they share insight on how to better understand, and leverage the future of employee communications.
The Biggest Microsoft 365 Management Mistakes and How to Solve...
Do you want to make sure you aren't making any major mistakes when managing Microsoft 365? Join two Microsoft MVPs, Richard and Christian as they help!
Compliant Collaboration: Responsibly Empower & Sustain at Scale
We work with more people today than ever before. The scale, speed, and sprawl that collaboration requires are some of the biggest challenges facing organizations today.
Solving Today’s HR, Communication, and Leadership Challenges...
Internal Communications leaders have shifted from editors to enablers. With that shift comes a change from enforcing messaging to empowering and amplifying excellent communications and great ideas throughout the business. From preboarding to offboarding, HR's challenges are harder today than they have ever been before. Naturally, how these leaders leverage the digital workplace has changed as well, especially in how they leverage technology to achieve more with less.
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Overcoming SharePoint Creative Blocks & Challenges
Creative blocks happen to the best of us, but with the help of Brandon Pittman and Richard Plantt, you can minimize how often SharePoint is the root cause.
The Future of Employee Management
Join Richard & Asif, two Microsoft MVPs and internationally recognized experts on Microsoft 365, as they share insight on how to better plan for, prepare for and benefit from the future of employee management.
The Future of Employee Collaboration
Join Richard Harbridge, a Microsoft MVP and internationally recognized expert on Microsoft 365 and the Digital Workplace, as he shares insight on how to better plan for, prepare for and benefit from the future of employee collaboration.
The Future of Employee Communication Roundtable
Join James Robertson, from Step Two author on digital employee experience, Suzie Robinson, author of the ClearBox report, and Richard Harbridge, as they share insight on how to better understand, and leverage the future of employee communications.
The Biggest Microsoft 365 Management Mistakes and How to Solve...
Do you want to make sure you aren't making any major mistakes when managing Microsoft 365? Join two Microsoft MVPs, Richard and Christian as they help!
Compliant Collaboration: Responsibly Empower & Sustain at Scale
We work with more people today than ever before. The scale, speed, and sprawl that collaboration requires are some of the biggest challenges facing organizations today.
Solving Today’s HR, Communication, and Leadership Challenges...
Internal Communications leaders have shifted from editors to enablers. With that shift comes a change from enforcing messaging to empowering and amplifying excellent communications and great ideas throughout the business. From preboarding to offboarding, HR's challenges are harder today than they have ever been before. Naturally, how these leaders leverage the digital workplace has changed as well, especially in how they leverage technology to achieve more with less.
Successful & Modern Microsoft 365 Governance: What You Need To...
Having effective Governance is about a lot more than just creating and maintaining a “Governance Plan” or having policies and leadership around how the service is run.
SharePoint Upgrade & Migration Planning
How do organizations successfully migrate or upgrade SharePoint to SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams? Find out in our webinar with partner AvePoint!
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Employee Experience Collaboration Strategy | Design for...
Modern workplaces need a collaboration strategy because working remote can be very isolating to employees who have a small circle of collaboration and low interaction with the team as a whole. Richard, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, discusses how intranets are changing in this video, and how Teams continues to position itself as your organizations "We" platform.
Planning for the Future of Collaboration – Key Concepts
Progress is unavoidable for the future of collaboration will continue to change. Its important to modernize how you approach, plan and support collaboration so that when new changes occur, your organization is resilient and ready to take advantage of them.
SharePoint Hubs in Hubs – StepTwo Forum Clip
Modern SharePoint introduced Hub Sites but when is the right time to use them? A few weeks ago, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge joined one of StepTwo's incredible members only forum for an AMA.
Internal and External Collaboration – Teams Works In More...
External collaboration with teams is now adapting to replace the need for SharePoint extranets. Shared channels can connect workplaces and tenants seamlessly for smoother internal or external.
The Intranet Is Dying: Debate Summary and Results
The first episode of The Great EX Debate has come and gone. Wondering what points were made or who the winner was? You’re in the right place!
If you haven’t had the chance to watch the LIVE event, don’t worry! Watch the full debate below or continue to read a quick overview and see the winner.
https://youtu.be/Q2jMacCG_q8
For and Against the Intranet Is Dying
We didn’t hold back on talent for the debate! For the motion, we had 7X Microsoft MVP and our CTO, Richard Harbridge. Against the motion, we had Neilson Norman Intranet award-winner and our Digital Workplace Strategist, Brandon Pittman.
The argument for
While Richard has worked on over 100 intranets and digital workplaces, he argued that the tides are moving away from the Intranet as the place to go or as the center hub of the digital workplace. Instead, he argues, the purpose should be to bring the experiences the Intranet provides to where the employees work in the context of their work.
Richard makes the following key arguments:
- The core design of the Intranet as the place to go is flawed and not the optimal or desired experience. A model that brings the value, services, and content of the Intranet to users where they already work are what employees want.
- It is unsustainable to centralize in the way we have with exponential growth in business content (currently doubling every 2 years).
- It's already happening on mobile, in email, Office applications, and Microsoft teams. Citing news consumption experiences, search experiences such as Microsoft Search embedded throughout the digital workplace, and navigation shifts for more dynamic, personalized, and intelligent navigation best represented by employee experiences like Viva Topics as a more just-in-time, in-context, connected, and AI-powered experience.
- The Intranet is not as significant an area of employee experience investment as it has been in the past. Most core capabilities are now easily accessible and easy to implement, and most new experiences are distributed in the apps/places people work.
- This is a transformative moment in time - similar to when enterprise social shifted the Intranet to focus on engagement, interactivity, and more. That it isn't a simple iteration on the prior model of Intranets.
The argument against
While Richard argued that people are leaving the intranet behind to focus on maximizing the employee experience no matter where the employee prefers to work, Brandon argued that the Intranet would continue to play a pivotal role in the digital workplace, one that nothing else can match today. He spoke to the intranet, not dying but evolving and thriving.
Brandon makes the following key arguments:
- Continued integration and investment from Microsoft and others into the Intranet experience clearly communicates that the Intranet remains essential and highly relevant.
- Adoption takes time, norms matter, and so do expectations, and the Intranet is familiar, known, and already highly leveraged. "Tried tested, and true." This is especially important during crises and unique business challenges these last few years as communication and connection take priority.
- The costs involved are better for investment since it's one place. It's easier to envision, design, build and roll out.
- It serves as a new employee center and gravity well and is the core of most onboarding experiences today.
- There is no better hub for employees today. While there are new employee experiences that can help produce similar results but these experiences are at best immature, siloed, or fragmented and are not ready to dethrone the Intranet.
The Results
At face value, it might not seem like much changed before and after the debate. While the percentages looked pretty similar, it is clear that the needle did move as more undecided individuals found their place in the debate. However, if we look even further, we see some interesting insights.
How did the votes sway?
For the motion, we saw a small percentage (2%) actually move away from Intranet Thriving, and Richard was also able to bring 1% of undecided individuals over. While there was some movement around swayed votes, most people for the motion stuck to their initial stance that the intranet is indeed dying.
Against the motion, we saw a lot of movement! While only 53% of voters stayed against the motion, versus the initial 58%, Brandon was able to resurrect faith in 2% of people who had previously seen the intranet as a dying solution. More impressive was his ability to turn 5% of undecided voters into believers!
Over on the undecided side, there was a lot of movement to either side. However, while Richard couldn’t bring individuals entirely over to his side, he managed to convince 3% of people that maybe there was more to his points than they initially thought but not enough to fully embrace the motion.
The Winner
Our debate was decided on the number of votes that were swayed. So, the winner of our debate was…
Brandon Pittman!
From an initial vote against the motion of 56%, Brandon increased to 58% of individuals for a total increase of 2%. Richard started from an initial vote for the motion of 38%, increased to 39% in the second vote, for a total increase of 1%.
The importance of debate and the future of the series
It’s clear from the still considerable split on this motion that we need more places to debate different opinions and ideas to allow the opportunity for opinion and nuance.
We look forward to another debate next quarter, and we hope you do too! Let us know your thoughts on social and other motions you’d love to see us debate with the hashtag #TheGreatEXDebate!
Until then, if you're looking to improve your intranet and digital workplace, download our free 160+ page whitepaper!
Do we have the right Digital Workplace Tools, and how much is...
How can you bridge the gap between having multiple digital workplace tools co-operating clumsily and a fully integrated experience? Watch our CTO and Microsoft MVP Richard Harbridge how to improve your digital workplace explain in this clip!
The Importance of Debating: The Intranet Is Dying
On August 18th, we'll be going LIVE with the first episode of a new series called 'The Great EX Debate.' The motion for our inaugural episode is, The Intranet Is Dying, where we will debate whether the Intranet has been dethroned as your primary employee engagement, communication, and collaboration solution.
While we are eager for the debate, let's dive into what makes it relevant and worth debating.
Do Internal Communications Teams Need to Evolve Beyond the Intranet?
Is the Intranet still the right focus? Or should your internal communications team shift their focus around bringing different elements and solutions from your digital workplace to a platform like Microsoft Teams?
Whether your employee communication and collaboration hub is Teams or a SharePoint Intranet, benefits are present on both sides, and you shouldn't neglect either. The main goal for many business leaders and employees alike is to improve EX regardless of platform prioritization.
The current state of the digital workplace
Organizations must consistently adapt their employee experience strategies to meet or surpass employee demand. That said, solutions need to do even more. Today, organizations are more focused on creating a better employee experience with greater necessity than ever before. However, as companies and technologies adapt and figure out the new norm, EX (employee experience) still has room for improvement.
If solutions can't deal with the ebbs and flows that come with the ever-changing landscape, they can quickly become irrelevant. Luckily, Microsoft is a massive engine with the ability to pivot quickly. For example, the new Microsoft Viva experience from Microsoft is an excellent example of Microsoft's ability to shift rapidly in the right direction. Then again, they have always been at the forefront of internal communications solutions.
Past Disruptors Have Failed to Dethrone the Intranet
Business technology is consistently changing to meet the demand of the world's workforce. Innovations force us to examine the existing EX and Digital Workplace models and question what these innovations do better. Or, more relevant to this blog, will they make old technology and patterns obsolete over time?
Did Yammer + Enterprise Social Kill the Intranet?
Four years after Facebook and two years after Twitter revolutionized social to the masses, in 2008, Yammer brought social to the enterprise and Microsoft stack.
With the release of Yammer, many raised red flags and wondered if enterprise social was the future of communication and collaboration at work. Also, will Yammer dethrone the Intranet? In short, it didn't but did add another layer to digital workplaces everywhere that enriched the employee experience, employee connectivity, and employee voice.
Instead of the typical linear discussions people were used to having, Yammer brought authentic conversations to the digital workplace, something that Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva Experiences would take one step further, potentially in a different and more impactful way.
For example, while leadership messaging has lived in Intranets for many years, Microsoft has taken the incredible work they've done with Yammer and is looking to the future by providing employee messaging and sharing experiences powered by Microsoft Viva Engage.
https://youtu.be/WFOCtYKDn0w
Did Microsoft Teams Kill Intranets?
Teams caught fire quickly. It provides a digital workspace that enriches communication and collaboration while bringing your favorite applications into Channels. For these reasons, Microsoft Teams has become the hub of digital workplaces for many companies. If you ask what apps they use as employees, it's usually Outlook or Teams at the forefront, not the Intranet.
https://youtu.be/PeyTMMVP7jY
The question is, has it killed the Intranet? That has yet to be determined. However, a recent Forrester report shows that 90% of employees would find an integrated EX platform valuable or extremely valuable. A question in the debate we will explore is whether the Intranet should be the EX platform or whether Teams or other experiences are a better long-term path forward.
So, while it has yet to be determined whether Microsoft Teams will take the place of the Intranet, organizations will need to use every tool they have to meet employees' expectations.
Before the dust clears on whether or not the Intranet is dying, there is no better time for a debate with two industry experts!
Watch 2 Industry Experts Go Head-to-Head at #TheGreatEXDebate
Have you heard The Great EX Debate is right around the corner? Don't miss our first live event! The motion: "Is the Intranet Dying?"
For the motion #IntranetDying, we have our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, and against the motion #IntranetThirving, we have Brandon Pittman, our award-winning Digital Workplace Strategist. Both collectively bring the experience of having worked on hundreds of Intranets from design to post-launch, and we can't wait to hear what they say.
What’s Holding Back an Employee Experience Manager today?
Overcoming common challenges an employee experience manager may experience in this video is two Microsoft MVPs, Richard and Asif. Watch them identify what is holding back the future.
Digital Maturity Model – Synchronized Efforts Across...
Real improvements in business communication happen when efforts are synchronized across multiple channels
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digital_workplace
Employee Experience Collaboration Strategy | Design for...
Modern workplaces need a collaboration strategy because working remote can be very isolating to employees who have a small circle of collaboration and low interaction with the team as a whole. Richard, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, discusses how intranets are changing in this video, and how Teams continues to position itself as your organizations "We" platform.
Planning for the Future of Collaboration – Key Concepts
Progress is unavoidable for the future of collaboration will continue to change. Its important to modernize how you approach, plan and support collaboration so that when new changes occur, your organization is resilient and ready to take advantage of them.
SharePoint Hubs in Hubs – StepTwo Forum Clip
Modern SharePoint introduced Hub Sites but when is the right time to use them? A few weeks ago, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge joined one of StepTwo's incredible members only forum for an AMA.
Internal and External Collaboration – Teams Works In More...
External collaboration with teams is now adapting to replace the need for SharePoint extranets. Shared channels can connect workplaces and tenants seamlessly for smoother internal or external.
What’s Holding Back an Employee Experience Manager today?
Overcoming common challenges an employee experience manager may experience in this video is two Microsoft MVPs, Richard and Asif. Watch them identify what is holding back the future.
Digital Maturity Model – Synchronized Efforts Across...
Real improvements in business communication happen when efforts are synchronized across multiple channels
Enhance Digital Employee Experience with Collaboration Solution...
MicrosoftTeams is an amazing resource for improving Digital Employee Experience through its improved communication and collaboration capabilities. Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge takes a moment to share some collaboration solution ideas to enhance the experience of your digital employees.
3 World-Renown Experts Talk Employee Experience Strategy for...
3 world-renown experts on digital workplaces and the employee experience connect to explore new organizational communication approaches and improvements, and share what is driving them.
Employee Experience Platform Gaps
Identifying employee experience platform gaps is a skill that will help ensure your company chooses the right platform for its specific need and doesn't spend money you don't need to.
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5 Ideas to Improve Employee Experience in The Digital Workplace
There is no shortage of ways organizations can improve the employee experience in the workplace today. The opportunity to accelerate app impact is high today. IDC, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey reported that 50% of digital work can be automated with current tech and 60% of all occupations have greater than 30% automatable activities.
Momentum and demand are building with more need for better apps and solutions than ever before. This demand is unprecedented and continues to accelerate. It is not uncommon today for larger organizations to have more than 200 apps in use across their organization with a backlog and demand for many more.
The more we can maximize Microsoft 365 apps and services to integrate, connect or displace these apps, the less isolation and silo effects we should see across our apps and solution ecosystem within our organizations.
In this blog, we will be sharing these five solution ideas:
- Center of Digital Excellence
- Time & Expense Submission
- Enhancements for Company Communicator
- New Employee Onboarding Assistance
- SharePoint Syntex Assessment
Navigating More Great Ideas
Before we dive into those five solution ideas, we should note that over 400,000 partners and tens of millions of developers are working with Microsoft 365 today. A robust ecosystem and marketplace of solutions from customers, community leaders, and vendors like Microsoft can show how Microsoft 365 meets many of those app needs and provides a better digital employee experience, but this ecosystem and marketplace are fragmented across many sites and spaces today.
To help here, we have put together an ebook to help organizations like yours navigate and take advantage of digital workplace solutions that build on Microsoft 365. This eBook helps organizations better understand how they can elevate their digital employee experience and meet key employee needs.
Those needs include:
- Adoption
- Business Processes
- Employee Communication
- Employee Networking and Connectivity
- Employee Onboarding
- Ideation
- Microsoft 365 Management
- Organizing the Digital Workplace
Download our latest Microsoft 365 resource below or read this blog, where we showcase 5 solutions out of the 35+ included in our eBook.
#1 Establish a Center of Digital Excellence
Every organization is working hard to improve digital excellence. Having a center for digital excellence is a foundational solution that will work to reinforce and communicate governance and provide a hub for self-service learning, connect champions, mentors, experts, and house tips, tricks, and considerable adoption material.
What does it do?
Acting as a hub for digital excellence, this templated or customized site, yammer community, and connected teams serve as a place to store, share, monitor, and manage digital excellence within the organization.
When used in combination with Viva Learning and other technology investments such as Microsoft Learning Pathways, it can surface and connect users to learning programs, materials, and resources.
The Digital CoE is also a foundational investment for governance. It provides a clear location for sharing, storing, and enabling a richer understanding of your digital governance policies and guidance. Many house champion programs, lists, mentorship, Q&A-driven communities, and much more.
Technology Used
Solution Areas
- Center of excellence
- Adoption
- Champion programs
- Learning management
- Governance
#2 Time & Expense Submissions
What if timesheets could proactively reach out to employees and simplify the process of submission. This approach would require no extra login, no additional app as it's in Teams where employees already work, with a simplified and improved end-user experience.
What does it do?
The app pro-actively reaches out to employees to perform a time and/or expense submission in Microsoft Teams.
With single sign-on, employees do not have to sign in every time to access the app or leave the Microsoft Teams experience. Whether using any device, mobile, desktop, or web browser, the user experience remains the same.
Managers get a single consolidated view of their team's time entry information and/or expenses. The manager can view action time & expense submissions for each direct report (accept, reject, and send a reminder).
Technology Used
Solution Areas
- Professional services
- Time & expense management
- Project operations
#3 Company Communicator For Microsoft Teams
Take your company communications to the next level with an enhanced company communication experience that enables pushing key messages to people and channels in Microsoft Teams.
What does it do?
The core solution enables communicators to leverage Microsoft Teams as an effective push channel for key or targeted employee communication. This is achieved by enabling:
- Message creation: Easily create messages by using a team tab where team members who have permission can collaborate and create messages.
- Audience selection: Pick from four options for to target audience. Send to the general channel of selected teams, send in 1:1 chat to members of selected teams, send to all users who have the app installed, or send to M365 distribution lists or security groups.
- Message metrics: Export messages delivery report.
- Localization: Supports multiple languages.
While this core solution is a great starting point many of our customers have worked with us to implement further enhancements and improvements. Here are a some of the more popular ones:
End-User Experience
- Improved first-run experiences
- Track, as read/acknowledged/confirmed
- Improved layouts
Publishing
- Delay delivery or schedule communication
- Send out to Yammer, email, or other channels beyond Microsoft Teams
- Integrate with other key systems (like digital signing)
Authoring
- Rich text improvements
- Drafting improvements
- Approval improvements
- Publishing improvements
- Private previews
- Improved layouts
Analytics
- Tracking acknowledgment
- Sentiment analysis of responses
- Segmentation and audience tracking
- Power BI integration
Technology Used
Solution Areas
- Corporate communications
- Digital workplace
- Employee experience
#4 New Employee Onboarding Assistance
With the New Employee Onboarding Assistance solution, new employee checklists, feedback capture, and the ability for new hires to introduce themselves using the app are all available. Managers can even approve the introduction and share it with relevant teams.
What does it do?
The Onboarding Assistance enables human resources to manage relevant content and processes for new employees via a new employee checklist (corporate or departmental). It allows employees to introduce themselves by sharing information that is automatically shared with their managers. This makes it easier for managers to review introductions about all new hires and share them with the relevant teams via the application.
At any time, new employees can share feedback on a task in their onboarding journey or on the overall experience using a helpful bot command. All feedback is shared with the HR team through notifications that can be downloaded.
HR teams can also use the app to share pulse surveys for new employees to review the employee feedback using Microsoft Forms.
Technology Used
Solution Areas
- Employee portals
- Employee experience
- Onboarding
- Employee networking
#5 SharePoint Syntex Assessment
Using the SharePoint Syntex Assessment enables you to gather data about your SharePoint libraries and generate a Power BI report with recommendations of where Syntex and AI might fit and bring added value to your organization.
These recommendations are based on factors such as the size and structure of libraries, the existing use of metadata or content types, and the use of retention labels.
What does it do?
This assessment tool can be used to report on the distribution and configuration of SharePoint libraries, content types, and more to help identify areas of opportunity for content and document automation, understanding, and enrichment. There are several reports available in the results of the assessment:
- Libraries with custom columns and the libraries that use the most columns.
- Column usage identifies columns commonly used across your document libraries, by name or by type.
- Libraries with custom content types to identify libraries that are enabled to use custom content types. It will also show libraries that are using the most content types.
- Content-type usage to help you to identify content types that are heavily used, both by number of files and locations
- Library size and libraries with retention labels help identify content understanding/enrichment targets that Syntex can automate.
- Library modernization status can indicate libraries that should still be modernized to take advantage of new capabilities and features like Syntex.
- Prebuilt model candidates and Syntex Model Usage can both provide libraries and content types where the name matches the ready-to-use models or where Syntex is leveraged today and items that have been classified.
Technology Used
Solution Areas
- Document understanding
- Document management
- Content automation
- Document automation
- SharePoint Syntex
Discover 35+ More Microsoft Solution Ideas
There are many more solution ideas in our eBook, and we're sure you'll discover a few valuable to your organization's needs.
Microsoft Power Pages: UX Friendly Page Designer | 2toLead...
The Microsoft Power Platform family has a new member! Introducing #MicrosoftPowerPages a UX-friendly design experience in Power Portals.
Express Design Capabilities in Power Apps | 2toLead Highlights...
Coming straight out of science fiction is the ability to doodle something and have AI build and understand the image in #PowerApps! 🤯
Microsoft Teams Updates: Collaboration Controls within Power...
#MicrosoftTeams and Power Apps have a new mutual friend called Collaboration Controls! Watch our CTO and Microsoft MVP break it down in this Microsoft Build 2022 highlights video!
Ignite November 2021 Highlights: Never A Better Time To Upgrade...
Microsoft Ignite is full of incredible announcements around improvements to what Microsoft is planning to offer in the not-so-distant future. While Ignite the Tour was missed by many worldwide for another year, we did have two incredible Microsoft Ignites, packed with new and exciting innovations.
Ignite the Hybrid Workplace
With much of the business world learning the advantages and how to optimize hybrid workplaces, it was evident that Microsoft would develop so much to provide answers and solutions to a lot of the world's questions and needs.
The desire and need for change don't only come from C-Level executives in need of adapting their business models. 58% percent of employees want to go back to the office to do more focused work and, the same percentage of individuals wish to continue to work from home for the same reason.
https://twitter.com/2toLead/status/1455555829717946380
Ignite announcements make it a no brainer to upgrade and/or migrate
Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, put together a few videos to highlight some of the more innovative and economic Ignite highlights that might allow your company to see the power of an up-to-date Microsoft 365 suite. These will make the shift to a hybrid workplace not only easier but more economical.
This blog will look at the highlights in two categories: financial & innovative wins.
If you want to understand what it would take to migrate or upgrade to Microsoft 365, register for our free webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint.
Two big financial wins for Microsoft coming out of Ignite November 2021
Microsoft continues to get better at understand how price Microsoft Viva, and Power Apps just became a lot more practical.
Major Power Apps Pricing News
If we told you that the most exciting Power Apps news was around pricing, would you find that hard to believe?
This change means a big barrier is removed for many organizations looking to do more with Power Apps. We asked Richard about it and he shared some insights on what the change of pricing is and why it matters.
https://youtu.be/BBvczj7fRXY
Do More, Pay Less with Microsoft Viva Pricing Bundle
Microsoft Viva pricing has already improved, and another improvement is on the way, the Microsoft Viva bundle! Learn what that means for organizations leveraging Viva and newcomers alike.
https://youtu.be/1rC2SPCVEyQ
Two big innovative wins for Microsoft coming out of Ignite 2021
From breaking down a huge Microsoft Teams barrier to a promise kept in the form of a new solution, the innovation was incredible this Ignite. Here are two we thought you would want to know more about.
Shared Channels Are Coming To Teams
Microsoft Teams Channels are an incredible aspect of Microsoft Teams and they are about to get even better with Shared Channels! If you haven’t heard of shared channels in Teams, be sure to watch this video where you will also get a better understanding of its potential impact on sprawl.
New apps mean new governance considerations (like Microsoft Loop) but subtle announcements like shared channels can have sweeping consequences. We asked Richard for his perspective on this and what it means for sprawl and governance.
https://youtu.be/J-vc8Y9ZMGI
Download our eBook to get ahead of the most common sprawl issues that plague Microsoft 365 digital workplaces everywhere.
Microsoft Loop
Microsoft Ignite November 2021 was full of announcements. However, Microsoft Loop stood out from the crowd in a big way! If you need want to understand the solution, this next video is for you.
https://youtu.be/zyVFdVOHBF8
Ready for a more hybrid-ready suite of applications?
Microsoft has exploded in the past couple years with speedy and impactful innovation! If you are looking for all of the most important updates from November's Ignite, keep an eye out for a special episode of David Francoeur's ongoing M365 Digital Workplace Updates series coming out next week.
Also, don't forget to find out how to plan and execute your SharePoint upgrade and/or migration in a webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint. This webinar will help make sure that your switch or upgrade to the most recent version of Microsoft 365 goes as smoothly as possible.
What is the Microsoft Power Platform?
Since its inception in November 2016, Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate have focused on the mandate to help organizations support business transformation. They provide a foundation that empowers the non-IT user to take their day to day activities and automate their business processes.
Let’s take a quick tour to meet the members of the Power Platform family.
Power Apps
Power Apps supports organizations to create responsive user interfaces to capture and present information in various devices and connect to data sources - obtaining or sending information.
There are 3 main ways to create custom apps with Power Apps:
- Canvas Apps – for apps where you want full control of the app design.
- Model-Driven Apps – component-based apps that focus on the business data models
- Power App Portals – external-facing websites that can surface business data.
Canvas Apps
With canvas apps, the world is your oyster! You have an empty canvas (pun intended!) to design your app just the way you want to. This may be a bit daunting at first, however, if you start from an existing data source (say, a SharePoint List for example) Power Apps is smart enough to give you a head start and create starter screens for you to browse the list, view or create/edit new items.
Model-Driven Apps
For model-driven apps, the focus is on the data itself and the business process around it. Instead of designing how the screen will look, you define the entities, business flows, forms, views, and/or dashboards around a specific business process. Model-Driven apps use the Common Data Service as the data repository for your entities.
Power Apps Portals
Power App Portals, also part of Power Apps, is one of the (old) new kids on the block that comes to provide a fresh new take on building external-facing portals for your organization.
Portals provide the means to create low/no-code responsive websites. These websites cant can be used with any major commercial (think Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or enterprise login provider (such as your own local credentials or work accounts such as your Office 365 account) and presents the user with a simple WYSIWYG interface to create static and dynamic web site pages based on information stored in the Common Data Service.
A few highlights of Power Apps Portals include:
- Building Blocks – Pages, templates, and components to build your Portal.
- New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal.
- New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal.
- Custom Domain URLs!
- List components to present or capture information stored in your CDS
- Form components to leverage model-driven forms (think of forms as part of a business process).
https://twitter.com/MSPowerApps/status/1315683651426844673
Power Automate
Power Automate on the other hand provides the ability to automate workflows that orchestrate business processes that gather data from disparate systems, make decisions and or transform the data into actionable tasks that can affect services in and out of the Office 365 or Microsoft ecosystem.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerAutomate/status/1296507293249482752
Based on actions, triggers, and conditions, you can build flows that run on a schedule or are triggered by an action (such as receiving an email, tweets from an account, a message from other systems, etc.). Once the flow is running, you can take action by reading the initial data from the trigger, manipulate it, make decisions based on it and act on other systems, for example, saving a new item into a SharePoint List, sending out an email, creating an approval task, etc.
Over 300 connectors are available for you to compose your flows in Power automate!
AI Builder
As you build new Power Apps or Power Automate flows there will be times where you want the power of artificial intelligence to support you in parts of the process. AI Builder provides capabilities to easily implement predictive AI capabilities that can speed up decision making based on historical data.
Currently, in preview, there are additional capabilities to explore around object detection (identifying and counting items on an image), forms processing (read and capture information in standardized forms for digitizing the content of the form) and text processing. These capabilities can support you to identify key trends and/or categorize content based on your business needs.
Power BI
Let’s not forget their older but also quite powerful cousin, Power BI. A suite of tools (desktop client, web client, and the Power BI service) released in July 2011 that have grown to be a key resource for building interactive reports and dashboard experiences.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerBI/status/1314641792055291905
Common Data Service
I mentioned earlier the Common Data Service, or CDS for short, is a cloud data repository that is primarily leveraged by the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of tools (and the Power Platform, of course ) which can also be used to create your own custom entities to store your company data.
CDS provides a robust security mechanism that can help you secure your data and provide appropriate access to each group that needs it. CDS is based on the Common Data Model schema and a standard set of entities that Microsoft has defined and is aligning with others such as Adobe and SAP as part of the Open Data Initiative. Another key benefit of the CDS is that it doesn’t need any infrastructure or administration, it is all managed by Microsoft.
On-premises Data Access Gateway
For those at home (see what I did there?), with the use of the Data Access Gateway, organizations can also connect to local services and information stores to effectively report on data sources (local SQL Server instances, SharePoint lists, and libraries, etc.) stored on-premises as well as create/update information in them in Power Apps or Power Automate.
For a while, that’s all we had… Until now!
Power Virtual Agents
The main premise of Power Virtual Agents is to support subject matter experts to create, manage and optimize chatbots by providing a no-code, easy to use interface that allows users to define topics where the bot can assist by providing accurate responses and even initiate a process by integrating with a Power Automate Flow.
The interface also supports quick testing of the bot and provides a dashboard with various key metrics to assess the engagement and effectiveness of the bot’s configured topics.
This is a game-changer, as previously it required a highly specialized team of IT, Data Scientists, Developers, and AI experts to have a baseline bot experience built and released.
Once you are done testing, you can easily publish your bot to a website (for external use), Microsoft Teams, or Facebook. With a few more additional steps, you can extend the reach to other canvases by using Azure Bot Service channels, allowing you to other services such as Skype, Kik, or Slack to name a few.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerVirtual/status/1314611628562960385
Great, so where to start?
Now that you are more familiar with the capabilities of the Power Platform, it will become easier to identify areas where these pieces can support your team to automate and make decisions day-to-day.
One key step towards your journey to business process improvement starts with understanding what the process actually looks like. Very few processes are accurately documented (if at all) and it is key to map out the business process, inputs, and outcomes before automation work should start. There are also various methodologies for mapping and optimizing business processes, one of which is the value stream mapping exercise, one of the tools of Lean methodology.
If you're looking for the latest Power Platform updates, take a look at our YouTube playlist!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6En1OT_n2lFdAC7Rdg6Ah8TYA_j1u-Do
We’re here to help
Would you like to learn more? Have you identified a key business process that you can automate and transform the way you work? Reach out to us, we will be happy to support you on your journey towards business improvement.
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How should organizations best approach multi-tenant and...
If you're looking for multi-cloud and multi-tenant best practices, look no further than 2 longtime industry experts to help guide you!
The Bane Of Digital Workplace Governance
Wait... what group was that document stored in? Is this the latest information or over a year old? Hold on... they've created how many sites? Do any of those questions sound familiar? Well, you may be fighting one of Digital Workplace governance's greatest enemies, unmanaged sprawl of documents, sites and groups!
Sprawl is something that even the finest of digital workplaces have to work with - to some degree. However, the longer sprawl goes unchecked, the more difficult it becomes to remedy it. While this blog will provide a quick overview of why it is important and some of the common issues you may encounter if kept unmanaged, tomorrow we team up with our incredible solutions partner, AvePoint, for a free 1-hour webinar.
If any of the following points resonate with you, this webinar is big win for your digital workplace governance strategy.
- Unmanaged SharePoint site and Teams sprawl
- Claims that SharePoint sucks
- Not enough resources
- A failing Microsoft 365 implementation
- Struggling to keep up with innovations
- Holding back on supporting digital excellence
Now, let's take a closer look at what sprawl is and why it matters.
What is sprawl, and why does it matter?
Inside your organization, content, communities, teams, groups, and sites grow over time. This is a positive result of digital adoption. As those digital workspaces grow in usage, volume, and variety, it can be challenging to manage and understand how the technology is leveraged, by whom, and where.
Organizations often have difficulty understanding digital workspaces because they are not given high enough priority at the start. As a result, organizations often only know who created the workspace, when it was created, and what it is used for.
For many organizations, the barrier to better management and support is due to a lack of understanding. Lack of insight leads to the sprawl being classified as “unmanaged sprawl.” Transitioning to “managed sprawl” is the number one focus of effective IT Governance for the Digital Workplace.
What are the common sprawl issues you can encounter?
For many organizations, the sprawl of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint sites, Yammer communities, and more is unavoidable, and potentially even something to celebrate as it indicates adoption. But unmanaged sprawl leads to many issues.
Every organization is unique, but somethings remains the same, like every organization is at risk of letting sites, teams, communities, and groups get out of hand. Fast-growing businesses are especially at risk of letting this happen because they often have new technology rolled out quickly without planning. They also often don't have enough resources and expertise to manage the new technology.
While some of these issues may seem self-evident or obvious, fast-paced technology and business landscapes do not always permit us to determine our most significant issues or where the issues originated, often due to time. Even once you identify the issues, some problems may seem simple. However, solving them may take understanding and expertise, which your organization doesn’t have, or sufficient time and attention your organization may not have due to other urgent ongoing business and technology operations.
For these reasons, we have taken the time to share insights on the top and most common issues, in our eBook on the subject. We hope that it helps your organization prioritize and highlight the importance of effectively managing sprawl.
Two big governance wins for your organization
Strong governance is an essential aspect to the strength and stability of modern digital workspaces everywhere. That is why we have multiple ways to help you improve it. Take a look at our eBook for a sprawl specific lessons or if you are looking for a greater discussion around Governance, watch out webinar with AvePoint.
Ignite November 2021 Highlights: Never A Better Time To Upgrade...
Microsoft Ignite is full of incredible announcements around improvements to what Microsoft is planning to offer in the not-so-distant future. While Ignite the Tour was missed by many worldwide for another year, we did have two incredible Microsoft Ignites, packed with new and exciting innovations.
Ignite the Hybrid Workplace
With much of the business world learning the advantages and how to optimize hybrid workplaces, it was evident that Microsoft would develop so much to provide answers and solutions to a lot of the world's questions and needs.
The desire and need for change don't only come from C-Level executives in need of adapting their business models. 58% percent of employees want to go back to the office to do more focused work and, the same percentage of individuals wish to continue to work from home for the same reason.
https://twitter.com/2toLead/status/1455555829717946380
Ignite announcements make it a no brainer to upgrade and/or migrate
Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, put together a few videos to highlight some of the more innovative and economic Ignite highlights that might allow your company to see the power of an up-to-date Microsoft 365 suite. These will make the shift to a hybrid workplace not only easier but more economical.
This blog will look at the highlights in two categories: financial & innovative wins.
If you want to understand what it would take to migrate or upgrade to Microsoft 365, register for our free webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint.
Two big financial wins for Microsoft coming out of Ignite November 2021
Microsoft continues to get better at understand how price Microsoft Viva, and Power Apps just became a lot more practical.
Major Power Apps Pricing News
If we told you that the most exciting Power Apps news was around pricing, would you find that hard to believe?
This change means a big barrier is removed for many organizations looking to do more with Power Apps. We asked Richard about it and he shared some insights on what the change of pricing is and why it matters.
https://youtu.be/BBvczj7fRXY
Do More, Pay Less with Microsoft Viva Pricing Bundle
Microsoft Viva pricing has already improved, and another improvement is on the way, the Microsoft Viva bundle! Learn what that means for organizations leveraging Viva and newcomers alike.
https://youtu.be/1rC2SPCVEyQ
Two big innovative wins for Microsoft coming out of Ignite 2021
From breaking down a huge Microsoft Teams barrier to a promise kept in the form of a new solution, the innovation was incredible this Ignite. Here are two we thought you would want to know more about.
Shared Channels Are Coming To Teams
Microsoft Teams Channels are an incredible aspect of Microsoft Teams and they are about to get even better with Shared Channels! If you haven’t heard of shared channels in Teams, be sure to watch this video where you will also get a better understanding of its potential impact on sprawl.
New apps mean new governance considerations (like Microsoft Loop) but subtle announcements like shared channels can have sweeping consequences. We asked Richard for his perspective on this and what it means for sprawl and governance.
https://youtu.be/J-vc8Y9ZMGI
Download our eBook to get ahead of the most common sprawl issues that plague Microsoft 365 digital workplaces everywhere.
Microsoft Loop
Microsoft Ignite November 2021 was full of announcements. However, Microsoft Loop stood out from the crowd in a big way! If you need want to understand the solution, this next video is for you.
https://youtu.be/zyVFdVOHBF8
Ready for a more hybrid-ready suite of applications?
Microsoft has exploded in the past couple years with speedy and impactful innovation! If you are looking for all of the most important updates from November's Ignite, keep an eye out for a special episode of David Francoeur's ongoing M365 Digital Workplace Updates series coming out next week.
Also, don't forget to find out how to plan and execute your SharePoint upgrade and/or migration in a webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint. This webinar will help make sure that your switch or upgrade to the most recent version of Microsoft 365 goes as smoothly as possible.
Managing and Maintaining Microsoft Teams Channel Permissions
Microsoft Teams is a leading product in business communication, collaboration and video conferencing. We have gone over the basics of managing a Team, you'll also need to know how to manage Microsoft Teams Channels.
The article below will provide step-by-step instructions on managing Microsoft Teams channels permissions, user capabilities, and team ownership. It will also walk through commonly used processes and troubleshooting.
Teams vs. Channels
If you think of Microsoft Teams as an office building, the different Teams would be the various companies, and the Channels would be the departments in each company.
A Channel is a section within a Team. It's used to organize conversations, files and can link to other applications and URLs.
Microsoft Teams Channel Permissions
Now that you are familiar with managing teams, members, and settings in Microsoft Teams, let's review Teams Channel permissions. There are two basic types of channels for Microsoft Teams. You can create private channels or a standard channels.
Standard channels in Teams or Private channels are accessible to a smaller group. Each Channel has a topic to help you stay organized with conversations, files, and Microsoft Teams meetings.
Manage your channels further by using the tabs at the top - files, apps, and services. Keep reading to learn about adding tabs, pinning channels, guests permissions, and moderator roles.
Adding Tabs
Tabs transform a Team from a simple, dedicated chat and file storage area to an entire digital workplace specific to the Channel.
To add channels, locate and select the plus sign next to your existing tabs. You can add tabs like Planner, Document, and Forms.
Pinning Channels
Are you having trouble keeping track of all your channels? You can pin your most frequently used channels for convenience.
To pin a channel select More channels, Pin.
To unpin the Channel, select More channels, Unpin.
Add Guests
To add a guest to your Teams page confirm that the individual has a Microsoft 365 account. If they don't, they can sign up for one for free using a valid email address.
Start by selecting Teams, More options, and Add Member. Enter the guest's email address. From there, you can edit guest information. Once you click Add, the guest will get an email with details about joining Microsoft Teams.
Guest Permissions
Before adjusting guest permissions, make sure that the person has been added to the team as a guest. Team owners set guest permissions for channels.
To see guest permissions in your Teams' Channel, select More options, Manage team, Settings, Guest permissions.
From there, you will see a list of potential guest permissions (i.e., enable channel creation). Check or uncheck permissions for guests.
Moderator Roles/Settings
Standard channels are not moderated, so any member or guest can post and reply. The team owner can add moderator(s) if they wish. The moderators can post, respond, react, as well as add and remove team members as moderators.
The team owner can turn on moderation to add a moderator or include existing team members as moderators. Click More options, Manage Channel. Locate Channel moderation and toggle to On. Once moderation is on, only moderators can begin new posts.
If you want to add or remove moderators select More options, Manage Channel. You will see Who are the moderators?, click Manage to add or remove moderators.
Missing Owners
Missing owners can lead to several team issues, including abandoned teams, unmanaged teams, lack of accountability, and overall poor team support.
To make the most out of Teams and get the support you need from IT, every team should have an owner (preferably two). Owners of private channels within a team may not be members of the team, which prevents them from managing the Channel.
Within your organization, you can create policies for missing owners using Microsoft 365. Admin users can check team owners and view teams without owners. For more information on missing owners and Microsoft 365 features, check out these resources.
Making Microsoft Teams Work For You
This article covered useful information regarding managing Microsoft Teams channel permissions, team settings, and user capabilities. If you are looking for tips on creating compelling Teams Channels, read our blog, but if you want to make sure you are getting the most out of your Microsoft team or you want more Teams examples, check out the user adoption resources we have on our website.
The 4 Stages of Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management
Microsoft Teams has seen usage grow exponentially over recent years, with around 250 million active users using the service. On top of recent exponential increases in active users, Microsoft Teams is proven to increase worker satisfaction by around 88%, when used correctly.
https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1420184023565885441
With every powerful solution comes the need to properly govern its workspaces and files. Microsoft Teams is no exception. If you want to make sure you are using it correctly, you are going to want to gain a greater understand of the lifecycle of a team!
While understanding the lifecycle of a team is an important start, there are many ways things can sprawl out of control. This article will overview the 4 stages of team lifecycle management but to understand the most common sprawl issues and how to solve them, you can download our eBook.
What are the 4 lifecycle management stages?
The lifecycle of a team can broken down into 4 stages.
- The request stage
- The provisioning stage
- The usage and optimization stage
- The closure, expiration and disposition stage
Understanding how each of these stages work is crucial to proper Microsoft Teams governance.
Requesting a team
Before a team is created, the first step on our journey is to request your team. There is plenty to do before you even add the members. Creating an engaging Microsoft team requires some research.
First things first: you have to set your goal. Determining the purpose of your team will guide you through every single stage of its lifecycle. Whatever the goal is, make sure to take note of it so that you can optimize towards it.
Once you know the goal, you can start compiling a list of who needs to be made a member. Anybody who's involved in the office 365 group or project will need to be added. A great tip for setting up your team is to try to make sure there are at least two team owners.
Below we have listed key elements you want to hit in the requesting stage.
Provisioning the team
You might choose to design your team from scratch. If you prefer not to do that or want your team format to match that of other projects, you can use an existing team as a template. Or, for an existing Microsoft 365 group, you can set up a team that will automatically include all of the members.
Whichever way you choose to do it, you have to know how you're going to undertake 'team' management from this point onwards. Keep in mind that there are over 20 ways to create a Microsoft 365 group and since any Microsoft 365 group could be 'teamified' this leads to challenges around how, when, and who creates teams. So often the use of a request, approval, and teams provisioning automation solution might be best (see more on this in our Sprawl eBook).
Once you have established your team add a few relevant channels to start with. These will grow over time but less is more and be strategic at the start.
Below we have listed key elements you want to hit in the provisioning stage.
Usage and optimization of the team
This usage and optimization stage of the teams' lifecycle begins almost immediately after the setup. It describes the whole period in which the team is functioning at its optimum, helping your members work together.
During this stage is when most of the overseeing will be done. Managing a team in the usage and optimization stage primarily focuses on making sure that it is a positive contribution to the organization and work culture. This means exploring and experimenting as well as monitoring.
The most important thing a team manager can do during the usage and optimization stage of the team's life is to ensure it keeps helping progress rather than starting to hinder it. It can be hard to let go of a tool that has worked successfully but eventually, you may reach a natural endpoint for the team.
Below we have listed key elements you want to hit in the usage and optimization stage.
Closure, expiration and disposition of the team
A vital part of closing a team is to give the members time to save important files and store the information they may need to contact one another for future work. There are several options available as to how you deal with a team that is at the end of its lifecycle.
Some important factors come into play concerning data and security. It is recommended that teams and channels that are no longer needed should be deleted if they contain sensitive or redundant information. There is no need for this to induce anxiety as that process for deletion could be multi-staged.
Once you have passed the notice period you gave to the members, you can delete the team or channel (or archive it in place via permissions or migrate it).
Forget something? For both a team and channel, no problem, at least for the first 30 days after the initial soft delete. This should be enough time to determine that you have all of the necessary information saved elsewhere and the team can be fully erased.
Be aware that deleting a channel does not necessarily remove folders or contents from other areas of the Microsoft 365 suite: this may have to be done separately. If necessary, you can choose to employ expiration or retention policies - more information about when these might be useful can be found here. Keep in mind that while these are a great starting point many organizations go beyond these with their own disposition processes for more escalation control, additional approvals, more steps for the disposition, and more.
Below we have listed key elements you want to hit in the closure, expiration and disposition stage.
Keeping Your Digital Workplace Organized Is Easy When You Use Our Resources
Looking for more help with lifecycle management? Watch the video below from our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, and/or find additional ways to stay on top of your digital workplace by downloading our eBook from the link in the section below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_g5KIufrvU&t=1s
When groups, sites, teams, files and documents continue to grow, there are many ways your digital workplace can easily sprawl out of control. In fact, Digital Workplace sprawl is a common issue that many organizations face.
To help you understand its impact on your digital workplace, we have compiled 8 of the most common issues we have encountered and provided insight into how to solve them.
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Employee Experience Collaboration Strategy | Design for...
Modern workplaces need a collaboration strategy because working remote can be very isolating to employees who have a small circle of collaboration and low interaction with the team as a whole. Richard, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, discusses how intranets are changing in this video, and how Teams continues to position itself as your organizations "We" platform.
Planning for the Future of Collaboration – Key Concepts
Progress is unavoidable for the future of collaboration will continue to change. Its important to modernize how you approach, plan and support collaboration so that when new changes occur, your organization is resilient and ready to take advantage of them.
SharePoint Hubs in Hubs – StepTwo Forum Clip
Modern SharePoint introduced Hub Sites but when is the right time to use them? A few weeks ago, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge joined one of StepTwo's incredible members only forum for an AMA.
Internal and External Collaboration – Teams Works In More...
External collaboration with teams is now adapting to replace the need for SharePoint extranets. Shared channels can connect workplaces and tenants seamlessly for smoother internal or external.
Do we have the right Digital Workplace Tools, and how much is...
How can you bridge the gap between having multiple digital workplace tools co-operating clumsily and a fully integrated experience? Watch our CTO and Microsoft MVP Richard Harbridge how to improve your digital workplace explain in this clip!
The Importance of Debating: The Intranet Is Dying
On August 18th, we'll be going LIVE with the first episode of a new series called 'The Great EX Debate.' The motion for our inaugural episode is, The Intranet Is Dying, where we will debate whether the Intranet has been dethroned as your primary employee engagement, communication, and collaboration solution.
While we are eager for the debate, let's dive into what makes it relevant and worth debating.
Do Internal Communications Teams Need to Evolve Beyond the Intranet?
Is the Intranet still the right focus? Or should your internal communications team shift their focus around bringing different elements and solutions from your digital workplace to a platform like Microsoft Teams?
Whether your employee communication and collaboration hub is Teams or a SharePoint Intranet, benefits are present on both sides, and you shouldn't neglect either. The main goal for many business leaders and employees alike is to improve EX regardless of platform prioritization.
The current state of the digital workplace
Organizations must consistently adapt their employee experience strategies to meet or surpass employee demand. That said, solutions need to do even more. Today, organizations are more focused on creating a better employee experience with greater necessity than ever before. However, as companies and technologies adapt and figure out the new norm, EX (employee experience) still has room for improvement.
If solutions can't deal with the ebbs and flows that come with the ever-changing landscape, they can quickly become irrelevant. Luckily, Microsoft is a massive engine with the ability to pivot quickly. For example, the new Microsoft Viva experience from Microsoft is an excellent example of Microsoft's ability to shift rapidly in the right direction. Then again, they have always been at the forefront of internal communications solutions.
Past Disruptors Have Failed to Dethrone the Intranet
Business technology is consistently changing to meet the demand of the world's workforce. Innovations force us to examine the existing EX and Digital Workplace models and question what these innovations do better. Or, more relevant to this blog, will they make old technology and patterns obsolete over time?
Did Yammer + Enterprise Social Kill the Intranet?
Four years after Facebook and two years after Twitter revolutionized social to the masses, in 2008, Yammer brought social to the enterprise and Microsoft stack.
With the release of Yammer, many raised red flags and wondered if enterprise social was the future of communication and collaboration at work. Also, will Yammer dethrone the Intranet? In short, it didn't but did add another layer to digital workplaces everywhere that enriched the employee experience, employee connectivity, and employee voice.
Instead of the typical linear discussions people were used to having, Yammer brought authentic conversations to the digital workplace, something that Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva Experiences would take one step further, potentially in a different and more impactful way.
For example, while leadership messaging has lived in Intranets for many years, Microsoft has taken the incredible work they've done with Yammer and is looking to the future by providing employee messaging and sharing experiences powered by Microsoft Viva Engage.
https://youtu.be/WFOCtYKDn0w
Did Microsoft Teams Kill Intranets?
Teams caught fire quickly. It provides a digital workspace that enriches communication and collaboration while bringing your favorite applications into Channels. For these reasons, Microsoft Teams has become the hub of digital workplaces for many companies. If you ask what apps they use as employees, it's usually Outlook or Teams at the forefront, not the Intranet.
https://youtu.be/PeyTMMVP7jY
The question is, has it killed the Intranet? That has yet to be determined. However, a recent Forrester report shows that 90% of employees would find an integrated EX platform valuable or extremely valuable. A question in the debate we will explore is whether the Intranet should be the EX platform or whether Teams or other experiences are a better long-term path forward.
So, while it has yet to be determined whether Microsoft Teams will take the place of the Intranet, organizations will need to use every tool they have to meet employees' expectations.
Before the dust clears on whether or not the Intranet is dying, there is no better time for a debate with two industry experts!
Watch 2 Industry Experts Go Head-to-Head at #TheGreatEXDebate
Have you heard The Great EX Debate is right around the corner? Don't miss our first live event! The motion: "Is the Intranet Dying?"
For the motion #IntranetDying, we have our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, and against the motion #IntranetThirving, we have Brandon Pittman, our award-winning Digital Workplace Strategist. Both collectively bring the experience of having worked on hundreds of Intranets from design to post-launch, and we can't wait to hear what they say.
What’s Holding Back an Employee Experience Manager today?
Overcoming common challenges an employee experience manager may experience in this video is two Microsoft MVPs, Richard and Asif. Watch them identify what is holding back the future.
Digital Maturity Model – Synchronized Efforts Across...
Real improvements in business communication happen when efforts are synchronized across multiple channels
Enhance Digital Employee Experience with Collaboration Solution...
MicrosoftTeams is an amazing resource for improving Digital Employee Experience through its improved communication and collaboration capabilities. Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge takes a moment to share some collaboration solution ideas to enhance the experience of your digital employees.
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What Is A Migration Plan, And How To Prepare
When migrating to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint online, the approach taken will often be very similar across organizations in that there are phases full of tactical activities for any migration from assessment to post-migration. This is also true for most SharePoint Server migrations. Often, the upgrade supported process is not used to avoid paying for additional hardware configuration and setup to hop from older versions of SharePoint Server to newer ones (as each supports an upgrade from the last).
As an example, what follows is a simple diagram depicting the typical flow of most SharePoint Online migrations.
As you can see, the entire migration process goes beyond simply transferring files and spaces. In order to ensure a smooth and effective migration it is imperative to have the right plan in place. This blog will help you ensure you effectively plan and prepare for your migration.
However, if you are looking for a greater understanding of an upgrade or migration plan, its components, and its importance, we highly recommend you watch the free on-demand webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint.
If you are also interested in avoiding and solving top Microsoft 365 management mistakes, register for our upcoming webinar with AvePoint on the biggest mistakes made and how to solve them.
What is a migration plan?
While our whitepaper or recent webinar dive deep into the topic, a migration plan is essentially used to define the path and strategy to migrate important documents, spaces (sites and groups), and other buckets of information to your new environment.
However, before planning, you’re going to need to assess the situation appropriately. While this blog is not about the assessment phase of the process, it is an essential step.
For more information on this step, download our free whitepaper.
Prepare and plan for your migration
After assessing the content and environment you will be moving to, it is critical to prepare for what content will be migrated where, how, and when. This is made easier by cleaning up, reducing the total targeted content, or clearly defining what content should change. In some situations, like when moving to SharePoint Online, you may be better served by pre-creating the target structure before the migration as well.
Site Structure Preparation
The sites need to be created in the new environment based on the site structure assessment outcome. If the new structure differs from the existing structure, the new structure needs to be built based on the mapping table as explained in the associated section. If a new site structure is used, the new site structure is likely following Microsoft's recommendation regarding Site Collections in SharePoint. To be able to implement a logical structure, specific sites need to be turned into Hub Sites, and related sites need to be associated with their hub sites.
Before a new site structure is implemented, the new structure needs to be reviewed. This review should be performed by members of different (if not all) departments or corporate entities.
Content preparation
Based on the outcome of the content assessment, a clean-up process needs to be initiated. Clean-up means that the list of identified documents is reviewed to find documents that should not be migrated to the new environment – these can be temporary documents, outdated documents, or documents that are not relevant anymore. As most documents belong to a specific corporate entity (like a department), the content owners or members of the associated corporate entity should be tasked with cleaning up their documents.
If documents from a file-share should be migrated to SharePoint, it is likely, that multiple versions of a document are existing. As a file-share is not providing any support for document versions, editors usually append the version number to the title of documents. These "title-versioned" documents need to be identified before they are migrated to SharePoint because SharePoint document libraries can handle multiple versions of a document. The identified "title-versioned" documents need to be transferred into the versioning mechanism of SharePoint document libraries.
If the new environment's site structure is different from the old environment's site structure, documents will likely be saved to a different location as well. If there is a site mapping table, the list of documents needs to be updated to reflect the new site for each document. It makes sense to update the list of documents after the clean-up.
This mapping should also consider the desired future state if you intend to modernize during the migration process. This isn't unique to just SharePoint migrations but is also relevant for file share migrations.
Workflow preparation
Based on the workflow assessment outcome, a migration path needs to be created for each identified workflow. The type of workflow is pivotal for deciding on the migration path. The first decision to be made is whether the workflow should be updated/modernized functionality-wise. If a workflow is being updated or modernized, it is likely, that the workflow needs to be rebuilt using modern technology (like Power Automate).
If you would like to start with creating a migration path, the following bullet-point list might be helpful:
- OOTB workflows: usually, these workflows can be migrated without issues.
- SharePoint Designer workflows: usually, these workflows can be migrated without issues, but some workflows might need some manual tweaks or adjustments.
- Custom workflows: usually, these are coded workflows based on server-side code, which means that they can't be migrated to SharePoint Online. A migration to a newer version of SharePoint on-premises might be possible.
- 3rd party workflows: in most cases, these are Nintex or K2 workflows, and it is likely, that the manufacturer provides an upgrade path or an upgrade procedure.
Based on the evaluated upgrade path, estimates and timelines need to be created for all workflows, which can't be migrated as-is. For each affected workflow, the efforts needed to prepare it for the migration (including recreating/recoding) need to be evaluated. A corresponding timeline shows how long the overall process of preparing the new environment's workflows will take. There should be a detailed list with all workflows, migration efforts, and timelines with durations for each workflow at the end of the workflow preparation phase.
Custom Solution Preparation
Very similar to the workflow preparation phase, the custom solution preparation phase is all about preparing custom solutions for migration. The type of custom solution is pivotal for deciding on the migration path. As with workflows, the first decision is whether a custom solution should be updated/modernized in terms of functionality and/or user experience. If a custom solution is being updated or modernized, it is likely, that the custom solution needs to be rebuilt using modern technologies or modern platforms (like Microsoft Azure).
As mentioned before, the migration path for custom solutions depends on how the custom solution has been created. The following bullet-point list might be helpful:
- Server-side code: there is a chance that this type of solution can be migrated to SharePoint on-premises with reasonable efforts. If the target platform is Microsoft 365, solutions build based on server-side code need to be recreated as custom server-side code can't be used.
- Client-side code: there is an excellent chance to migrate this type of custom solution to SharePoint Online or SharePoint on-premises, but some updating might be required.
- 3rd party solutions: the best option is to contact the vendor to check if there is a dedicated migration path.
Migration plan
Like most plans, this phase of the migration process consists of a stage where you define and then evaluate the steps needed before finalizing.
With so many things to consider and plan for, a detailed migration plan needs to be created and the following is what you should include.
- The selected migration approach and the reasons why a specific method has been chosen.
- A list of all sites and site collections that need to be migrated and a mapping table if the new structure differs from the old structure
- A list of all documents that need to be migrated, their location in the old environment and in the new environment
- A list of all workflows (existing, recreated, new) needs to exist in the new environment and their locations. If additional steps are required (like reconnecting workflows to data sources), these steps need to be added as well
- A list of all custom solutions (existing, recreated, new) needs to exist in the new environment and their locations. If additional steps are required (like reconnecting solutions to data sources or specific installation instructions), these steps need to be added as well
- Any additional activities that need to be performed during a migration and the dependencies
- A detailed timeline with a responsible person for each step of the migration
Do you want to make sure the approach and structure for your SharePoint migration is strong, watch our video below.
https://youtu.be/3_FSYq9Z85E
What’s next?
If you are looking for help with migration, watch our webinar with AvePoint on-demand. In the webinar, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, will discuss what important considerations should be understood and planned before an upgrade/migration, what approaches have successfully worked for other companies, and practical guidance on how best to succeed with your modernization or migration project.
Migrate to SharePoint Online and 2019 | Whitepaper Update
With Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft provides a modern platform that allows organizations to build their own tailored Digital Workplace. The applications and the rich set of features that Microsoft 365 provides can be leveraged together to build an environment customized to organizations’ needs and requirements, their corporate entities, and their staff.
As many new and exciting features are not available with older versions of SharePoint, many organizations migrate from their old environment to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online. Those who want or need to host SharePoint within their own hosted environment can migrate to SharePoint 2019.
Regardless of the designated target environment, migrating an existing environment is never an easy endeavor and requires a lot of planning and preparation. Based on our staff’s long-time experience with SharePoint migrations for various organizations, we know that thorough and comprehensive planning is a crucial step to success. This Whitepaper provides guidance and best practices regarding migrations from previous versions of SharePoint to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 as well.
How will it help you migrate to SharePoint?
This whitepaper is over 50+ pages long and looks extensively at migrating to SharePoint Online and 2019. The following are the topics discussed in the whitepaper.
- Business Drivers for Migration
- Key Considerations
- Planning and Strategizing for Your Migration
- Risks to the Success of Your Migration
- Key Takeaways
Read more about each section topic below or dive into the entire whitepaper by clicking on the image.
Business drivers for migration
Everyone upgrades eventually (or they move away from the platform), so we think it's always good to talk about why businesses are accelerating their upgrades or where (in terms of workload) they are considering an 'early' upgrade/migration for SharePoint.
So why do people upgrade or migrate? It's worth noting that there are internal and external pressures on IT to upgrade their technology. In this section of the whitepaper, we look at the internal and external factors as well as creating a better user experience, improving business process support and collaboration support, reducing hardware maintenance costs, and improving security.
Key considerations
Once the planning is done and plans have been verified multiple times, your organization will proceed with migration activities and migration execution. Migrating content from one environment to another environment isn't as easy as migrating files from one folder to another folder.
When planning to migrate data in a professional environment, we need to think about how to best migrate data with the least disruption to the business. The section of the whitepaper provides an overview of the most common migration considerations.
Planning and strategizing for your migration
The upgrade supported process is often not used to avoid paying for additional hardware configuration and setup to hop from older versions of SharePoint Server to newer ones (as each supports an upgrade from the last).
For example, a simple diagram depicting the typical flow of most SharePoint Online migrations follows.
In this section of the whitepaper, we detail all of the different phases seen in the illustration above.
Risks to the success of your migration
Several factors can impact the perceived success of the content migration effort by the project team and external stakeholders.
- Technical Changes vs. Organizational Changes
- General Expectations
- When To Review Content
- Picking The Right Approach & Tooling
- Ensure You Have Broken Down Enough
- Validate The Target Readiness
- Test Migrations & Get A Ranged Duration Estimate
- Migration Sign Off
We go into detail on the listed risks in our SharePoint Migration Whitepaper.
Key takeaways from reading our whitepaper
Successful migrations leverage the best practices listed in this white paper - before, during, and after - the migration process. As with any migration, you need to do proper planning and analysis of the legacy system and how it will map to SharePoint. You need to prepare the target environment for the new content and usage. You need to ensure the migration results in as little user disruption as possible. Finally, you need to ensure that the new SharePoint architecture ensures a better experience today and in the future.
- Invest in better understanding your content and how it's used today.
- Invest in more migration planning for a more successful migration.
- Invest in greater amounts on post-migration activities like support, adoption, and change management.
- Invest in greater expertise by not doing this work alone or without an expert. Find a friend or partner who has done it before and knows what to expect.
It isn't always easy, and that's why we tried our best to share some guidance that might help you. Download our Whitepaper to take advantages of our combined experience!
Migrating to SharePoint just got simpler
Need a little extra help? Whether your organization is looking for quick or incremental migration project to Online or the latest version of SharePoint On-Premises, our organization is ready to help with a strong history of successful migrations. It was and is very typical in the process of the over 100+ intranets we have implemented.
We are ready and happy to support your migration efforts with our Microsoft MVPs and extensive knowledge and experience with migrating to SharePoint sites, files and folders from various document libraries and platforms.
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Discover key approaches, improvement ideas, and why they are important in this clip focused on Employee Experience Strategy for management!
Microsoft Teams as a Digital Hub | Employee Experience Concept
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Insuring your Microsoft 365 Investment | Case Study
| Industry | Insurance |
| Org Size | 15,000+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online Outlook OneDrive |
This large insurance organization of 17,000 employees was looking to improve the impact and success of Microsoft 365 throughout the organization. While there was some usage of Microsoft 365 in the organization, there were many opportunities to improve usage, deploy new capabilities, and help users get more out of Office 365.
2toLead worked with them to deliver a set of services and activities that helped their organization get more out of Office 365 and achieve greater levels of digital workplace success.
The situation
Historically, they were an IBM shop. However, they had been in the process of migrating to Microsoft's suite of applications. Educating and bringing champions as well as experienced users along the journey to embrace Microsoft technologies was critical to achieving high performance across the organization.
With 17,000 employees, speaking 6 languages, and an extensive international footprint, it was critical for staff to have the ability to coordinate and work more effectively together. Over two-thirds of all employees needed to learn new Microsoft technologies and new ways of working.
Their Center Of Excellence for collaboration and communities was inexperienced around Microsoft technologies. While they had experts for aspects of the technology, they weren't experts on strategy, when to use what, or how to effectively drive awareness and adoption.
The insurance organization emphasized an investment into digital skills and digital technologies as a differentiator and advantage that they saw as critical for continued marketplace dominance/success. They needed to improve their current skills while also developing a strategy and approach that would allow them to continue investing, leading, and differentiating.
The solution
The organization received a tailored questionnaire to help accelerate our shared understanding of the current state of Microsoft 365 within the organization as it relates to technology governance and adoption planning.
Together we evaluated key roles and role readiness. This large insurance organization scored exceptionally well. We then assessed existing guidance/policies. Together we found gaps and opportunities to improve these guidance and policy documents.
Based on our gap analysis, we provided an immense amount of detailed recommendations on Governance, policies, roles, and responsibilities. Including some samples to help accelerate the development of key policies.
Our team of technology and business experts developed, facilitated, and recorded multiple tailored training sessions based on four modules to audiences like internal champions, coaches, help desk, and more. These training sessions included 'ask the expert' style questions and answers as well as tips and techniques for more experienced users on how to get more out of the technology.
We provided Microsoft 365 metric guidance for how to best measure, track and evaluate the success of Microsoft 365 in the organization. Going beyond basic usage statistics, we recommended additional reports to assess and even provided samples of the reports to accelerate creation.
As leaders in the adoption space, we shared considerable guidance to help accelerate and support the development of campaigns.
We often go above and beyond in our work with customers (it's why we have been named generous), and this organization was no exception.
We did several things pro-actively and at no additional cost to this customer that immensely helped them be more successful with Microsoft 365:
- We noticed several issues within the way customizations had been implemented in the environment and pro-actively shared comprehensive guidance (including source code) on how to correct these issues and avoid these missteps in the future.
- Due to a notable gap in enterprise social planning, we pro-actively provided 60+ pages of detailed guidance and met with leaders to answer questions and share best practices.
The results
The organization has a clear strategy for Governance, adoption, and the tools to enable them to successfully lead their large user base in this transition as they grow their digital skills with Microsoft 365 and transform business processes.
The adoption and center of excellence approach based on our work will scale and be leveraged. This approach is not limited to Microsoft 365 but for all digital skills, including a sizable and important set of non-Microsoft technologies like Quickr and Confluence Wiki, and others.
In the process of supporting users on this change management journey to Microsoft 365, the organization updated Microsoft 365 for all users, transitioned to Outlook from Lotus, prepared and deployed OneDrive for Business, encouraged and rolled out Delve, leveraged Intune for more protection/control, and deployed SharePoint Online for their Intranet, and a considerable number of team sites.
Some other benefits that were realized include:
- Recognition of gaps in Governance, guidance, policies, and metrics.
- Definition and direction on tracking effective adoption and engagement with Office 365 technologies using measures and metrics.
- Greater levels of executive engagement
- Improvement in champion/leader satisfaction and user confidence.
- Users now have access to a set of Microsoft 365 training materials, new policies, and guidance.
- Advances implementing the SharePoint Intranet and team spaces (branding and customization improvements to better align with OOTB capabilities and the Microsoft roadmap).
How we can help your organization
We hope our Microsoft Office 365 case study has provided you with insight into the capabilities of the application suite and our team. If you are looking for more insights into Microsoft 365 and your digital workplace but aren't ready to contact us, feel free to download our free resources, packed with our knowledge and expertise.
Children's Non-Profit Organization Sees Advantages of Digital...
| Industry | Non-Profit Social Services |
| Org Size | 100+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Teams SharePoint Power Platform |
Non-profit community organization funded by the Government, legally mandated to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
When the organization was looking to transform how they communicate and collaborate with staff and social workers, they partnered with 2toLead to ensure success. Their team used a legacy Intranet platform for sharing essential links and day-to-day relevant information. Another integral repository was the file server, which also needed to migrate to SharePoint Online. After an initial step in the right direction, moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft 365, they stayed committed to supporting their workforce during the transition.
As a non-profit organization, agility and efficiency are paramount to empower their team to reach as many people who need them as possible. The organization had the vision to provide the right tools, proper training and communication to support its staff. 2toLead was there to make it happen by leveraging their team of Microsoft 365 champions.
Establishing what the advantages of digital transformation mean for them
Our journey began in October 2019 by meeting with their IT and Administrative Services team. We focused on creating the foundational pieces and a new tool or channel that compelled users to visit, interact, and get information. Their staff looks at the Intranet as the source of critical information, raising the stakes of its importance.
At the time, Microsoft Teams was being piloted by their IT department to evaluate its capabilities and to identify how both Teams and SharePoint would complement each other. A question that's on the minds of many organizations today.
The building blocks of their Intranet
Our first release focused on providing the foundation for an Intranet that supported the central communication and collaboration functions of their team. As the organization had recently embraced the Microsoft 365 platform for email, leveraging SharePoint Online to build the foundation for their Intranet was a natural choice due to the strengths of a connected digital workplace.
With an agile set of workshops to cover our information architecture, navigation, and search capabilities, we confirmed our requirements for the new Intranet.
As part of our discussions, we reviewed the governance and life cycle planning aspects relevant to creating new communities using the platform. The use of wireframes and mockups were essential to iterate and confirm our requirements for visual impact faster.
Planning and executing the migration
With the foundation in place and the Intranet platform built, we rolled up our sleeves and dug into the file shares.
The team assessed the various file shares provided to staff for individual use (home drives), department level, and global use. The team used the gathered information to ensure the right documents were migrated.
Personal files: the team documented clear instructions for employees to move their data to OneDrive for Business.
More extensive data repositories: our migration consultants supported the team and migrated their information from their shared drives to SharePoint Online.
Adapting to the new normal with targeted training
During our journey, the Coronavirus pandemic brought additional challenges that compelled the non-profit to act fast and accelerate their plans for adoption, particularly for Microsoft Teams. Rolling out Microsoft Teams was vital to uphold their principles of service excellence and collaboration in the face of an unprecedented change to how work happens.
The Microsoft Teams rollout took priority, and from a technical perspective, it was simple to deploy. However, employees struggled to adapt to the new environment and needed additional support to remain productive. Internally, the staff received initial training and supporting resources, but they wanted to take it a step further.
Their team decided to provide more targeted training. With the help and information provided by them, 2toLead delivered a tailored training program focused on best practices and collaboration boosters. This empowered employees to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to their fullest potential. Additionally, given their recent transition to a new email and calendaring system, we emphasized tips and best practices for managing email, scheduling meetings, and organizing calendar events.
Taking the first steps towards business process automation
Accelerated by the new normal, and to facilitate critical business processes, we identified areas that needed automation. The Power Platform was a solid choice as the technology to underpin the efforts. The team had just begun their business transformation journey and needed a partner to walk the path and not only implement the critical business processes, but also acquire the knowledge internally by being part of the process.
To meet this goal, they partnered with 2toLead to automate a process for distributing vouchers to families in need.
The voucher administration process is a critical process that involved various departments, automation, and data sources within and outside the realm of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
With the actors, their actions, and the flow of the system documented, the team joined forces and proceeded to build three Power Apps to meet the needs of the various actors, ranging from social workers, supervisors, administrators, and delivery drivers.
Along the way, our 2toLead consultants and their Administrative Services Team participated in the design and development sessions to create each app. This approach allowed for training the team as we developed the Power Apps and Power Automate Flows needed for each step of the process.
Leveraging data from on-premises data sources
A critical business need derived from the analysis was to read client data and present it using Power Apps. This data resided on-premises. Given the nature of its sensitivity, we needed a secure and efficient solution that allowed this data to be exposed to our Power App users while ensuring it would remain available at any time.
To meet this need, our architect team proposed a Hybrid Data Architecture model. This model leverages Common Data Service to store client information and update it regularly. The scenario called for using an on-premises data access gateway to connect to the SQL Server Instance on-premises. With the information now stored in a cloud entity, it was ready to be leveraged by Power Apps, or Power Automate flows that required it.
To complement the architecture, we also considered the use of Power BI to report on data from cloud sources such as our data entities and on-premises data residing in SQL Server.
What’s next for the organization?
With a solid foundation in place to communicate and collaborate with modern tools, and the resources to train new and existing employees, their team is well-positioned to invest further in making the operation more secure, efficient and adaptable to the needs of the organization.
The knowledge gained from building their first apps in the Power Platform will boost their confidence in the platform to continue optimizing and automating business processes and simplifying their reporting solutions to bring data and actions to the front lines. This experience, in turn, will contribute to supporting the organization in continuing to fulfill its mission to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
The power of a partner on your journey
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. Experiencing business transformation takes an intentional partnership with the business's knowledge and the expertise to optimize and implement technology in a way that meets your business outcomes. Our team is passionate and strives to work together to make the journey much more comfortable to walk along. Let us join your organization's journey towards digital transformation and business process optimization together.
Microsoft 365 Cloud Security and Governance when External...
| Industry | Law |
| Org Size | 500 + |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Azur SharePoint Microsoft Teams OneDrive |
2toLead recently worked with one of Atlantic Canada's largest regional law firms. They reached out to us for guidance on using SharePoint Online to share information with external users, primarily their clients.
They were curious to explore the use of SharePoint Online for their clients and ensure they had easy and secure access while experiencing the platform. The team was particularly interested in the key areas that would help them secure access, ensure sensitive information was protected, and learn how to guarantee the configuration needed for Extranet sites was repeatable to keep compliant and maintain consistency.
The law firm was looking for a team that had the same philosophies around innovating and customer excellence. 2toLead was a great choice given our extensive experience building Intranet and Extranet portals as well as our breadth and depth of knowledge in the Microsoft 365 platform. The client's primary need was to move towards building an extranet service based on SharePoint Online that integrates with other systems for a more cohesive client experience. Join us in taking a look at the journey we took to better governed and more secure sharing.
TIP | If you are looking to improve governance, our eBook on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl can help!
Our journey toward better Microsoft 365 cloud security when external sharing begins
To determine the team's specific needs, we began our journey by holding a series of discovery sessions. These interactive discussions centered on governance, security, and compliance. The team was highly engaged and keen to learn what is possible in the platform, so we peeled back the various layers of Microsoft 365. We did this to ensure we had a common understanding of the platform's possibilities and gain user needs and insights that would drive our recommendations towards what specific areas needed to be defined and configured.
Peeling the external sharing onion
While the storefront for an extranet based on Office 365 is traditionally a SharePoint Extranet, we reviewed the different areas where the platform is malleable to configure a safe and secure collaboration experience. Along the way, we dove in to discuss Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and OneDrive external sharing. We also looked at relevant policies and settings in Microsoft Teams to ensure proper coverage of the many ways one can collaborate and share with others.
The team was particularly interested in the platform's federation and single sign-on capabilities (as they were using a third-party solution to accomplish this goal. A more extensive and organization-specific analysis was done to identify the level of support and effort to migrate the SSO capability from the third-party platform to Azure Active Directory.
Add more personable moments, to highlight the relationship and good collaboration with the client.
- SSO piece, added interactive aspect to our discovery discussions
Thought leadership: showcase an example and a moment that marks the 2toLead difference.
- SSO piece, adding value beyond the basics
- Extranet/Intranet portals our core strength
Check about us page for client and map out values to journey where applicable.
- Added commitment to innovation and adding value to client with the firm intent to make their life’s easier.
A key differentiator for them as opposed to any other client.
- Their focus on innovation is clearly stated
Governance as the mainline for putting all the pieces together
In isolation, these capabilities allow us to configure the main pieces. However, we took special consideration in managing the container's lifecycle, site provisioning, and guest management.
Our findings raised important considerations for managing and automating these crucial processes to establish a repeatable and auditable process that balances business agility and security.
Keeping sensitive information safe and secure
Our compliance discussions highlighted the need for defining a set of policies and labeling that can support users on day one of using their extranet and prevents leakage of sensitive information. On the other hand, the need to define retention based on key document types, locations, automated or manual led to raising awareness and establishing an information governance strategy to support internal and external users as they adopt the new system.
On the security front, we also evaluated the need for defining a clear set of policies to ensure the right people have the proper access to data. Azure Active Directory played a vital role in these discussions. Capabilities such as Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access, Terms of Use, and advanced group management provided the team with the right pieces to strengthen their security posture. These essential pieces would help provide peace of mind, even as they bring guest users into the Extranet environment.
Trust, but verifying
Another important consideration for security was the ability to audit user activity. The unified audit logging capabilities of the platform complement their existing investments on security.
These capabilities support the team by being alerted of critical risks associated with external sharing and other administration related tasks, ensuring prompt detection and mitigation should the need arise.
By performing access reviews using the Azure Active Directory capabilities, the team can ensure the right people have access to resources by periodically triggering reviews and providing the information to the owners of the content to attest to the access granted.
What is next?
While the journey continues for the law firm, the team now has a roadmap that sets out a clear path to follow based on business needs and prioritized next steps. Key milestones include defining their governance and information architecture needs towards automation of extranet site creation. In parallel, the team works with relevant parties to refine integration points with other systems to further enhance their clients' experience.
Let us tag along
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. If you are unsure about what you need for your digital transformation journey, reach out to us. Our strategy services can help you identify the key pieces to consider and set you up for success. Better yet, if you need a team of experts and passionate consultants to walk the path with you, let us tag along and bring the umbrella to protect you from rainy days.
Delivering content that is important to Magna Employees around...
| Industry | Manufacturing & Automotive |
| Org Size | 150,000+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 SharePoint Azure |
Magna International is a $40B Canadian-based, leading global automotive supplier. It employs roughly 158,000 people from 342 manufacturing facilities (Divisions) and 91 product development, engineering, and sales centres, operating within 7 product-based Groups, across 27 countries. This diversity is a massive strength for the company, but it needed to be supported in the right way to ensure employees find the information they need, when they need it.
Information Overload in Today’s World
In today’s world, we are all overloaded with information. From social media, to news, to chat groups with your friends, to new and interesting podcasts. There is a lot of content coming at us. It is hard to follow, and it is even harder to identify what is important.
This problem is just as true at companies as it is within our personal lives. There are documents everywhere. Notifications everywhere. Company news in your email, on your intranet, in the media, and, likely, in many places you wish it wasn’t.
Too much information in the Digital Workplace
Employees and managers wrestle with this daily. The objective is to provide the most relevant information to employees, at the right time, in the right way, and ultimately increase productivity. This is not easy. It is difficult and a challenge that can be daunting for any business.
Organizations invest a lot of time and resources into creating ways to automate this challenge. Often, algorithms are made to suggest content that may be relevant to employees. This can be based on which documents employees work on, teammates they collaborate with often, or information that might be trending from across the company.
Algorithms like these can be highly effective. One example is Google Search. We all use Google Search, it works great. These algorithms do have problems though. They are biased. They can lead to people getting stuck in a tunnel of self-reinforcing recommendations. This is not good for discoverability.
In addition to these recommendation engines, we must explore other ways of surfacing content to employees, ways that encourage discoverability. One such method is through matching the types of content created for employees to their place within the organization. This allows for a constant stream of content that is relevant to the user but broader than their immediate use case.
The Journey to Better Information Distribution
Our team has been fortunate in being able to support Magna with the growth of their Digital Workplace. We have had a long-lasting partnership and have developed many content discoverability solutions together.
One of those solutions was the Content Stream, a multi-faceted content personalization and content targeting aggregator that provides relevant information to employees on their intranet, MagNET. The Content Stream became a true beacon of increased information flow for Magna employees, but creating it required a deep understanding of the needs and pain points of their employees.
Large, global organizations have a very broad range of employee profiles. A key feature of the Content Stream is its ability to target content to employees based on their unique profile. This was a critical feature for Magna, as they were focused on surfacing relevant information to their employees as soon as they landed on the intranet.
Information Architecture – Taking care of the foundation
One of the first challenges that we had to overcome was a lack of information architecture consistency across their intranet. We worked closely with Magna’s Corporate Communications teams to identify consistent metadata that could be used to classify information on the intranet. This metadata was coded into SharePoint site templates to make it easy to apply it consistently every time a new intranet site was created. Essentially, creating 'information anchors' to streamline information findability across the intranet.
Content Roll-Up – Pulling the right information
Our second major challenge was developing a content experience that was powerful enough to roll up relevant content for employees from across hundreds of SharePoint sites that make up the intranet. Through user interviews, personas, pain point and needs analysis, as well as deep design thinking exercises with the team, we created a Content Stream experience that surfaced news from across the Intranet into a single, branded stream of publications.
This stream has many targeting settings that work off our information architecture foundations. Importantly, we enabled a setting that when selected, presents news to employees that align with their Group, Function, and Region within the organization.
Azure Active Directory – Connect the dots for personalization
Our final major challenge was ensuring the intranet had the information that it needed to make a match between an employee’s profile and the metadata pattern of news articles. Through a close partnership with Magna’s IT team, we worked out the infrastructure and integrations required to sync their on-premises Active Directory information with Azure Active Directory and SharePoint’s user profile service. Schemas were designed, integrations coded, and data began to flow from a single source of truth to where it could be referenceable and matched to news published on the intranet.
What’s next for Magna International and 2toLead?
Through a user-first, cross-platform, cross-team effort, working with various functions across the organization, we designed an integrated and personalized news experience for Magna employees. When they open their intranet, they see news that is both relevant to them, but also news that encourages discoverability. Employees are now more productive in being able to find relevant announcements and have a much-improved news experience.
However, this is not the end of our journey. In addition to building many other content discoverability features with Magna, we are continuing to work together to enhance their digital workplace experience. From personalized communications newsletters to news analytics that track engagement and employee sentiment, we are just getting started.
Why it matters and how 2toLead can help
Building experiences that amplify the user experience and allow employees to discover relevant content when they need it most is a difficult challenge. Organizations need to embrace internal communication and collaboration challenges if they seek to empower their staff to be the most productive version of themselves.
We have been fortunate to develop deep expertise in creating employee digital experiences that lead to real change in organizations. It is our passion. We also have various whitepapers and if this whitepaper rings for your, then you may find our intranet and adoption whitepapers particularly interested and topical.
If you are interested in working together to build a similar experience, as seen in this intranet case study, for your company, talk to us. We would love to help you with your journey.
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The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience with M365 and Viva
Looking to understand Employee Experience and how Microsoft 365 and Viva solutions can help? Our 80+ page whitepaper covers it all, so don't miss out and download today.
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Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
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Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
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SharePoint Migration
Learn migration best practices, and how to best plan and execute a SharePoint upgrade or migration to SharePoint Online from file shares, legacy systems, older versions of SharePoint, and more.
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Download this whitepaper now to discover guidance and insights based on our experience improving external sharing and collaboration with hundreds of customers in a wide variety of industries and organization sizes.
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eBooks
Office 365 Success Kit
We have worked extensively with Office 365 and in an effort to be generous with our guidance we have shared many templates, samples and resources.
2
kits
The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience with M365 and Viva
Looking to understand Employee Experience and how Microsoft 365 and Viva solutions can help? Our 80+ page whitepaper covers it all, so don't miss out and download today.
Overcoming SharePoint Creative Blocks & Challenges
Creative blocks happen to the best of us, but with the help of Brandon Pittman and Richard Plantt, you can minimize how often SharePoint is the root cause.
Enhancing Corporate Communication and Collaboration in Microsoft...
| Industry | Technology |
| Org Size | 10,000 |
| Technologies | Microsoft Teams |
This multinational technology conglomerate corporation of roughly 10,000 employees, was looking to improve communications where employees work. 2toLead worked with them to enhance corporate communications by leveraging the power of the Enhanced Company Communicator app.
The Challenge
As we are all too aware, there has been a shift in the workplace in the last few years, resulting in many organizations embracing remote and hybrid work models for business continuity and workforce well-being. In consequence, it has become abundantly clear for leadership teams that successful communication in the ‘new way of work’ must evolve to accommodate the following:
- Compatibility with asynchronous work spread across multiple continents and/or time zones;
- Modern communication formats that can reach employees right where they collaborate; and,
- Ease of use as a large portion of the workforce has been with the company for under a year.
Now, anyone can work from almost anywhere that has a decent internet connection. Untethered from the physical restrictions of the office, organizations have been heavily investing in digital workplace solutions to enable communication and collaboration across multiple time zones, locations, and continents. Although remote work technology has been commercially available for nearly a decade, the demand and speed at which adoption has taken place over the past two years have left many employees overwhelmed by digital clutter and inefficient tooling.
Consequently, many organizations have been adapting and moving their communication and collaboration, at least partly, out of email and into Microsoft Teams.
Along with changing working environments comes a rapidly changing employee base spurred largely by the Great Resignation. Many of the organizations we work with report that a large portion of the staff has been with the company for less than a year. We constantly see more and more new hires across all industries and services.
And what is a better time to look for a solution to pave the way forward through these uncertain times?
Our Solution: The Enhanced Company Communicator App
Our team has been fortunate to support our client with the pilot of the Microsoft Teams Enhanced Company Communicator application over the past few months.
The Enhanced Company Communicator app is the ideal solution for announcements and team broadcasts to engage your organization. Messages can be used to share important updates, special announcements, and links to staff surveys without sending a single email to your team.
The key to the Enhanced Company Communicator app is understanding how people work. There has been a culture change in terms of the method that we utilize to communicate, specifically with less email and more real-time messaging. Employees are asking management to meet them where they spend a large part of their working time. Every day we are sent many messages; sometimes, those important messages will get lost with everything that requires our attention.
There was an opportunity to make this process easier for communication and leadership teams to reach out and share these important messages with their staff.
We wanted to build an app that seamlessly integrates into the places staff are already working - inside Microsoft Teams. The Enhanced Company Communicator app offers an opportunity to reach your audience where they are.
We took the existing Company Communicator app and enhanced it further to address some missing gaps. We embraced the best-in-class patterns we all know and love in Microsoft Teams. On top of that foundation, we built new functionality to help streamline the publishing process and improve the user experience. Enhanced Image Selection and Custom Scheduling were built into the company communicator, making it easier than ever to create your custom messages. The app provides an easy interface for a designated user to create, preview, collaborate, and send messages. We used the power of bots inside Microsoft Teams to automate and distribute those messages seamlessly across business channels.
Enhancement 1: Enhanced Image Selection
Create and craft messages your way
It’s as simple as adding a title, picking your image, defining your message, and adding a call to action. In a few clicks, the Company Communicator app allows you to craft a message either from scratch or even from a set template.
User Journey
The Communicator selects the ‘Browse’ button.
The required image file is located within the desktop file explorer.
Once selected, a preview o the image appears in the ‘New Message’ panel.
Enhancement 2: Custom Scheduling
Define where and when your message will go out
Scheduling and automating your messages to have them distributed at the right time with your team while you focus on other tasks.
With the Enhanced Company Communicator app, messages are shared directly inside Microsoft Teams chats or channels ensuring those important messages are not missed.
User Journey
After selecting the intended audience, the Communicator can indicate the date and time for the message to be sent.
Enhancement 3: Message Metrics
User Journey
Communicators can track the success of their announcements by analyzing the number of employees who have viewed their message, replied, or even reacted to it. The Enhanced Company Communicator allows you to boost your productivity, work smarter, connect the right people with the right information within Microsoft Teams.
What’s next for our client and 2toLead?
While it may be easy to assume that our work is done our journey together has only just begun. We have commenced the next phase of enhancements: message analytics. It is our intention to capture message analytics (e.g. Total views, reach, popularity, and failure rate) and present them within a custom PowerBI dashboard. We believe that this approach will be essential in both capturing the success metrics of messages and providing a clear line of sight into which features/enhancements to plan for in subsequent releases of the application.
Why it matters and how 2toLead can help
Building experiences that ensure employees receive important communication blasts all while seamlessly integrated into the digital workplace is a difficult challenge. It is a challenge that organizations need to embrace if they seek to empower their staff to be the most productive version of themselves.
We have been fortunate to develop deep expertise in creating employee digital experiences that lead to real change in organizations. It is our passion.
If you are interested in working together to build this experience for your company, talk to us. We would love to help you with your journey.
Employee Experience Collaboration Strategy | Design for...
Modern workplaces need a collaboration strategy because working remote can be very isolating to employees who have a small circle of collaboration and low interaction with the team as a whole. Richard, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, discusses how intranets are changing in this video, and how Teams continues to position itself as your organizations "We" platform.
Planning for the Future of Collaboration – Key Concepts
Progress is unavoidable for the future of collaboration will continue to change. Its important to modernize how you approach, plan and support collaboration so that when new changes occur, your organization is resilient and ready to take advantage of them.
SharePoint Hubs in Hubs – StepTwo Forum Clip
Modern SharePoint introduced Hub Sites but when is the right time to use them? A few weeks ago, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge joined one of StepTwo's incredible members only forum for an AMA.
Internal and External Collaboration – Teams Works In More...
External collaboration with teams is now adapting to replace the need for SharePoint extranets. Shared channels can connect workplaces and tenants seamlessly for smoother internal or external.
The Intranet Is Dying: Debate Summary and Results
The first episode of The Great EX Debate has come and gone. Wondering what points were made or who the winner was? You’re in the right place!
If you haven’t had the chance to watch the LIVE event, don’t worry! Watch the full debate below or continue to read a quick overview and see the winner.
https://youtu.be/Q2jMacCG_q8
For and Against the Intranet Is Dying
We didn’t hold back on talent for the debate! For the motion, we had 7X Microsoft MVP and our CTO, Richard Harbridge. Against the motion, we had Neilson Norman Intranet award-winner and our Digital Workplace Strategist, Brandon Pittman.
The argument for
While Richard has worked on over 100 intranets and digital workplaces, he argued that the tides are moving away from the Intranet as the place to go or as the center hub of the digital workplace. Instead, he argues, the purpose should be to bring the experiences the Intranet provides to where the employees work in the context of their work.
Richard makes the following key arguments:
- The core design of the Intranet as the place to go is flawed and not the optimal or desired experience. A model that brings the value, services, and content of the Intranet to users where they already work are what employees want.
- It is unsustainable to centralize in the way we have with exponential growth in business content (currently doubling every 2 years).
- It's already happening on mobile, in email, Office applications, and Microsoft teams. Citing news consumption experiences, search experiences such as Microsoft Search embedded throughout the digital workplace, and navigation shifts for more dynamic, personalized, and intelligent navigation best represented by employee experiences like Viva Topics as a more just-in-time, in-context, connected, and AI-powered experience.
- The Intranet is not as significant an area of employee experience investment as it has been in the past. Most core capabilities are now easily accessible and easy to implement, and most new experiences are distributed in the apps/places people work.
- This is a transformative moment in time - similar to when enterprise social shifted the Intranet to focus on engagement, interactivity, and more. That it isn't a simple iteration on the prior model of Intranets.
The argument against
While Richard argued that people are leaving the intranet behind to focus on maximizing the employee experience no matter where the employee prefers to work, Brandon argued that the Intranet would continue to play a pivotal role in the digital workplace, one that nothing else can match today. He spoke to the intranet, not dying but evolving and thriving.
Brandon makes the following key arguments:
- Continued integration and investment from Microsoft and others into the Intranet experience clearly communicates that the Intranet remains essential and highly relevant.
- Adoption takes time, norms matter, and so do expectations, and the Intranet is familiar, known, and already highly leveraged. "Tried tested, and true." This is especially important during crises and unique business challenges these last few years as communication and connection take priority.
- The costs involved are better for investment since it's one place. It's easier to envision, design, build and roll out.
- It serves as a new employee center and gravity well and is the core of most onboarding experiences today.
- There is no better hub for employees today. While there are new employee experiences that can help produce similar results but these experiences are at best immature, siloed, or fragmented and are not ready to dethrone the Intranet.
The Results
At face value, it might not seem like much changed before and after the debate. While the percentages looked pretty similar, it is clear that the needle did move as more undecided individuals found their place in the debate. However, if we look even further, we see some interesting insights.
How did the votes sway?
For the motion, we saw a small percentage (2%) actually move away from Intranet Thriving, and Richard was also able to bring 1% of undecided individuals over. While there was some movement around swayed votes, most people for the motion stuck to their initial stance that the intranet is indeed dying.
Against the motion, we saw a lot of movement! While only 53% of voters stayed against the motion, versus the initial 58%, Brandon was able to resurrect faith in 2% of people who had previously seen the intranet as a dying solution. More impressive was his ability to turn 5% of undecided voters into believers!
Over on the undecided side, there was a lot of movement to either side. However, while Richard couldn’t bring individuals entirely over to his side, he managed to convince 3% of people that maybe there was more to his points than they initially thought but not enough to fully embrace the motion.
The Winner
Our debate was decided on the number of votes that were swayed. So, the winner of our debate was…
Brandon Pittman!
From an initial vote against the motion of 56%, Brandon increased to 58% of individuals for a total increase of 2%. Richard started from an initial vote for the motion of 38%, increased to 39% in the second vote, for a total increase of 1%.
The importance of debate and the future of the series
It’s clear from the still considerable split on this motion that we need more places to debate different opinions and ideas to allow the opportunity for opinion and nuance.
We look forward to another debate next quarter, and we hope you do too! Let us know your thoughts on social and other motions you’d love to see us debate with the hashtag #TheGreatEXDebate!
Until then, if you're looking to improve your intranet and digital workplace, download our free 160+ page whitepaper!
Do we have the right Digital Workplace Tools, and how much is...
How can you bridge the gap between having multiple digital workplace tools co-operating clumsily and a fully integrated experience? Watch our CTO and Microsoft MVP Richard Harbridge how to improve your digital workplace explain in this clip!
2
internal_webinars
The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience with M365 and Viva
Looking to understand Employee Experience and how Microsoft 365 and Viva solutions can help? Our 80+ page whitepaper covers it all, so don't miss out and download today.
Overcoming SharePoint Creative Blocks & Challenges
Creative blocks happen to the best of us, but with the help of Brandon Pittman and Richard Plantt, you can minimize how often SharePoint is the root cause.
Enhancing Corporate Communication and Collaboration in Microsoft...
| Industry | Technology |
| Org Size | 10,000 |
| Technologies | Microsoft Teams |
This multinational technology conglomerate corporation of roughly 10,000 employees, was looking to improve communications where employees work. 2toLead worked with them to enhance corporate communications by leveraging the power of the Enhanced Company Communicator app.
The Challenge
As we are all too aware, there has been a shift in the workplace in the last few years, resulting in many organizations embracing remote and hybrid work models for business continuity and workforce well-being. In consequence, it has become abundantly clear for leadership teams that successful communication in the ‘new way of work’ must evolve to accommodate the following:
- Compatibility with asynchronous work spread across multiple continents and/or time zones;
- Modern communication formats that can reach employees right where they collaborate; and,
- Ease of use as a large portion of the workforce has been with the company for under a year.
Now, anyone can work from almost anywhere that has a decent internet connection. Untethered from the physical restrictions of the office, organizations have been heavily investing in digital workplace solutions to enable communication and collaboration across multiple time zones, locations, and continents. Although remote work technology has been commercially available for nearly a decade, the demand and speed at which adoption has taken place over the past two years have left many employees overwhelmed by digital clutter and inefficient tooling.
Consequently, many organizations have been adapting and moving their communication and collaboration, at least partly, out of email and into Microsoft Teams.
Along with changing working environments comes a rapidly changing employee base spurred largely by the Great Resignation. Many of the organizations we work with report that a large portion of the staff has been with the company for less than a year. We constantly see more and more new hires across all industries and services.
And what is a better time to look for a solution to pave the way forward through these uncertain times?
Our Solution: The Enhanced Company Communicator App
Our team has been fortunate to support our client with the pilot of the Microsoft Teams Enhanced Company Communicator application over the past few months.
The Enhanced Company Communicator app is the ideal solution for announcements and team broadcasts to engage your organization. Messages can be used to share important updates, special announcements, and links to staff surveys without sending a single email to your team.
The key to the Enhanced Company Communicator app is understanding how people work. There has been a culture change in terms of the method that we utilize to communicate, specifically with less email and more real-time messaging. Employees are asking management to meet them where they spend a large part of their working time. Every day we are sent many messages; sometimes, those important messages will get lost with everything that requires our attention.
There was an opportunity to make this process easier for communication and leadership teams to reach out and share these important messages with their staff.
We wanted to build an app that seamlessly integrates into the places staff are already working - inside Microsoft Teams. The Enhanced Company Communicator app offers an opportunity to reach your audience where they are.
We took the existing Company Communicator app and enhanced it further to address some missing gaps. We embraced the best-in-class patterns we all know and love in Microsoft Teams. On top of that foundation, we built new functionality to help streamline the publishing process and improve the user experience. Enhanced Image Selection and Custom Scheduling were built into the company communicator, making it easier than ever to create your custom messages. The app provides an easy interface for a designated user to create, preview, collaborate, and send messages. We used the power of bots inside Microsoft Teams to automate and distribute those messages seamlessly across business channels.
Enhancement 1: Enhanced Image Selection
Create and craft messages your way
It’s as simple as adding a title, picking your image, defining your message, and adding a call to action. In a few clicks, the Company Communicator app allows you to craft a message either from scratch or even from a set template.
User Journey
The Communicator selects the ‘Browse’ button.
The required image file is located within the desktop file explorer.
Once selected, a preview o the image appears in the ‘New Message’ panel.
Enhancement 2: Custom Scheduling
Define where and when your message will go out
Scheduling and automating your messages to have them distributed at the right time with your team while you focus on other tasks.
With the Enhanced Company Communicator app, messages are shared directly inside Microsoft Teams chats or channels ensuring those important messages are not missed.
User Journey
After selecting the intended audience, the Communicator can indicate the date and time for the message to be sent.
Enhancement 3: Message Metrics
User Journey
Communicators can track the success of their announcements by analyzing the number of employees who have viewed their message, replied, or even reacted to it. The Enhanced Company Communicator allows you to boost your productivity, work smarter, connect the right people with the right information within Microsoft Teams.
What’s next for our client and 2toLead?
While it may be easy to assume that our work is done our journey together has only just begun. We have commenced the next phase of enhancements: message analytics. It is our intention to capture message analytics (e.g. Total views, reach, popularity, and failure rate) and present them within a custom PowerBI dashboard. We believe that this approach will be essential in both capturing the success metrics of messages and providing a clear line of sight into which features/enhancements to plan for in subsequent releases of the application.
Why it matters and how 2toLead can help
Building experiences that ensure employees receive important communication blasts all while seamlessly integrated into the digital workplace is a difficult challenge. It is a challenge that organizations need to embrace if they seek to empower their staff to be the most productive version of themselves.
We have been fortunate to develop deep expertise in creating employee digital experiences that lead to real change in organizations. It is our passion.
If you are interested in working together to build this experience for your company, talk to us. We would love to help you with your journey.
Employee Experience Collaboration Strategy | Design for...
Modern workplaces need a collaboration strategy because working remote can be very isolating to employees who have a small circle of collaboration and low interaction with the team as a whole. Richard, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, discusses how intranets are changing in this video, and how Teams continues to position itself as your organizations "We" platform.
Planning for the Future of Collaboration – Key Concepts
Progress is unavoidable for the future of collaboration will continue to change. Its important to modernize how you approach, plan and support collaboration so that when new changes occur, your organization is resilient and ready to take advantage of them.
SharePoint Hubs in Hubs – StepTwo Forum Clip
Modern SharePoint introduced Hub Sites but when is the right time to use them? A few weeks ago, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge joined one of StepTwo's incredible members only forum for an AMA.
Internal and External Collaboration – Teams Works In More...
External collaboration with teams is now adapting to replace the need for SharePoint extranets. Shared channels can connect workplaces and tenants seamlessly for smoother internal or external.
The Intranet Is Dying: Debate Summary and Results
The first episode of The Great EX Debate has come and gone. Wondering what points were made or who the winner was? You’re in the right place!
If you haven’t had the chance to watch the LIVE event, don’t worry! Watch the full debate below or continue to read a quick overview and see the winner.
https://youtu.be/Q2jMacCG_q8
For and Against the Intranet Is Dying
We didn’t hold back on talent for the debate! For the motion, we had 7X Microsoft MVP and our CTO, Richard Harbridge. Against the motion, we had Neilson Norman Intranet award-winner and our Digital Workplace Strategist, Brandon Pittman.
The argument for
While Richard has worked on over 100 intranets and digital workplaces, he argued that the tides are moving away from the Intranet as the place to go or as the center hub of the digital workplace. Instead, he argues, the purpose should be to bring the experiences the Intranet provides to where the employees work in the context of their work.
Richard makes the following key arguments:
- The core design of the Intranet as the place to go is flawed and not the optimal or desired experience. A model that brings the value, services, and content of the Intranet to users where they already work are what employees want.
- It is unsustainable to centralize in the way we have with exponential growth in business content (currently doubling every 2 years).
- It's already happening on mobile, in email, Office applications, and Microsoft teams. Citing news consumption experiences, search experiences such as Microsoft Search embedded throughout the digital workplace, and navigation shifts for more dynamic, personalized, and intelligent navigation best represented by employee experiences like Viva Topics as a more just-in-time, in-context, connected, and AI-powered experience.
- The Intranet is not as significant an area of employee experience investment as it has been in the past. Most core capabilities are now easily accessible and easy to implement, and most new experiences are distributed in the apps/places people work.
- This is a transformative moment in time - similar to when enterprise social shifted the Intranet to focus on engagement, interactivity, and more. That it isn't a simple iteration on the prior model of Intranets.
The argument against
While Richard argued that people are leaving the intranet behind to focus on maximizing the employee experience no matter where the employee prefers to work, Brandon argued that the Intranet would continue to play a pivotal role in the digital workplace, one that nothing else can match today. He spoke to the intranet, not dying but evolving and thriving.
Brandon makes the following key arguments:
- Continued integration and investment from Microsoft and others into the Intranet experience clearly communicates that the Intranet remains essential and highly relevant.
- Adoption takes time, norms matter, and so do expectations, and the Intranet is familiar, known, and already highly leveraged. "Tried tested, and true." This is especially important during crises and unique business challenges these last few years as communication and connection take priority.
- The costs involved are better for investment since it's one place. It's easier to envision, design, build and roll out.
- It serves as a new employee center and gravity well and is the core of most onboarding experiences today.
- There is no better hub for employees today. While there are new employee experiences that can help produce similar results but these experiences are at best immature, siloed, or fragmented and are not ready to dethrone the Intranet.
The Results
At face value, it might not seem like much changed before and after the debate. While the percentages looked pretty similar, it is clear that the needle did move as more undecided individuals found their place in the debate. However, if we look even further, we see some interesting insights.
How did the votes sway?
For the motion, we saw a small percentage (2%) actually move away from Intranet Thriving, and Richard was also able to bring 1% of undecided individuals over. While there was some movement around swayed votes, most people for the motion stuck to their initial stance that the intranet is indeed dying.
Against the motion, we saw a lot of movement! While only 53% of voters stayed against the motion, versus the initial 58%, Brandon was able to resurrect faith in 2% of people who had previously seen the intranet as a dying solution. More impressive was his ability to turn 5% of undecided voters into believers!
Over on the undecided side, there was a lot of movement to either side. However, while Richard couldn’t bring individuals entirely over to his side, he managed to convince 3% of people that maybe there was more to his points than they initially thought but not enough to fully embrace the motion.
The Winner
Our debate was decided on the number of votes that were swayed. So, the winner of our debate was…
Brandon Pittman!
From an initial vote against the motion of 56%, Brandon increased to 58% of individuals for a total increase of 2%. Richard started from an initial vote for the motion of 38%, increased to 39% in the second vote, for a total increase of 1%.
The importance of debate and the future of the series
It’s clear from the still considerable split on this motion that we need more places to debate different opinions and ideas to allow the opportunity for opinion and nuance.
We look forward to another debate next quarter, and we hope you do too! Let us know your thoughts on social and other motions you’d love to see us debate with the hashtag #TheGreatEXDebate!
Until then, if you're looking to improve your intranet and digital workplace, download our free 160+ page whitepaper!
Do we have the right Digital Workplace Tools, and how much is...
How can you bridge the gap between having multiple digital workplace tools co-operating clumsily and a fully integrated experience? Watch our CTO and Microsoft MVP Richard Harbridge how to improve your digital workplace explain in this clip!
2
external_webinars
Upcoming Events, Sessions and Webinars
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The Future of Employee Management
The world of employee management has undergone an unprecedented rapid and transformative change globally. In consequence, leaders and managers have navigated unexpected and challenging times....
It is rare to find deep product domain knowledge for SharePoint outside of Microsoft product groups. Richard attacks understanding product capabilities and client implications with relentless drive.
- Brian Z, Microsoft
Kanwal has an interesting blend of technology savvy and marketing skills that make him a very flexible person to work with…a great addition to any SharePoint team with proven leadership skills.
- David B, The Real Content Network
Kanwal is an enormous value to any organization or client he is servicing as his commitment to their end goal, quest for new knowledge and unwavering dedication is unmatched by many. skills
- Camille M., Dun and Bradstreet