Intranet projects just got even faster with Wizdoms Accelerate programme

In the past, some SharePoint intranet projects have been long, exhausting and resource-intensive.  We can remember a few which felt truly epic!

Thankfully, the triple whammy of Office 365, SharePoint intranet in-a-box solutions and a more iterative and agile approach to intranet projects means that far more rapid deployments are now possible, preferred and even expected.

And now Wizdom, our Danish partner behind the leading Sharepoint-in-a-box intranet, has just introduced the Accelerate programme, a guided and semi-automated way to provision an entire intranet site structure very rapidly.

An already relatively speedy Wizdom intranet project just got even quicker and easier.

What is the Wizdom Accelerate programme?

When we originally announced our partnership with Wizdom we said that we loved the solution because of the maturity of the product, its flexibility and its great ease of use.

Another reason we choose to partner with Wizdom is because of the companys strong commitment to continue to invest in the product in response to customer feedback.  Wizdom has a product roadmap which is full of innovative new features and capabilities and Accelerate is one of the latest modules to emerge.

Put simply, Accelerate allows us to provision a whole site structure very quickly for our customers. We can build all the central components you need including the homepage, a news centre, a central document library and more. We can also set up any relevant departmental sites and sub-sites you require, all with the right associated site templates.

And because each template already delivers all the functionality you need for each section of your intranet, using Accelerate means you end up with a fully provisioned site which is ready to start populating with content and data.

Using Accelerate means in one session you can potentially build an intranet which includes a homepage with all the features youd expect, corporate and local news with social features, an employee directory, departmental and divisional sites, a mega menu, a collection of links and more. Thats also an intranet thats optimised for mobile and can either be cloud-based or on premises.

Using Accelerate has some key advantages.

Allows for truly agile or semi-agile project delivery

Many IT functions and intranet project teams want to be able to develop their intranet using an agile methodology, or at least a semi-agile methodology. Accelerates instant provisioning capability saves hours of time, even days, for very complex sites. Essentially you can have an intranet built in less than an hour.

At last, heres an intranet product that isnt working against your IT delivery teams aspirations around agile development, but fits into the way your project team want to work.

In the bigger picture that also ensures a more rapid implementation, with all the benefit that entails including quicker ROI and avoiding the pitfalls of losing momentum often associated with big waterfall intranet projects.

Brings the intranet build closer to the business

Before Accelerate, building a site has been an activity for IT developers. Of course, how you structure an intranet and which associated template to use is a business decision rather than a technology one. However, when you hand the site build over to a developer to complete, there can be a degree of separation between that person and the team making those essential business decisions.

Accelerate moves the building process closer to the business. When we use Accelerate we’re right there in the room with the intranet team, completing the online forms which provision the new intranet. The build process is far more transparent.

Our information architect can get the direct feedback on any decisions that need to be made there and then and we can also tease out any issues that might arise. With the structure built in full visibility, the client will also consider things which they might only think of later, making the whole build process smoother. Overall, weve found using Accelerate is a much better way of working.

Reduces costs

Using Accelerate saves time by automating parts of the site building process. Naturally that means our customers do not have to pay for IT developer time previously spent building the intranet, individual site by individual site. The more complex the site, the more the potential saving.

See what content looks like

Another great feature of Accelerate is that it allows you to view content as it would appear on a site or subsite. You can download content packs which will show you what the different pages within parts of your newly provisioned intranet look like.

This is very useful if a team wants to visualise what a department site might look like and can help intranet teams make quick decisions about which templates to use. It also means there is less frustrating to-ing and fro-ing with SharePoint developers as intranet teams ponder their options.

Lets Accelerate!

We’re using the Accelerate programme with our clients and we’re already seeing the benefits. Naturally we like the time saved, but we also enjoy having intranet teams even more involved in the building stage. The process helps them make essential decisions about site structures and makes the new intranet more tangible.

And our clients like the reduced cost, the speed of implementation and the fact that after just one meeting they have an intranet they can start to add content to. That accelerates the intranet project and means everybody is happy.

 

Also please watch a video about Wizdom accelerate from Flemming Goldbach (Head of product development at Wizdom)