How Wizdom Intranet provides multiple options for customisation

SharePoint has a perception in the marketplace for being a complex application that can be time consuming and require internal expertise to deliver even basic requirements. With the introduction of SharePoint Modern experience and Wizdom’s updates to make it compatible with Modern, there are now many ways to deliver custom functionality on an intranet.

SharePoint Modern (or SharePoint Framework (SPFx), as it is known by developers), is the new way to develop on SharePoint and enables client-side development for building SharePoint experiences – facilitating easy integration with the SharePoint data, and providing support for open source tooling development. With SPFx only reaching General Availability in Feb 2017, the Modern experience is still not fully fledged but there’s a lot to like. And it’s all available on Wizdom too.

When developing on SharePoint, often best practice can be overlooked, and sometimes not even understood. When working on Office 365 best practice is extremely important – all it can take is one Microsoft update to SharePoint Online and your intranet can become completely unusable if custom code has been implemented in an incorrect manner.

This is where an off-the-shelf intranet, like Wizdom Intranet can help by providing a more structured and manageable way of deploying features, making use of components like Custom Modules and a unified REST API. Importantly, Wizdom doesn’t conflict with any custom developments you already have in place, and still allows you to develop on SharePoint using out of the box SharePoint way – creating custom JavaScript and creating page layouts.

Wizdom Custom Modules & Administration

installation_of_wizdom

When using the Wizdom app on a site collection (by the way, you can pick and choose which of your site collections you use Wizdom on and which you don’t), you are provided with a rich administration interface that makes it straightforward to use.

Wizdom provides over 50 modules and features that each have their own configurations settings via the app. These modules come with the ability to completely control the way your information is displayed to your users by way of display templates – easy to use HTML templates that require only a small amount of coding knowledge to change the look and feel of them completely.

Also built in to this app is a feature that allows you to create custom modules of your own. These modules are administered within the Wizdom application and loaded straight in to SharePoint for you. This gives you a centralised place to manage all of the custom code applied to your SharePoint site.

Wizdom API

Wizdom has many REST endpoints available for customer use. These endpoints allow you to not only manipulate the Wizdom application, but also information within your SharePoint environment. The APIs that Wizdom offer also make it easier for you to integrate your third party applications with your intranet by providing well documented and data rich endpoints that extend SharePoint’s out of the box ones.

Native to SharePoint

wizdom_sharepoint_add-in…and what’s more, Wizdom comes completely native to SharePoint! Wizdom uses the SharePoint Add-in Framework to richly integrate with SharePoint as well as the rest of Office 365: so when O365 is updated (and there was over 450 updates last year), those updates are immediately available to you on SharePoint without any necessary changes or upgrades to Wizdom.

 

Future proofing your intranet: how Wizdom Intranet can give you a head start

This month Office 365’s monthly commercial users hit a record 120 million, up from 100 million in April 2017. Microsoft are heavily investing in it’s product and infrastructure, and as such things are ever evolving and changing giving you new features every week. It was recently announced at Ignite 2017 that SharePoint will be rolling out Hub sites to compliment the new team and communication sites. These sites will be completely configurable and customisable via the SharePoint Framework. However, they aren’t seen to be replacing Publishing sites and will only be used primarily for basic knowledge sharing. This is where a product like Wizdom can be used to supplement an intranet and offer much more focused tools to enrich a users experience.

Wizdom is a product that sits natively on SharePoint and provides intranet owners a powerful toolkit that is constantly growing. This toolkit is fast moving and provides regular updates to coincide with new Microsoft features and tools. Below we’ll run through how we achieve this and some of the things that are coming up for Wizdom.

Wizdom upgrades

Wizdom has a built in upgrade module that makes rolling out updates to the core application extremely straightforward. The Wizdom product teams consists of over 50 people constantly working on the product and so far this year, there has been 16 updates available to our clients, offering new and exciting features such as the new notification toolbar, Wizdom Success Center, Service Desk Business App, mobile lightening pages, and many, many more pieces of functionality.

An upgrade doesn’t cause downtime on your intranet and will never cause feature or customisation interruption .

Office 365 and SharePoint updates

Lat year alone it was touted that Microsoft released upwards of 250 updates to Office 365 and SharePoint. With Wizdom being a native application, as soon as Microsoft make a change, that change will be available to you!

To ensure that you never have a problem with any of the updates that Microsoft roll out, Wizdom have access to preview and first release tenants to constantly check to make everything continues to work as expected. And if something doesn’t, we can quickly push out a new Wizdom upgrade before any change is made by Microsoft!

Wizdom’s roadmap

Wizdom itself being a product does have a product development roadmap. With the ever changing landscape that is Office 365, the Wizdom roadmap is constantly evolving, but key developments over the next 6 months will be:

  • Modern pages and webparts: SharePoint’s transition to modern pages is providing products like Wizdom with much more power and flexibility. Wizdom are working making all their webparts deploy-able on both modern and classic pages.
  • Microsoft Teams integration: Teams is a product that is extremely popular at the moment, and Wizdom are working on integration points in SharePoint to make information such as joined teams and documents available to all users.
  • Wizdom Success center: The Success center has been launched for 2 months now and has ever evolving content that helps ensure that your content editors have all of the information they need to make implementing Wizdom as easy as possible.
  • Multi geography support: With Microsoft recently announcing their upcoming support for mutli geo tenants, Wizdom are working hard to ensure that we will instantly be able to support this great new feature.
  • Cloud performance optimisation: Wizdom are constantly working to ensure that users are having lightening fast experiences when using their intranet.

Wizdom works both on premise and in the cloud – for more information, you can check our Intranet-in-a-box page.

Wizdom presents new features at Intra.NET Reloaded, London

Wizdom, leading provider of the highest rated intranet solution built on SharePoint and Office 365, partners with Intra.NET Reloaded, London, the leading event on Digital Workplace transformation in the United Kingdom, showing Wizdoms new features at the event taking place from November 27th to 28th.

Wizdom, who was recently named as Cool Vendor in the Digital Workplace by Gartner, is known for best in class enterprise intranet solutions built on SharePoint, Office 365 or SharePoint onprem. Comprising of over 50 amazing features Wizdom is designed to provide a complete platform for information sharing and collaboration based on the intranet as the core which enable companies to embrace digital workplace strategies.

At Intra.NET Reloaded, London, Wizdom will present its latest addition, the Wizdom Service Desk business application, which provides an intuitive ticketing system for internal operations. This enables employees to initiate and handle internal inquiries and concerns, such as office supply requests, IT issues, and all other employee queries from the intranet without the need to introduce another software platform.

Naturally, visitors will also get a demonstration of Wizdoms complete and feature rich intranet platform, an evergreen solution continuedly kept cutting-edge by Wizdoms own developers ensuring product updates and additions at frequencies not experienced elsewhere in the intranet software business.

Intra.NET Reloaded, London offers the opportunity to show the Wizdom solution as part of the Digital Workplace of the future.

We invite everyone to visit us and experience firsthand the industry merits our solution has earned and the extend of what Wizdom offers says John Wainer, CEO and Partner at Wizdom A/S. We are dedicated to providing the best intranet solution in the market based on input from our 300+ digital workplace implementations to date and the hard work of our own development team, and see Intra.NET Reloaded as a perfect venue to show this John Wainer ends.

Intra.NET Reloaded is the third of its kind in London aimed at bringing together communication, intranet and knowledge management experts in order to network, learn and discuss current trends and challenges in the industry.

The original article was published here.

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