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A win for our client at the 2018 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards!

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

The Step Two Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards are global awards that recognise outstanding contributions to the fields of intranets and digital workplaces. We’re super proud to have won an award this year for our work on Moving Made Easy.

This is what Step Two had to say in their summary of the Moving Made Easy entry:

Moving Made Easy: Using Office 365 for core business processes

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Small property company Moving Made Easy has rebuilt its core systems using Office 365, resulting in a new custom-built digital workplace. The new system covers every part of their selling process from logging customer and property details, through to capturing details of the sales process to generating marketing documents. Power BI has been used to deliver an extensive set of management dashboards.

The new system is already supporting enhanced decision-making, delivering significant time savings, supporting a positive shift in culture and providing a springboard for the evolution of the company.

Why this won a Silver award

  • Its great to see Office 365 used creatively to rebuild core business processes and to be at the centre of the way the organisation works and interacts with clients.
  • There are significant time savings which have a considerable impact on a small company
  • The digital workplace is already contributing to a change to a more proactive and learning- centric culture.
  • The extensive use of Power BI to build management dashboards and expose sales data has already helped in decision-making and focusing sales teams.
  • We admire the commitment to using the digital workplace as an enabler to move the business forward, from driving further efficiencies to client service innovation, there is already an ambitious roadmap planned.

Take a look at the Moving Made Easy case study on our website.

The above excerpt was taken from the Step Two summary of the MME entry.

How to publish different language versions of an article on Wizdom

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Wizdom have recently released Wizdom language variations. Watch this short video to see from the back end how easy it is for an editor to publish a news article on Wizdom. In this video you also see how easy it is to create multiple language versions of the same article and target them to different locations using Wizdom’s targeting functionality.

Wizdom sponsors Gartner Digital Workplace Summit, London

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Wizdom, top-rated intranet solution provider built on SharePoint and Office 365, is a sponsor at the upcoming Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in London. Designed for Business architecture professionals and leaders within Digital Workplace, IT and Business applications, the Summit will take place at the Park Plaza Westminster on September 24th-25th.

According to Gartner employee engagement within an organization is more prevalent than ever as a driver of business performance. And if companies fail to adopt a digital workplace strategy they will fall behind. With the event Gartner aims at enabling visitors to learn new, more effective ways of working using technology and techniques in order to raise employee engagement and consumer orientated styles that help make the digital workplace a success.

For Wizdom the Gartner event is the perfect venue place for showcasing how to leverage the challenges of implementing a successful digital workplace using new technology. Wizdoms product accolades and awards are a testament to the quality of the companys evergreen intranet product which has also just been released for Microsofts Modern technology and with Wizdoms Mobile app included.

Were looking very much forward to participating as sponsors for the Digital Workplace Summit. We know we have a market leading product to help companies along their path to digital transformation and are excited to share our insights and connect with visitors and the Gartner network during the summit says John Wainer, CEO at Wizdom.

The original article was published here

Five key takeaways from digital workplace projects

Posted on by John Scott

One of the brilliant things about working at Content Formula is you can get involved with clients who are innovating and experimenting with the digital workplace. Even when implementations are more straightforward, theres often a fresh perspective or a new twist somewhere in the project. Sometimes you experience something new, while at other times you get fresh insight into things you already knew. There is always an opportunity to learn.

Over the past couple of years so weve been doing a lot of work with Wizdom intranets, building custom digital workplaces in Office 365 and SharePoint, implementing Microsoft Teams and deploying chatbots. Weve been busy! Here are five key lessons and takeaways from some of our projects.

1. You need to train your bot

Weve been very proud of our work at UK accountancy firm, Haines Watts. We helped the team introduce a new custom-built intranet based on Office 365, where all the content is tagged with controlled keywords. Our latest project has been to introduce a new chatbot named after the firms founder, Cyril  Watts. Employees can access Cyril via every intranet page and through Skype for Business. They can ask it key operational questions, to find information, and even discover a fact or two about the company.

One thing we have learnt is that you need to spend time to train your chatbot. Because the bot uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve performance, the more you talk to it, the more phrases it understands. We worked with the team at Haines Watts to train Cyril to respond to the natural language phrases used by employees. It was important to get Cyrils understanding up to a sufficient level, so that employees can see the value in using the bot, and drive adoption so Cyril keeps on improving. Training your bot is a critical step in any chatbot project.

2. Always plan for the unknown

A key tenet of project management is always to plan for the unknown, for example ensuring you have a little contingency in the budget and flexibility in your timeline.  Weve found that to be true for digital workplace projects.  With Office 365 such a reliable platform and with a mature, stable platform like Wizdom, its always tempting to assume everything will work like clockwork. And, to be honest, on the technology side of things, theres rarely an issue. But digital workplaces and intranets can be complex and sometimes theres an issue thats hard to spot until youre knee deep in the project.

For example, we recently worked with one client to upload policy information into a central policy library. But the metadata on the documents meant that we had make some modest development changes to make the content migration work.  Similarly when we worked with Moving Made Easy to help them build  their complex digital workplace, we needed to add additional elements to the design to ensure we ended up with the best possible solution.  Luckily both clients made provision for changes and we were able to deliver additional but critical enhancements without troubling budgets and timelines.

3. Carry out a soft launch

In the past there has always been an emphasis on making a big splash when you launch your intranet and digital workplace. And while its great to make some noise, in recent years there has been a move away from big bang releases to more iterative approaches.

I would urge clients to consider a soft launch now. Its just a more intelligent way to launch a digital workplace. We recently worked with UK iconic fashion accessory brand Mulberry and the intranet was initially launched to a much smaller set of users. Seeing the soft launch go smoothly gave confidence to key stakeholders and gave extra time for content owners to finalise their sites.  It also gave us very valuable feedback from users and on the back of this we made some tweaks and added a couple of new features which really made a difference.  The soft launch also resulted in a ready set of ambassadors whom were more likely to recommend using the intranet to their peers. The result was a better intranet and a head start on adoption.

4. Use offline channels for promotion

Because were producing digital workplaces we tend to think of digital channels as the best option to promote new sites and drive adoption. Were also setting a good example by exhibiting the type of digital behaviour were advocating.

Of course, you must promote digitally, but weve learnt along the way that offline channels can be the best way to promote a digital workplace.  For example, when we implemented a new intranet at global technology company Johnson Matthey, the intranet team carried out a highly effective roadshow to promote the intranet in places like China and the US.

Employees get bombarded with emails and information, and it s easy for them to get message blindness. Having a stand in the staff restaurant which tells you about the benefits of the new intranet can sometimes have more impact and drive awareness and adoption.

5. Always do your research

Getting a good understanding of how employees use the digital workplace, what their pain points are and how they work is essential to produce a successful intranet or digital workplace. You must spend time interviewing users, running workshops, observing working patterns and running surveys. Every single project Ive been involved in has always reminded of the importance of this.  There are usually some very specific points uncovered in interviews with users and stakeholders which lead to a key detail in how we design the solution.

In virtually all our projects at Content Formula we run a thorough discovery process where we carry out a lot of interviews, crunch the data and gain some insights. This has two additional benefits to driving good requirements. Firstly, it creates trust and engagement with users who feel they are being listened to, and which can directly impact adoption after launch. Secondly, having data can silence uninformed stakeholders who might want to make design decisions based on their assumptions. Again, Im always glad weve undertaken a thorough period of user and stakeholder research.

Learn with us!

As we go forward with Office 365 and the digital workplace therell be more to learn in the coming months. If youve planning a Office 365, intranet or SharePoint project, why not get in touch and benefit from our extensive experience? There may be opportunities to learn together and try out new approaches. The futures looking exciting in the digital workplace!

Wizdom’s learning management system – useful addition to your Intranet

Posted on by John Scott

Wizdom’s course management module helps companies to manage activities such as training courses and company events in a streamlined and effective manner.

This training & event management module covers every major function in the event planning life cycle and supports processes behind training courses and events. The application creates an easy-to-understand overview of all courses and events, and manages registrations, de-registrations, waiting lists, and the communication before and after events and courses. This module is flexible and can be configured to manage many different types of activities e.g. lectures at a university or college.

Filterable and searchable overview of scheduled courses and events.

A high-level overview of all courses gives you a quick and easy way to identify relevant activities. You can rapidly narrow down search results using powerful filters.

The user can also search for a course, share with a colleague and mark a course as a favourite.

lms_wizdom_trainingeventmanagement

Smooth sign-up experience

When you click on a course from the overview page, youre taken to the details page for the course. Users are met by attractive and engaging pages featuring course or event descriptions and information. You can sign up with only few clicks.

The detail page shows all needed information for a user to decide to signup, be added to waiting list, signup others or cancel signup. After the signup, a confirmation email is send to the user together with a calendar invitation.

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Intuitive interface to create and manage events and courses

Course and event administrators can quickly create a new courses and/or edit existing event and manage attendee lists.

There are defined course types (event, online course, course), metadata (e.g. start date, end date, deadline, description, location, etc) and roles (e.g. relevant for, mandatory, visible for, waiting list, etc) are available in the module for an administrator to use or change if required. An administrator can also customise the e-mail notification templates.

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Seven essential elements of a global intranet project

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

One of the most valuable aspects of a great intranet is that it allows employees to come together in a single place to communicate and collaborate. This has particular value in global organisations, where employees work in scattered locations across multiple time zones. A global intranet brings employees together and feel more like one company.

Projects to establish a single intranet in large, global organisations can be challenging. The logistics of dealing with a large group of distributed employees, the sheer amount of content on the intranet and potentially merging existing local intranets into one global platform is not always straightforward. And while using a product like Wizdom is much quicker than building a custom platform, projects can still take a long time once you factor in planning, research, testing, content migration and more.

At the recent Wizdom Conference in Copenhagen we had some strong case studies of global intranet projects from companies such as Ørsted, Ramboll and GEA. Here are some of our thoughts on the essential elements of a successful global intranet project.

1. Do your research

Global intranet projects will involve a large number of users and stakeholders, not only from different business divisions but also from locations around the world. Those involved must reflect the diversity of a global workforce with different types of employees in various roles, including those working in offices, production plants and frontline roles.

A successful intranet is designed around a thorough understanding of employees and their needs. Because of the diversity of the workforce who will be using your intranet, it is critical to spend time finding out about different working patterns, needs, pain points and perspectives. This can only be achieved through an extensive discovery and user research period that covers all your different groups of users.

There are multiple techniques to carry out effective research including interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, usability testing, developing personas and more, but it is always worth spending the time and effort. User research also creates buy-in from employees who feel they are being listened to and see that their needs are being considered for the new intranet.

2. Create a vision that everyone can buy into

With so many different stakeholders, inevitably there will be many differing ideas and opinions on what the new intranet should do and deliver. Having a strong vision for the new intranet that everybody can buy into allows all involved to work towards the same end goal. It also helps gets users and stakeholders excited about the project.

At the Wizdom Conference, we heard how Ramboll developed a new vision for the global intranet to be an integrated digital environment, Digital Workspace, that allows employees to communicate, collaborate and deliver excellence whenever and where they may be working. Communicating the vision helped the wider team to deliver a consistent message to users and stakeholders, as well as establish clarity and focus.

3. Work on getting the governance right upfront

Governance is a wide topic covering the various structures, polices, roles, rules and processes to make sure the intranet delivers value and runs efficiently on a day-to-day basis. Establishing governance up-front (and making sure everyone buys into it) will allow your intranet to develop in a more sustainable and successful way, and ensure you have high quality content. The need for robust governance is particularly acute in global intranet projects so it can stop local teams going off and doing their own thing and undermining the high quality of your intranet.

For example, at GEA the team established various different roles with associated responsibilities to provide clarity over intranet, news and content ownership. These included portal owners, task or content owners, local news creators, global news editors, intranet owners and IT.

4. Use personalization to balance global and local content

One of the key capabilities of a modern intranet is to deliver personalized content which is targeted to the individual employees based on their profile. A global intranet should know some details about the person who is viewing the content and then deliver news and pages based on attributes such as the location that person is based, the division or function they work in, the language they speak or their level of seniority. This local content should appear seamlessly together with global content to ensure the intranet is relevant and useful to every employee.

Getting the balance between global and local content is not always easy and requires ensuring all profile data (usually sourced from your HR system and synchronised with Active Directory data) is correct. Teams must also work with local content owners to ensure they produce relevant content, and also deal with the logistics of multi-language content.

5. Focus on content and its findability

An intranet is only as good as its content, and a new intranet project provides the opportunity to make sure content is useful, relevant, well-written, accurate and up-to-date. And of course, getting the content right also means making sure it is easily findable. In global intranet projects two important practices help with these elements.

It is important not to just migrate your existing content. Instead spend time to identify the content that is valuable and rewrite if it necessary. For example, Ørsted used analytics and standard criteria to identify which content should be migrated, reviewed or deleted. If youre migrating content from multiple existing local intranets, its a must to review it carefully.

The second key practice is to develop a global information architecture (navigation) which is based around the way employees think and work rather than organisational structures. The only reliable way to achieve this is to work with users and carry out extensive testing, a practice that both Ørsted and GEA followed to produce intuitive, task-based information architectures that a global workforce understands.

6. Establish a realistic roadmap for launch that also involves change management

Its essential to have a realistic roadmap for the launch of your global intranet. Global intranet launches are often done across multiple phases, either because the central team is too small to fully support a single big bang global roll-out, or because different features and capabilities are being introduced more gradually. At Ramboll the team released several core components of the digital workspace before the full intranet launch and continue to release new features.

Intranets also need ongoing change management efforts to help content owners and users get the best out of the platform. For global intranets it is often best to physically visit some of your key locations to help with launch. For example, at GEA the team carried out a post-launch engagement roadshow covering editor training, feedback sessions, promotional activity and more.

7. Perseverance is key

Because of the complexity and length of a global intranet project, there are going to be times when things dont run so smoothly or take much longer than expected. Project teams running global intranet projects need perseverance and patience.

At the conference we heard first-hand accounts of some of the challenges including one company who had to work at the same time as a major corporate transformation exercise which the new intranet would help support. But the project team had to keep the transformation plans secret, which was very difficult when you are working with hundreds of users to shape the new intranet!

Of course, once you get to the launch of your global intranet and get great feedback from users, it always feels worth all the efforts that youve made!

Global intranets are always worth the effort

Global intranet projects take time but theyre always worth the effort. They provide a fantastic channel to help keep employees informed, support them in their working day and connect with colleagues from all over the world. As well as driving engagement and efficiency, they also provide a springboard to develop global digital workplaces. Using many of the elements above will help teams to deliver highly successful global intranets.

The original article was published here

Building a policy library that employees actually want to use!

Posted on by John Scott

We now offer a policy management software for sharepoint called Xoralia

Xoralia policy management software helps you push out and track mandatory policies in a simple, intuitive interface.

Find out about Xoralia ›


One of the key use cases for an intranet is providing a centrally- controlled library for important official documents, where all employees can access the very latest policies, procedures and forms, knowing that they are accurate and up-to-date.

Typical examples might be the HR manual, the social media policy, risk management procedures or contract templates to use with clients.

A good policy library not only provides easy access for employees, but also supports content owners in ensuring only the very latest versions of documents are accessible.

While perhaps the policy library isnt the most exciting aspect of an intranet it is one of the most valuable! All too often these central official documents get stored on emails or lost on the file network. It can be incredibly frustrating for employees to have to trawl their inbox to find the right document or having to call Nadine in HR only to find that she has just gone on holiday.

It can also be risky if you use out-of-date documents or apply policies which may have just recently changed, for example, due to GDPR. Sometimes, for compliance purposes, organisations must also show they have a good way to control the risk of employees accessing and actioning out-of-date policies.

The Institute of Cancer Researchs Policy Library

One piece of work which we are particularly proud of is the creation of a custom policy library for the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). This was part of a wider project to create a new SharePoint intranet.

The ICR, based in London, is one of the worlds most influential cancer research institutes. As a research establishment and a charity with an exemplary reputation, it is critical that the organisation and its employees operate in certain ways and follow various procedures, both for compliance purposes and to maintain its own high standards. Therefore, having a central library for policies, procedures and formal guidance documents was a priority for the intranet team.

The previous library, the Approved Document Library (ADL), was not doing its job. An audit of content found that the majority of documents were not meeting information governance requirements. Employees found it hard to find the documents they needed, and content owners found it very difficult to post the latest versions. The overall user experience was clunky and there was a lack of confidence in the tool. In short, it was not fit-for-purpose.

Working closely with the intranet team and users at ICR, Content Formula was able to scope, design, build, test and launch a new Policy Library that employees actually want to use. The library is based on SharePoint 2013 and has been built from scratch.

By focusing on the needs of both users and policy owners, and ensuring good findabilty, content management and a strong user experience, usage of the new library has increased by 48% compared to the old system. Its also a library where the content meets the ICRs compliance and information governance requirements.

Some of the key features are described below:

Providing easy access to policies for all employees

All employees have access to the new library via the global navigation on the intranet. Its very easy for employees to find. Its also called the Policy Library rather than the confusing ADL a name which new staff wouldnt necessarily associate with official policy and guidance.

Providing a great user experience

The policy library presents a smart, clean and modern interface with a number of intuitively-labelled categories and a prominent search box. The attractive and easy-to-use design has been critical in establishing trust with users and driving adoption of the tool.

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The policies themselves are presented in ways which makes them easier to digest. We know that policy documents can end up being lengthy and wordy and sometimes employees just need to find one piece of information contained within the document.

Large fonts for headlines and maximum characters per line ensure that documents are easier to scan, while users can jump to different sections through a hover-over facility. In addition, selected information from the cover sheet is presented to the left of the document with an option to see all this information.

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Strong findability

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There is also very strong findability baked into the policy library. Each policy has a main category and then a sub-category which are clearly displayed. There are limits on the number of categories which can be set to avoid confusion for users. A very clear search interface also displays all the relevant hits under each main category.

When accessing a policy there is also the ability to view related policies which share the same sub-category, and also view custom links to related content such as FAQs which the policy owner thinks relevant. This allows an employee to view important content about the use of the policy.

Centred around users

We also added another couple of features based around how employees actually use policies. A prominent Save button exports a version of the document in Word which also preserves much of the attractive styling of the online version, while a Print button prints out the policy for convenience.

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Making life easier for policy owners

One of the issues with the previous library was it was hard for policy owners to use. The new library removes many barriers for policy owners and includes:

  • The ability to have different owners and approvers for different policies – different teams throughout ICR can maintain their own sections of the library
  • Allows for a different approval process for minor edits and major edits a highly practical detail which means more senior staff dont need to approve elements such as corrections to typos
  • Allows editors to add links to FAQs and other useful context
  • Sends out automated reminders when policies are due to expire
  • Has full version control and highlights differences between versions of documents if required
  • Can do reporting on links.

Having these features has helped policy owners to keep their own policies up to date.

Need a great policy library? Get in touch!

Every organisation needs a central place where employees can access and find official documents and forms. In some sectors a strong policy library is critical. We created an excellent library at ICR which has driven user adoption, helped business policy owners and satisfied compliance requirements. We can do the same for you! If you need a robust but also highly usable policy library then dont hesitate to get in touch.

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SharePoint 2010 end of life is a great opportunity for intranet managers

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

The managers and teams who run intranets are critical to intranet success. In our experience, behind every super intranet, youll find a set of intranet super heroes who are going beyond the call of duty to increase collaboration, drive communication and help employees get thing done!

Many IT teams will be considering options and planning with a budget to move to supported environments. There are some who will choose to accept the risks and plow ahead with other priorities. For the Intranet manager still bound to 2010, the opportunities are great and the time to act is now.

Are there still many people using older versions?

In 2017 the SharePoint and Office 365 Industry Survey by Sharegate, Hyperfish and Nintex, looked at the SharePoint versions deployed in around 450 of their customers. The results show a strong growth in the deployment of SharePoint Online (167% from 2016 to 2017). In addition, they also indicate that there are still a lot of people on older versions of SharePoint.

These numbers are similar to other surveys I have seen and are certainly in line with what we experience among many of our customers, particularly the larger ones.

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What are the risks of running unsupported SharePoint?

In some cases, the risk of running on unsupported software is acceptable. If youre not changing anything and not connected to anything; that may expose you to new security risks, then it may be acceptable to delay an update.

You should however, make management aware that there are risks and certainly costs associated with running unsupported environments.

But if we intend to be up-to date, what then?

If updates are on the agenda, then there are opportunities. For a start, this is the chance to consider whether you want to be cloud based, on premise or hybrid for the next few years. Whatever you choose, you can consider several different solutions.

The lift and shift

You can upgrade what you have, although this isnt always as easy at it sounds. In this case, youre likely to need the help of third party tools to reduce the pain. The benefit of this solution is the business doesnt really get involved beyond checking their sites have moved correctly. You get what you have, warts and all.

The spring clean

Before you carry out your lift and shift, you look long and hard at your environment and decide what you can throw away. This usually involves quite a lot of business engagement and organization, but its a great way to get rid of out of date and ownerless material.

The fresh start

You build everything new and migrate what you need into a nice new environment. This gives the opportunity to make use of some of the great new features and possibilities. Intranet projects dont have to be the monsters we had a few years ago, its getting easier to get real business value of the box.

The flagship and scrapyard approach

Just like the fresh start, you want to build some new things and get the most out of the tools for your business, but that doesnt mean that you need to build everything new. Its fine to build a few fantastic examples that people want to be part of and are motivated to use, while in parallel freezing new requests in your old environment. However, its not always a crime to keep the information in the older systems for just a bit longer. As always Intranet managers need to:

  • Deliver value
  • Balance budgets
  • Reduce risk
  • Reduce business effort and find the right pace for your organization

… and if you get the chance; transform the organization just a bit at a time.

Is this the opportunity to take the next step to the employee engagement you always dreamed of?

It could be… and maybe your IT team is already helping to make the business case for the investment on your behalf. If they are planning to upgrade the old system, you may be able to cooperate and get more out of 2019 than you thought. Whatever you choose to do, youll need to get your budget application sorted out this year… time for a coffee with the CIO?

The original article was published here

Why an intranet helps support Office 365 governance

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

How an intranet can help with Office 365 governance

Office 365, SharePoint and intranet governance are big topics that weve previously featured in this blog. Effective governance is essential for the success of your platform and covers many areas including:

  • senior sponsorship and decision making
  • technical standards
  • data management
  • the content lifecycle
  • legal and regulatory considerations
  • design and branding
  • and more!

Governance of the use of tools

One aspect of Office 365 governance which many digital workplace teams are currently grappling is with around the use of different tools within the enterprise. In any given organisation there are a plethora of applications in use, with:

  • some centrally supported and encouraged
  • some owned within specific departments and lines of business and not centrally supported
  • tools which are actively discouraged because they provide less value, are costly duplicates of tools already in use or are risky (Shadow IT)

Office 365s ever-expanding library of tools, applications and capabilities provides one of the best strategies to cut down on wasteful and risky shadow IT because it provides effective alternatives to those in use. It also helps replace ancient legacy applications. You cant tell users to stop using a system unless there is a decent official alternative. If you want to reduce the use of Dropbox, Whats App and the creaking custom-built telephone book then One Drive, MS Teams, Skype for Business and Delve are the way to go.

However, the plethora of Office 365 tools can also lead to another dilemma for digital workplace teams. Often the pace of new tools being added is faster than the ability for central teams to properly evaluate use, launch them and then carry out effective training and support. And some Office 365 tools when released in beta need time to mature before they are truly enterprise-ready. Therefore, a key Office 365 governance issue is deciding on which tools to roll out to users and support, and which ones to lock down.

In our experience Office 365 governance is best approached with carrots rather than sticks. Creating positive and valuable experiences for the tools that you want employees to use is the best way to advance a set of centrally-supported tools. Then you need to do far less work on the discouragement or locking down of the tools you dont want people to use.

The intranet can help!

An excellent way to drive use of certain types of tools is through a SharePoint intranet which effectively acts as a gateway and experience layer lying on top of the Office 365 tool suite. Using an intranet helps to:

  • Drive a better experience, creating positive and valuable experiences of tools such as MS Teams which underpins successful usage
  • Integrates tools into the flow of work: brings the use of tools into the flow of work so they become the natural applications to use
  • Makes some tools easier to access and some less so, encouraging use and reminding employees about the tools they should be using
  • Helps with support and training by highlighting good use and providing support on how to use these tools
  • Support an approach to experiment with tools which have not yet been rolled out fully, supporting a framework to experiment and valuate new Office 365 tools

Lets look at each of these aspects in more detail.

A better experience

A good user experience is not generally regarded as a governance tactic, but it will have more impact than creating a policy document. Ultimately, outside the use of Outlook and the core Office suite, the use of most of the Office 365 suite is not mandatory, and therefore you have to persuade employees to use your preferred tool rather than another.

Sometimes an intranet, particularly a SharePoint-based product like Wizdom, presents a superior interface to the Office 365 tools, and encourages use. Dont underestimate the importance of a nice look and feel in driving adoption and underpinning governance.

Integrates tools into the flow of work

Intranets have evolved into digital workplaces, acting as gateway into the wider suite of tools, including those from Office 365. An intranet can integrate data and content from different Office 365 tools and provide access to them through dashboards, workspaces and profiles, helping to make these applications the tools of choice.

For example, a Yammer feed in an intranet workspace with all your community members makes that the natural tool to use for community discussions. If Skype for Business is integrated into your employee directory, employees may use that tool to message the colleague theyve just looked up. And with AD integration, single sign-on also removes a barrier to using these tools. Integrating the core Office 365 tools with your intranet directly supports your governance model.

Make some tools easy to access and others less so

Above integrating preferred tools, there are other ways an intranet can make some applications easier to access and others less so. These include:

  • Providing access to selected tools via your global navigation
  • Providing favourite links to applications on the homepage, perhaps using prominent icons
  • Creating a service catalogue with supported tools (and sometimes allowing users to add to their own favourite links from here)
  • Providing feeds from different tools or lists of different sites relating to tools from your own homepage e.g. a list of Team Sites an employee is a member of, a Yammer feed etc.
  • Providing landing pages with a list of all the sites a person is a member of. For example, we recently integrated a page for a client where an employee can find all the Teams they are a member of.
  • Providing a form to request a new team space, site, group or community

All of the above heavily encourage use of preferred tools. Excluding the tools in the Office 365 suite which are not yet rolled out will help to limit their use.

Helping with support and training

Encouraging the use of preferred Office 365 tools is also supported by providing training and support resources via the intranet. For example, you could have a what to use when matrix which indicates the optimum digital tool or channel to use for which scenarios.

You can also have specific training resources including how to guides and videos, and even support communities which include intranet teams, site administrators, IT helpdesk and knowledgeable users. Here people can ask questions and swap tips. Again, this reinforces the use of the right tools to dissuade users from using alternatives.

Drive an approach to experiment with tools

While you are likely to want to lockdown some of Office 365, you may also want to encourage some experimentation or pilots with newer tools to help you evaluate their use before they get fully rolled out to the company. This also helps you to allow early adopters and mavericks to use tools they are keen to try, but in a more controlled environment.

Sometimes it pays to formalise an approach to piloting new tools on the Office 365 roadmap and bake that into your governance model. The intranet can help with this approach. For example, you may have a community which pilots tools and you may use the intranet to give them access the tool and collate their feedback. Of course, once a tool becomes fully supported you can then open this up to be a full support community with the appropriate support resources also available.

Use carrots, not sticks

Controlling the use of Office 365 tools is a challenge and it needs governance. We believe the carrot approach to encourage use of the tools you want employees to use is the best approach. Telling employees that they cannot use a tool because it is not yet supported does not always go down well.

An intranet can really help with the carrot approach by integrating tools so that they have value and also providing the right support. Office 365 is a fantastic and exciting platform, and a SharePoint intranet complements it perfectly.

Wizdom Conference 2018 – Full event video

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

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