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Custom business apps on Office 365 – the art of the possible

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Office 365 not only offers an incredible array of tools and services such as SharePoint Online, MS Teams, and Outlook but also acts as a flexible, effective platform to develop and deploy bespoke business apps. These can help employees with specific processes and goals that are unique to your organisation.

What is a bespoke business app?

Many of the Office 365 tools can be used straight out of the box. But some features such as Power BI, PowerApps, Flow and even Azure (not Office 365, strictly speaking) are there to help you build custom capabilities and applications and digitise processes. The app may be based on a configuration, customisation, combination or integration of standard Office 365 applications and services.

Why deploy bespoke business apps?

There are multiple reasons to create bespoke business apps. You can:

  • Create apps to your exact specification
  • Improve a huge variety of processes through automation
  • Digitise processes reliant on email or paper
  • Reduce costs, for example discontinuing subscriptions for SaaS apps and point solutions
  • Help employees get things done in ways that are centred on how they actually work
  • Build apps for mobile so that processes can be done on the move
  • Build completely new capabilities and services, and drive innovation
  • Create apps within the Office 365 environment, all easily accessible via Single Sign-On, and advance your digital workplace
  • Help drive adoption of Office 365 tools and fully leverage your investment in Office 365
  • Help to improve the employee experience for all your workforce, for example by building tools specifically for frontline workers
  • And many more!

What kind of business apps can you build with Office 365?

There are many types of different business app you can build and deploy. At Content Formula weve built and launched multiple types of apps.  For example:

Automation and efficiency

Office 365 provides many opportunities to use automation and workflow, helping to improve processes, drive efficiencies, increase accuracy, minimise risk and more. If you have processes which are currently too reliant on email and file shares, or still even use paper, then there are almost certainly opportunities for automation.  For example, at Praetura, a private equity company, we automated a key process for tracking and assessing opportunities for investment, using workflow and automation to take staff through an eight-stage process.  Meanwhile at Haines Watts we helped to streamline employee onboarding with an onboarding workflow.

Reporting and dashboarding

Power BI is an exciting tool which can produce attractive dashboards and reports, bring together information form multiple sources into one place. Reporting apps can help drive insights which support real-time decision making for management, system owners and more. We’ve developed numerous dashboards for clients, as well as reporting dashboards as part of other apps.

Content, knowledge and learning

Some apps are created to better manage content, knowledge or learning resources, and provide access for employees. For example, we built a powerful bespoke central policy library that was suited to the specific needs of the Institute of Cancer Research.  Chatbots can also help connect employees to content and knowledge.

Collaboration

Office 365 has a stack of collaboration tools including Yammer, Teams and Team Sites. There are  many possibilities to customise these to suit your processes and ways of working. For example, we added a unique knowledge management solution to Microsoft Teams for !What If?, allowing teams to easily share the most valuable documents containing knowledge from projects.

Mobile solutions

Sometimes business apps based on Office 365 can be designed specifically for mobile devices, particularly if the target audience are frontline or mobile employees who might not have easy access to a computer during the day. For example, Content Formula has developed a mobile news app for field workers. Thanks to Microsoft’s own mobile apps for Flow and PowerApps it’s become very easy to deploy custom mobile apps.

Core operational systems

Sometimes an app goes beyond being an app; its so central to what your organisation and employees do its really a core system. With our award-winning work for property company Moving Made Easy, we created an entire digital workplace designed around the different stages of selling a property, replacing a creaking legacy system, driving significant headcount efficiencies with integration and automation, and even creating new opportunities to innovate their service.

Customer apps

Although most business apps for Office 365 tend to be for employees, its also possible to develop apps that impact customers.  For example, in our work for Moving Made Easy, our solution output PDF reports that are automatically sent to customers. There are now plans to extend the system for direct customer access.

Enhance existing tools

Sometimes you want to use tools from the Office 365 suite, but perhaps they dont quite work in the right way for you. Sometimes a little customisation can go a long way and really add value. For example, we enhanced the use of Microsoft Teams for innovation company What If? so that spaces can be automatically archived and aligned to the company’s project management methodology.

Approaches for developing your business app strategy

There are no hard and fast rules to developing your strategy, but here are a few successful approaches weve observed based on our work with clients:

Base your strategy on user and stakeholder research

A strategy for your apps should be based on thorough user and stakeholder research which reveals how people work and their pain points. At Content Formula we carry out our discovery process involving user and stakeholder interviews and workshops, so we get a thorough understanding of the problems we are trying to solve.

Identify obvious opportunities

Usually within any organisation there are some obvious opportunities where an app can make a significant difference. A typical example might be a process which is primarily carried out by email or even manually. Perhaps there is an activity where users must enter different systems to complete tasks or get information.

Sometimes these opportunities might prove to be low hanging fruit where an app can quickly and easily resolve user frustrations or save time. Prioritising straightforward, high value apps that touch a lot of people can demonstrate the power of Office 365 to stakeholders and users and give a wider programme of transformation some momentum.

Align your business app strategy to company and digital workplace strategy

A strategy for your business apps doesnt exist in a vacuum. It needs to align with your wider company strategy but also your more specific digital workplace or Office 365 strategy in order to deliver value, drive adoption and make sure it meets any necessary standards.

Chase widespread value

Some apps are likely to deliver more value than others. Despite it being tempting to design a specific app which might be very clever, it usually makes sense prioritising solutions which have the most widespread value. For example, apps that:

  • cover core or critical activities, for example relating to customers
  • impact a wide number of people
  • deliver considerable time or cost savings
  • enable other potential digital workplace solutions or apps
  • help to eliminate or reduce critical risks.
  • drive or enforce compliance

Build more complex apps in phases

Sometimes more critical apps can evolve into more complex systems, but it can be worth delivering these in phases so you can start to gain value from them and learn about their usage. Its not always advantageous to build too much complexity when youre starting out, and you may want to wrap this into your strategy.

Work iteratively and learn as you go

Most organisations find they learn a lot about how to get the best out of Office 365 once they see it deployed and being used. Taking a more iterative approach to app development can help you to spot opportunities but also get insights into how to develop tools and incorporate more user feedback. If you want to customise Microsoft Teams for an app, learning how Teams is already being used gives you an advantage.

Dont just recreate whats gone before

The digital workplace tools within Office 365 can help you to design completely new ways of doing things. If your app strategy is just redesigning processes in a slightly more efficient way using Office 365, you may be missing out on some exciting opportunities.

Its all about the apps!

Office 365 provides an exceptional platform to build compelling bespoke business apps to help your employees and your organisation. If youd like to talk about your business apps strategy for Office 365 then get in touch with us.

Webinar – Driving business productivity with Microsoft Teams and PowerApps

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

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Register now!

Microsoft Teams has become very popular with our customers and there is a lot of interest in getting the greatest possible value out of it. As companies begin to get to grips with the basic features, a natural next step is to integrate Teams with other systems and provide a seamless digital employee experience – the kind that really drives adoption.

Teams is well positioned to take advantage of integrations because it has a tabs area that can be used to embed other apps. There are apps for all of the Office 365 features like Stream and Power BI, but also popular non Microsoft products like Confluence and Asana.

Where there is no off-the-shelf solution, you can create bespoke apps using PowerApps and embed them within Teams. This could be something as simple as collecting information using a form, or a sophisticated piece of software.

In this webinar we will:

  • Show you how to add apps to Teams
  • Show you some examples of PowerApps embedded in Teams that drive business process
  • Answer your questions about how Teams can be extended with apps

Register now!

Wizdom acquired by LiveTiles

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Wizdom, top-rated intranet solution provider built on SharePoint and Office 365, has been acquired 100% by LiveTiles.

With the agreement the Wizdom team of 65 employees look forward to becoming part of LiveTiles globally and taking advantage of the positive synergies between the two companies that help organisations realise more value from their existing technology investments. This means providing customers and partners with a wider product offering, a better global support and even more innovative products which combine the full technology stack from two market-leading companies.

Wizdom and LiveTiles offer highly complementary products focused on providing customers with intelligent technology solutions. And with the deal, Wizdom is excited to be joining forces with the LiveTiles team and believe that both companies will be able to leverage their respective customer footprints, established partnerships and sales and marketing channels to drive rapid growth across both businesses.

Combined with a strong interest for LiveTiles existing AI capabilities from Wizdoms customer base, this will provide Wizdom with immediate cross-selling opportunities and a compelling product offering to attract new customers.

The deal between Wizdom and LiveTiles is expected to be fully completed in mid-February 2019.

About LiveTiles:
LiveTiles is a global software company headquartered in New York, with operations in Seattle, Tri-Cities (Washington State), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina, Rochester, London, Sligo, Amsterdam, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Geelong and Hobart. LiveTiles offers intelligent workplace software for the commercial, government and education markets, and is an award-winning Microsoft Partner. LiveTiles products comprise LiveTiles Intelligent Workplace, LiveTiles Design, LiveTiles Bots, LiveTiles Intelligence, LiveTiles for SAP Software, LiveTiles MX, LiveTiles Mosaic and Hyperfish. LiveTiles customers represent a diverse range of sectors and are spread throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Learn more about LiveTiles.

LiveTiles Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) announcement link.

 

The original article was published here

Video – Integrating Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to automate business processes

Posted on by John Scott

We recently helped drive business processes of an investment firm by integrating Microsoft Teams with SharePoint Online. Essentially we built an application based on Office 365 features that models their process of evaluating businesses that they are considering making an investment in.

The opportunities are tracked in SharePoint and SharePoint controls the creation of Teams – also populating the Teams with new channels and template documents. This helps the business to ensure that the correct process is followed when evaluating opportunities for investment.

If you are interested in getting help with Office 365 including Teams and SharePoint then get in touch

How an in-a-box intranet meets specific business requirements

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Intranets meet many different needs. An intranet helps to deliver Internal communications, content publishing, collaboration, support for customer services, onboarding, document management, HR self-service, learning, enterprise search, a front door to help employees navigate the wider digital workplace and more.

To a certain extent the needs around these different areas are similar from organisation to organisation, and subsequently intranets deployed in different organisations have similar capabilities. Its also why some of the core features of intranet in-a-box products like Wizdom are relatively similar for example in how news publishing is dealt with and is displayed.

When you have very specific requirements

The problem often comes when you want to meet the very specific requirements for your organisation. Perhaps you run your onboarding in a slightly different way to other companies or perhaps your project management methodology is unique to you? Perhaps you use a combination of different systems for one process or perhaps you have a creaking legacy system you built in-house which means employees complete tasks in a certain way?

Perhaps you have some very complex workflows and approvals for your content? Or perhaps you have a stubborn stakeholder who wants things done in a certain way? Maybe you need to have some unique branding on your intranet or different parts of your organisation do different things in different ways.

In most large or complex organisations, it is extremely likely that you will want to have some digital workplace or intranet feature that is unique to the way you operate.

Should you customise?

Sometimes when you need your intranet or digital workplace to deviate from the standard way of doing things, there is a perception that the intranet product wont  quite do exactly what you want. Thats when some organisations decide they need to customise a solution or even build their own to meet specific needs.

Customisation has some advantages in that you can meet your exact requirements, but it is expensive, means the implementation must be closely managed, has more risks and, crucially, means it is far harder to upgrade. In our view, it is better to buy than build. It also means you might not be able to take advantage of all the efficiency, usability and productivity advantages of an in-a-box product like Wizdom, especially when it is combined with a cloud platform like Office 365. For these reasons, many IT departments tend to avoid customisation if they can.

The result of avoiding customisation is that there can be tension when an IT department wants to implement a standard solution, and local stakeholders or groups of employees want to have highly customised solutions which meet their individual needs.

Sometimes is it possible for employees to change the way they work, but overall the best possible solution is when you have a highly flexible and configurable intranet and digital workplace which meets local or unique business requirements and avoids the negative associations of customisation. We often encounter perceptions that this cannot be done, but with the right product and approach, this is perfectly possible.

For example, a typical (and very powerful) combination of products is the use of Wizdom and Office 365 together. Together, were confident that they can solve the vast majority of very specific, individual intranet and digital workplace requirements.

Lets look at five ways this happens.

1. Range of features

One of the key strengths of combining Office 365 and Wizdom is the sheer breadth of capabilities and range of tools available for employees to use, meeting a variety of different needs and use cases across your organisation. In fact, its unlikely you will use all the functionality on offer, but these tools provide many options to provide a sophisticated digital workplace as new needs emerge.

For example, Office 365 alone has various options for messaging and collaboration for individuals, small teams, wider communities, project teams, those who want to collaborate on documents, and many more use cases.

Meanwhile Wizdom supports intranet publishing and internal communications for both your entire organisation and local departments. You can also establish a central policy library, manage events, provide access to learning resources, use a ticketing system for logging issues and more.  You really will be able to meet most of the requirements across your organisation.

2. Configuration of individual features

As well as the range of features available, each of the tools is also generally configurable to give as much flexibility as possible. For example, the range of different options in Wizdom allows you to build the intranet homepage you actually want with specific features and corporate branding, or to introduce the collaboration site that fully supports your project methodology.

Also, because there is the ability to introduce personalisation and content targeting, it means you can deliver targeted, relevant experiences for different audiences within your organisation, incorporating different sub-brands if necessary.

3. Wizdoms extensibility engine

We also know that there is always going to be some tweaking to standard functionality which users and organisations need and where products cannot meet every eventuality. Because of this, weve built Wizdom in such a way that it is possible to customise some elements of the product without impacting the long-term viability of the platform; you can still carry out upgrades.

While we believe the core tools of the platform will meet around 90 percent of user needs, Wizdoms extensibility engine means you can customise the last 10 percent you need and have a solution which exactly meets your requirements, but still safely evolve your digital workplace.

4. Integration with the wider digital workplace

Delivering a more integrated experience across different systems is a common direction of travel for advanced intranets and digital workplaces. This can involve a great deal of customisation, but at Wizdom we can easily integrate with the rest of the Office 365 suite, including Microsoft Teams and modern SharePoint sites. Your intranet becomes an integrated digital workplace experience.

5. Keeping up with emerging needs

There are always emerging needs within organisations caused by organisational changes, new services, the increased expectation of users and the release of new digital capabilities which are now commercially available.  Often intranet and digital workplace teams have requirements to meet these needs quickly, but find their intranet is not ready or able to do this.

One of the key advantages of Office 365 combined with an in a box product like Wizdom is that it can meet these emergent needs, either through the release of new tools within the Office 365 suite which can then be integrated seamlessly into your intranet, or through features within the intranet which have been introduced on the back of direct feedback from customers. This means your intranet is effectively up-to-date and future-proofed as an ever-expanding true digital workplace.

Meeting your requirements

Were confident that Wizdom, when combined with Office 365, can deliver most of the requirements of your business, even if they are highly specific to the way you work. You dont necessarily need to customise and if you do our extensibility engine means it can be done in a managed way.

If youve ever felt worried that an in-a-box product wont meet the very specific way your organisation works, then think again; it can be done.

The original article was published here

3 things you must consider when designing a mobile intranet

Posted on by Joe Perry

Delivering the corporate intranet on mobile devices is perhaps the most effective initiative you can take to increase intranet usage.

Not only will the intranet become omnipresent, always available to users in any situation. Also, youll make the intranet accessible for new employee groups that have not been able to fully benefit from the intranet before, such as frontline workers.

As an extra benefit, youll have new methods available, like mobile push notifications, to motivate staff to go to your intranet. However, designing a mobile intranet requires special considerations for the medium youll be delivering your service through. Here, well go through three central points you really should consider when adding your intranet to mobile devices.

 

1. Mobile app vs. responsive intranet

A responsive intranet can be viewed from different devices and screen sizes. A mobile app, on the other hand, is a separate application that is downloaded and installed on smartphones and tablets. Responsiveness is definitely good for usability. But, even though a responsive intranet has the advantage of being instantly available in mobile browsers, a mobile app, however, has at least seven important benefits:

 

A mobile app spares users from typing on a small screen

Typing the full URL of the intranet in a smartphones browser can be troublesome. Even if users take the initiative to save the intranet as a shortcut, its not ultra-intuitive to navigate to the intranet from a mobile browser. When users first have the mobile intranet app downloaded to their smartphone, they can find it effortlessly, just like theyre used to navigating to any other app on their smartphone. An act we are all trained so proficiently in, the behaviour it is automatic. Also, depending on your security settings, the app can spare employees typing in their intranet login every time they open the intranet on their phones, making it simple for users to open the intranet and start using it.

A mobile app can engage with push-notifications

App notifications are a proven tool for engagement. A mobile app tool can help lead your users to the intranet. Both for reminding employees that they have the intranet app there on their smartphone, and for calling direct attention to news or other important content.

 

A mobile app can offer offline access

Even though the world is very wired, mobile intranet users can come in situations where connection to the internet isnt stable. You might have staff working in emergency situations, on the ocean, or just in areas with a slow internet connection. With a mobile app, you can allow offline access to some content and functions and enable employees to report back from the frontline, from any place in the world.

 

A mobile app delivers a clean version of your intranet

A responsive intranet offers a one to one representation of the desktop intranet on mobile devices. While this has some advantages in terms of recognition for the employees who are very used to using the intranet on their desktop (and this might not be a large percentage of all employees), it most likely will cause confusion.

A mobile intranet should offer users content and navigation especially optimized for use on the go. As you can custom design both navigation and content for the mobile experience in an app, a mobile app allows for this.

 

A mobile app enables pages to load faster

Users really dont want to wait for pages to load. A study performed by Google found that longer page load time drastically increases the likelihood of a visitor bouncing from a mobile site.

 

If a mobile app is well designed, its remarkably faster performing on a mobile device than the responsive desktop version. Thereby, improving usability significantly.

 

A mobile app is more secure

Offering you intranet in an app, instead of in the mobile browser, will enable you to make the mobile intranet available through mobile device management (MDM). In this way, IT can fully secure the intranet content and, also, remove the app from particular phones e.g. in situations where an employee loses his or her phone.

 

Users fancy apps

Mobile apps are not just the future of mobile usage, its also very much the current trend. The app share of total mobile minutes lies between 80 and 94%, depending on country. This means, users spend the absolute vast amount of their time on mobile devices in mobile apps.

Delivering your mobile intranet as an app will make your intranet available in a way that users like to consume content and use tools on their smartphones.

2. Content and navigation

When you first designed your intranet, you probably considered scenarios for intranet usage and asked yourself how the intranet could help different groups of employees in their workday.

Its a good idea to repeat this exercise when you design your mobile intranet, as a mobile intranet can be used in whole new situations.

We see mobile intranets being used by field staffers during the workday, when people check their phones at home at night, when staff transport themselves to and from work using public transportation, during lunch, and even during a workday in the office alongside the desktop intranet, perhaps motivated by app notifications.

The needs for information and tools differ in these situations. For example, people generally like to check news when they commute. Field workers need tools readily available to either retrieve vital information, report from the field, or be social with their colleagues using social features and messaging.

You can probably add situations and needs to the list that are unique for the way employees in your organization will use a mobile intranet.

Understanding the circumstances in which different staff groups in your organization will use a mobile intranet and what they will need from the mobile app in these situations can help you design the optimal mobile app.

Not only the way the intranet is used is different for a mobile intranet. The phone as a medium has restrictions the desktop doesnt. In the context of a smartphone, people are limited by the small screen. Typing in long texts when reporting would be troublesome and timely, as would a heavy intranet navigation confronting users with many choices and levels of navigation.

With a simple navigation designed for the mobile experience, people can quickly retrieve the information and tools they need.

You can help users further by considering the trouble of using small smartphone keys. Offer a list of options or type-ahead for filling out forms from the mobile app and enable users to report back with images, video, and/or audio.

Considering and carefully designing the content, tools, and navigation of your mobile app is worth the effort.

3. Security

Delivering confidential content on employees private smartphones obviously composes a risk.

This risk can be almost eliminated by offering the mobile intranet as an app through mobile device management (MDM) on managed corporate smartphones and by asking users to log in every time they open the app. However, often strict security can affect usability negatively.

If users must log in to the intranet app every time they open it, it creates a barrier between users and the intranet. On the other hand, if employees can freely download the intranet as an app from Apple Store or Google Play on their private smartphones, they might feel the intranet is more present, fully integrated with all the other apps they use to live their lives.

An alternative, or supplement if you like, to strict security around the app availability, could be to restrict the supply of content in the mobile intranet. In this way, you can ensure highly confidential content is not accessible from the mobile intranet.

Its about finding that elusive balance between user friendliness and security, and, of course, remain in line with company policies.

The original article was published here

SharePoint page editing – Improving the experience for content publishers

Posted on by John Scott

SharePoint 2013 does not provide a great experience for content publishers out-of-the-box.

This is something that we need to address in nearly every intranet project we deliver.

There are two main approaches that can be taken:

  1. Add some custom editing elements that simplify the experience, but are hyper-focused on a few key editing tasks.
  2. Use a third party add-in to provide a better user experience across a broader set of features and content types.

 

Custom editing elements


Content publishers can click an onscreen element like this one.


The editor can then add information to the page by filling in a simple form.
This avoids any of the out-of-the-box SharePoint interfaces which can be confusing and overwhelming.

We have provided a demo video that shows an example page content editing task. See video below:

AdvantagesDisadvantages
  • Drastically improves the experience for content publishers
  • Reduces or completely removes the need for training
  • No on-going licence fees
  • Restricted to a small number of important areas (otherwise costs can quickly add up)
  • Requires additional budget to maintain and enhance these features over time

 

Third party add-ins

builder

There are many options when it comes to third party add ins for SharePoint.

Some are aimed at enhancing every aspect of SharePoint like Wizdom intranet-in-a-box.

Others are aimed at enhancing things like page editing and design. A good example of this type of product is ShortPoint.

Products like these still require some training for content editors, but offer an improved experience and greater flexibility when maintaining intranet content.

AdvantagesDisadvantages
  • Improves the experience for content publishers
  • Reduces the need for training
  • Has a wide ranging set of features (depending on the product)
  • On-going licence fees (often fairly significant ones)
  • You may be paying for features you dont need
  • Requires support from the product vendor or consultancy

 

Summary

Improving SharePoints content editing interfaces is not easy and comes at a cost regardless if you take the custom or prebuilt route.

Therefore, it is important to identify and prioritise the areas where you want to give a lot of control to content editors. Typically more options for ways and styles of publishing = greater cost.

By limiting the control given to content owners and making things as template driven as possible, you can keep costs more reasonable.

A positive side effect of a template driven approach is often a cleaner, more simplified experience for your intranets end users.

More recently, a significant way to improve the user and editor experience for SharePoint is to move to SharePoint Online as part of Office 365. SharePoint Online has a completely refreshed interface which makes things a lot easier for editors.

What’s the role of AI in the digital workplace now and in the future?

Posted on by Joe Perry

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has received a lot of attention in the media and now seems to be a feature in many digital products. This focus (and hype) has meant that many organisations, support functions, lines of business and teams are actively considering how to use AI and what their corresponding strategy should be. Of course, intranet and digital workplace teams will want to think about how they are going to use AI.

In some respects, the hype and noise about AI is a distraction, and can even be off-putting. However, once you take away the exaggerated claims, unpack the term a little and look to its genuine potential, we can see that AI will be making a real difference in the digital workplace in the very near future.

Unpacking AI

Its worth considering what AI actually means. You can take your pick from various definitions such as quite specific academic meanings; however when most of us use the term AI we think of computers, machines or robots carrying out actions that  mimic human intelligence, for example when they can learn to be more effective at solving problems, deliver insights or understand the more subtle nuances of human language.

This means that AI isnt actually one specific technology; its actually an umbrella term which could be applied to anything from natural language processing to machine learning to autonomous vehicles to even just some very smart algorithms.

Its also worth remembering that what we regard as AI today might not be regarded as AI tomorrow. For example, we might regard the improved ability of dictation software to automatically capture what we say as text as an example of artificial intelligence. But we might not regard Optical Character Recognition (OCR) where scanned documents are turned into text as AI now, although perhaps we would have done so in the past.

What technologies constitute AI is therefore quite subjective and can change. It also means that every product under the sun can claim to have AI, potentially reducing AI to a marketing label akin to a term like hand-made or organic.

Where are we with AI in the digital workplace?

As a rule, AI is still not that advanced in the everyday digital workplace. There are a few organisations who may be considering their approach and strategy to AI, but in reality, AI tends to be apparent in separate use cases or as a feature of different products.  As far as I am aware, there is nobody who can say AI is a constant and convincing thread through the standard digital workplace accessed by most employees.

Also, while there is something which still sounds quite futuristic about AI, actually most of the active use cases for it in the digital workplace are generally every day needs which we all face. For example, AI might provide suggestions for content youre interested in, help you to tag articles, provide suggestions for responses in online conversations or to anticipate the tasks you need to complete.

In particular, lets look at five areas where AI is having an impact on the digital workplace now and in the future.

1. Understanding and responding with natural language

Understanding, interpreting and responding to our natural speech is one of the most exciting areas of AI. Many of us have experienced the power of conversations with Siri or Alexa in the consumer world; thats rapidly coming to the digital workplace through chatbots that can help employees answer questions, find items, complete transactions and semi-automate processes.

For example, here at Content Formula weve worked with Microsofts language understanding service (LUIS) in helping to implement a chatbot at accountancy firm Haines Watts. The bot can be trained to understand more and more and learns as more employees converse with it.

While its still early days for workplace bots, their ability to understand and converse with us naturally will get more sophisticated quite rapidly. Anybody whos watched the jaw-dropping Google Demo of an AI assistant booking a hairdressing appointment over the phone, can see where we could be heading.

Digital workplace virtual assistants that help us with the more routine tasks may well become commonplace. There is also likely to be more voice activation involved, for example some companies are experimenting with an Alexa in meeting rooms to take requests.

2. Making sense out of data

AI in the digital workplace has a major role in trying to make sense of a lot of potentially disparate data from different systems. This has the power to give us insights into things we didnt know or didnt notice such as patterns in user behaviour or how to optimise the workplace to support better productivity.

Where the fields of data analytics and AI start and finish is difficult to ascertain, but this is an area where we are bound to see more growth as the analytical engines of different products become sharper and use machine learning to recognise patterns which we can act upon.

One element of the digital workplace where AI is likely to have an impact is the Internet of Things with more connected devices and sensors around the building providing data which can be turned into insights into workplace behaviour and design.

3. Extracting meaning from content

Another way AI is helping to make sense out of data is extracting meaning from content. Using natural language processing and machine learning means that more effective sentiment or text analysis can be applied to individual pages or even whole document libraries.

This is already a core feature of some products, but improved capabilities have a whole range of potential uses. These include improving search and findability, automatically tagging content, suggesting relationships between documents and items based on meaning, supportinga barometer of employee sentiment, identifying common issues coming from customers and many more besides.

There are also other highly targeted uses ranging from building model documents such as contracts, identifying fraud, producing automated synopses, spotting reputational risks and more.

4. Anticipating what you need

In the consumer world we are very used to powerful suggestion engines on Netflix or Amazon which seem to know exactly what our tastes are when viewing or buying suggestions. Powerful AI and a massive dataset have made these suggestions for our tastes remarkably accurate.

Suggested content or actions is a common feature on many digital workplace products and channels; from related items on an intranet page to Workplace by Facebook offering suggestions for groups to follow to Delve presenting the information youre likely to be interested in.

AI has the power to make these suggestion engines more powerful, anticipating what we need every day as we carry out different processes in the digital workplace. For example, the Wizdom intranet uses AI to suggest tags for content. saving time and effort for content owners. Imagine, this taken further with AI, suggesting everything we need to attend to, view and worry about at the start of the working day.

5. Learning to do things better

All of the above elements of AI assume some machine learning, so that processes improve, building on the cumulative data, inputs and preferences. AI in the digital workplace can only get better.

What about the future?

In this article weve tried to look at AI in the digital workplace today and what it might being in the near future. Of course, in the more distant future, the possibilities are endless. Personalised workplace robots? Maybe!  Some kind of weird-augmented-reality-thing that seems to read your mind? Who knows!

By its very definition AI will change, as the things that raise our eyebrows today become normalised tomorrow. But currently AI is an exciting prospect for the digital workplace which will have real world impact sooner than we think.

Wizdom version 6.33 highlights

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Wizdom version 6.33 brings a whole lot of new features and improvements. This video brings us the highlights including:

  • Changes to the news web parts (Corporate news and Noticeboard) in the SharePoint Modern Experience
  • Service Desk app has been enhanced for support agents and support managers.
  • The Projects module which is now called Workspaces to reflect that the module is suitable not just for projects but for lots of other collaboration scenarios such as communities, teams, departments etc.

How to get started with Wisdom on Modern SharePoint

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Wizdom has been quick to bring the new SharePoints Modern Experiences interface to its product. 

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