Webinar video: How to bring your intranet into MS Teams

Creating the ONE corporate dashboard in MS Teams to navigate the digital workplace

Simplicity is a basic principle in UX, which is why weve created the one corporate dashboard in MS Teams, that enables you to navigate your digital workplace with ease. Application overload is becoming more prevalent within todays digital landscape. Keeping ahead of the curve is becoming increasingly difficult. By having one dashboard where you access all your applications, we are alleviating major company pains in the area of application overload.

A recent study showed that:

  • The average worker flips between apps as frequently as 10 times per hour.
  • Among 2,000 workers from the US, UK, and Australia 69% reported wasting as much as 32 days a year navigating between apps.

As a hub for teamwork in Office 365, MS Teams is Microsofts solution for bringing the stack of productivity tools together to users in a single application. What we do is help bring your intranet into MS Teams.

In this webinar we showed how you can set up MS Teams to support this goal.

Learn how to:

  • Prevent employees from working in silos in individual teams within MS Teams.
  • Reach employees with corporate news and messaging in the MS Teams application.
  • Give users the possibility to handle work tasks requested by third party line-of-business applications inside of the MS Teams application.
  • Bring together notifications from different applications and present them intelligently to users in MS Teams.
  • Help users intuitively create content, news, and workspaces that comply to company standards.

How LiveTiless AI-driven Office 365 profile solution adds value to your intranet

The LiveTiles acquisition of Wizdom extended the range of digital workplace applications available for Wizdom customers. One of the most exciting of these is an AI-driven tool (formerly known as Hyperfish) that encourages users to populate Active Directory (AD) and employee profile data. This is also available for separate purchase so all intranet managers can benefit. Having complete and accurate employee profile data is a must have for a great digital workplace but has traditionally been a challenge, and this solution is designed to help.

In a nutshell the product works by searching through your AD data, identifying the gaps and then messaging each individual employee with what they need to do to complete it. It effectively crowdsources your AD data through a chatbot, an easy interface nd a little gentle gamification with percentage bars showing levels of completion. Meanwhile administrators have control over what information is needed, can set approvals and can report in detail on progress.  These nudges can prove highly effective with some clients reporting up to a 300% improvement in terms of profile completion within days of implementation.

If youre an intranet manager any tool that improves Office 365 profile completion can really improve your intranet in several different ways, some of which are explored below.

1. It powers your employee directory and people search

One main reason employee come to intranets is to access employee directory information and search for people. Connecting with colleagues, finding contact information and collaboration is at the heart of the many organisational process so you really want the intranet to deliver a great employee directory and strong findability around people.

However, unfortunately most employee directories come riddled with gaps in some cases the directory is complete broken!  There tends to be more gaps in the data where you are relying on employees to supply the information; this can include staff photos, some contact details, skills information and more. System-generated information from your HR system that is replicated in AD tends to be more complete.

By using AI to crowdsource this data you can effectively power an essential intranet staple and deliver a superior directory and people search that will be heavily used by employees.  In turn other benefits such as stronger collaboration, greater efficiency and better intranet adoption should flow.

2. It provides essential information for better content targeting

Modern intranets have strong personalisation and content targeting features to ensure that content is relevant for every single individual employee. This is particularly true of larger or complex organisations with multiple locations and divisions, or a diverse set of roles. The powerful content targeting features of Wizdom is one of the products real strengths.

For successful targeting and personalisation you are reliant on complete and accurate people data that can then be stored in Active Directory. The better your information, the better you can carry out content targeting and the better the experience for your users.  By filling in the gaps and correcting mistakes, the LiveTiles profile completion tool helps you to get the data to be able to take full advantage of personalisation capabilities within your intranet product, delivering the right content to the right groups.

3. It helps your users navigate the organisation

One of the nice things about the solution is all profiles can be viewed as a navigable organisation chart. An org chart is always a popular intranet feature that helps employees not only find the right person to connect to but also understand complex organisational structures.

The org chart can also be limited to one function or division which can then be embedded on a page. For example, you could have an org chart of your IT function on your IT intranet landing page. Wizdom customers can also make the org chart available through the Wizdom Power Panel, cementing it as a useful tool right across your digital workplace.

4. It saves your intranet teams time

If youve ever had to run a campaign to encourage your users to complete their employee profiles, youll know that it can be a time-consuming (and sometimes painful) effort. Even if a campaign is relatively successful, youll then need to spend time to make sure profiles stay up to date. The Hyperfish tool saves your intranet team significant time by taking most of this effort away, and getting better results in the process.

Most of this is because of the automation and AI I in the background the tool just gets on with it. However there is also robust and granular reporting so if you need to target any communications or interventions because one team or function arent completing their profiles, or nobody is adding skills information, you can focus efforts on contacting the right people or asking for the right information.

5. It increases data quality and supports governance

AD and employee directory information must be of good quality – having inaccurate and inconsistent data is usually worse than having no data. This means trying to establish some rules and governance around the data that is added. A similar approach is true of intranets as a whole; good intranets need robust governance to ensure they remain focused and deliver value.

One of the great things about the approach in the LiveTiles solution is it can help to drive accuracy as well as maintain governance. For example, it leverages Microsoft Vision Services to ensure that only real, single photos of people are uploaded rather than a cartoon or someones cat! You can also set formatting rules and approval workflow for specific information to help to drive accuracy. For example, you many want to have consistency in telephone number formatting if youre asking people to update their mobile phone number, or if you need a manager to verify skills within a profile.

6. It drives trust and adoption

Successful intranets thrive on good adoption and trust in the content. A fully populated and accurate employee directory can play a significant role in this. Firstly, accurate people data builds trust. If you see your own data as inaccurate it can colour your view of all the content in the intranet.

Secondly trust builds adoption and confidence. People realise that the information is reliable and are more likely to visit. Using AI and adding data can also be that first step for an individual to contribute to the intranet. Once a user finds its easy to submit information, they usually feel more confident and ideally more interactions with content such as comments and likes, as well as contributions in groups. will follow.

Want to know more?

LiveTiles Office 365 profile completion tool has enormous potential for your profiles and your intranet!  If youd like more information or want to arrange a demo then please dont hesitate to get in touch.

Webinar video: 3 classic mistakes to avoid when deploying MS Teams

With more than 19 million weekly users just two years after launch, MS Teams has taken the world by storm. As an intuitive tool for teamwork and collaboration its not hard to understand that the application is adored by users.

Deploying MS Teams in your organisation, however, requires careful planning and consideration. As teams in MS Teams per default can be created by any user, policies must be in place to avoid:

  • An enormous number of MS Teams and Office 365 workloads created.
  • Lack of control in what is being shared externally from MS Teams.
  • Clutter of inactive teams resulting in low findability and discoverability.
  • More teams created for same purposes.
  • Users working in silos in different teams.

Have you already deployed MS Teams and are experiencing some of the issues above? Dont despair! We will also cover how you can gain control over your Office 365 self-service environment even long after a MS Teams rollout.

In this webinar we have covered how to establish automated processes for governance to ensure MS Teams is rolled out to make the workday better for each employee in your organisation.

Learn how:

  • to define fixed standards for teams creation and provisioning,
  • to maintain and keep your Office 365 self-service environment tidy,
  • to establish a healthy teams lifecycle.

LiveTiles acquires leading ‘pocket’ intranet software

We’re proud to be LiveTiles’s top partner with more Wizdom implementations than any other partner in the world. Today we’re excited to hear that LiveTiles has acquired a new technology that we’ll be able to offer our customers. They’ve acquired CYCL, a Swiss company with two products: one is called Condense – it’s a mobile intranet delivered as a SaaS solution and is ideal for mobile workers that don’t necessarily have an Office 365 account. The other product is Matchpoint, a SharePoint product that complements Wizdom really nicely. We’ll find out more soon but for now, we’ve got a copy of the press release below:

Overview of CYCL

CYCL is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland with offices in Bern, Zurich and Boston. CYCLs highly experienced founders and senior management team include Patrick Pűntener (CEO and co-founder), Matthias Walter (CFO and co-founder), Thomas Brunner (COO), Urs Wermelinger (Chief Marketing Officer) and Matthias Weibel (Head of Product Development). The business was founded in 1999 and since the inclusion of its own intranet software products, has grown its revenues, customer base and staff substantially.

CYCL has 156 customers including many global brands and multinationals such as PwC, Roche, Shell, Siemens, SwissLife and the United Nations.

The business has 56 staff, including highly regarded services capabilities that are complementary to its product portfolio. CYCL has 10 active reseller partners and longstanding expertise in managing a high quality, low-cost nearshoring product development team to complement its Swiss-based product team.

CYCL recently established a sales presence in the US (Boston), and has a strong pipeline of qualified opportunities.

Overview of products

CYCL has two differentiated and highly complementary intranet software products: Condense and MatchPoint.

Condense: unlike full-service intranet software that requires bespoke implementation services in order to deploy and go live within an organisation, CYCLs recently developed Condense product is a mobile-focused cloud SaaS product enabling organisations to rapidly configure and launch a pocket intranet. Given the nature of this cloud product, LiveTiles sees strong opportunity to leverage the Condense technology to speed up the sales and deployment process for customers.

Condense significantly expands LiveTiles total addressable market through its focus on organisations with large front-line or mobile workforces, as well as smaller organisations. Critically, Condense enables organisations to reach front-line workers without traditional company IT account access the employee simply needs a mobile phone. Condense drives employee engagement and corporate culture across an organisation, providing content authoring and publishing, a native employee app and enterprise grade connectivity and security.

MatchPoint: an award-winning turnkey intranet solution aimed at enterprise-wide deployments, with a particular strength in financial services and the public sector (including on-premise deployments).

The combination of joint capabilities between CYCLs MatchPoint product, LiveTiles and Wizdom creates an enhanced Intelligent Workplace offering which will open up greater enterprise opportunities. The enhanced Intelligent Workplace offering will also help attract more and stronger partners given the increased opportunity for services with enterprise customers.

MatchPoint is built on the same Microsoft technology platforms as LiveTiles/Wizdom, thereby offering strong product and sales channel synergies.

Webinar: 3 classic mistakes to avoid when deploying MS Teams

Webinar details

Date: 20th November 2019
Time: 2:00pm to 2:30pm UK time
Presented by: Nico de Jong, Innovation and Experience Lead, Wizdom & LiveTiles

With more than 19 million weekly users just two years after launch, MS Teams has taken the world by storm. As an intuitive tool for teamwork and collaboration its not hard to understand that the application is adored by users.

Deploying MS Teams in your organisation, however, requires careful planning and consideration. As teams in MS Teams per default can be created by any user, policies must be in place to avoid:

  • An enormous number of MS Teams and Office 365 workloads created.
  • Lack of control in what is being shared externally from MS Teams.
  • Clutter of inactive teams resulting in low findability and discoverability.
  • More teams created for same purposes.
  • Users working in silos in different teams.

Have you already deployed MS Teams and are experiencing some of the issues above? Dont despair! We will also cover how you can gain control over your Office 365 self-service environment even long after a MS Teams rollout.

In this webinar we will cover how to establish automated processes for governance to ensure MS Teams is rolled out to make the workday better for each employee in your organisation.

Learn how:

  • to define fixed standards for teams creation and provisioning,
  • to maintain and keep your Office 365 self-service environment tidy,
  • to establish a healthy teams lifecycle.

 

Sign up today!

 

Microsoft Teams intranet by Wizdom

Help users work efficiently in Office 365 groups and teams. Wizdom prevents Office 365 sprawl, keeps your self-service environment tidy, and offers users a one-stop digital workplace in Microsoft Teams.

Contain and create MS Teams your way

Catch sprawl in its making. Wizdom allows you to control the Microsoft Teams creation process through approval flows and templates with fixed standards for privacy level, roles, theme and logo.

A built-in governance flow will clear away inactive MS Teams and create a clutter free environment for your business to collaborate in.

All the time you will stay in control of flows. Restore archived MS Teams and change processes if you like, but feel free to let go of tiresome manual tasks like creating a new Team every time its requested by a user.

A one-stop digital workplace in MS Teams

By bringing in a personalized and intelligent overview of content and tools across all systems, Wizdom breaks the silos between applications and delivers the ONE corporate dashboard in MS Teams you need to visit to keep up and get work done.

No more searching in silos and relying on memory to find the presentation you are looking for. No more checking and registering data in a multitude of applications to be on top of things.

When youve logged on to MS Teams, you have access to everything. Simply, everything you need to get work done.

As a Wizdom customer you will automatically receive Wizdom for MS Teams. If you are a new customer, you have the opportunity to upgrade to the full Wizdom intranet solution, after purchasing Wizdom for MS teams. Please reach out if you have any questions.

 

Book a demo

Digital transformation through governance and simplicity

#1All Office 365 groups and teams automatically live up to company defined standards

By creating new teams based on fixed templates, users intuitively establish groups and teams with a suitable level of security and governance for the business purpose.

Data is systematically collected for each team created, ensuring all teams are optimized for findability and governance.

#2Approval flow controls teams creation

By adding a layer of either manual or automatic approval, Wizdom ensures there is a legitimate reason behind the creation of every new team.

#3Lifecycle management of all teams

A built-in governance flow requires team owners to regularly confirm relevancy of their teams in MS Teams. Ultimately, auto archiving will clear away inactive teams. No sweat though, a team can always be recovered if it becomes missed.

#4Your entire digital workplace delivered in MS Teams

Through system integrations and flows, Wizdom collects information and tools from all applications and services used by the business, and delivers these in MS Teams.

Each user gets a personalized and organized dashboard with all the tools, and information needed to get work done.

Eliminating frustration wasted on application silos and a complex landscape of collaboration tools, this makes MS Teams the perfect environment for employees to simply go and get work done.

 

Download the ‘Alleviate application chaos with Wizdom for MS Teams‘ brochure in PDF

 

Book a demo

 

The original article was published here

MS Teams and the digital workplace infographic

What can you do with MS teams in the context of the digital workplace and to help with increasing employee engagement?

At Wizdom, we want you to get the best out of the latest Microsoft technology. But first, it’s important to know a bit about what that technology does.

We created this infographic to bring awareness about MS teams in the context of the digital workplace. Employee engagement and solving business needs with technology, figuring out the why what and how of MS teams in relation to your business, is on the top of our minds.

MS Teams infographic

We have included a text version of the infographic below

Microsoft Teams

What can you do with MS teams in the context of the digital workplace and to help with increasing employee engagement?

MS Teams governance

What to think about when working with MS Teams

When you have a house, you make sure all the foundations are stable and the materials are high quality. With a digital workplace, the same, valuable infrastructure needs to be thought about, along with the possibilities of extensions.

MS Teams affords you the strong infrastructure needed with a range of options to extend and build on top of a sound structure.

MS Teams & communication

Meetings, project management, file management, notifications

  • Integrate Planner software to manage timelines
  • Keep track of internal communications
  • Get a hold of rogue data within MS Teams
  • Be social with your distributed workforce

Personalize your dashboard with the tools you need

MS Teams and data

Analyze what is working within MS teams and keep track of MS Team creation

Employee usage of MS Teams

By tracking the usage of MS teams, you can make sure it is used in the right way and cut down on governance sprawl.

MS Teams and security

Data loss prevention, security compliance, and policies & procedures.

By including a powerful provisioning engine, MS Teams has become more readily available for projects requiring organizational collaboration, external project management where sensitive information needs to be secured, and on a community level, where sharing information quickly and in a well governed way is of the utmost importance.

Have questions about MS Teams? Get in touch with us.

 

The original article was published here

Microsoft Teams Governance

Dont let Microsoft Teams run out of control

It feels like nothing can stop the march of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has declared it their fastest growing enterprise application with around half a million organisations using it. A figure that is set to rise. Microsoft also continue to invest in Teams, adding new features, folding in other capabilities like Skype for Business, and evolving ways to integrate with the rest of Office 365 and even third-party applications.

Individually within separate organisations, Teams adoption is also going well, helping to drive communication, collaboration and workflow. In some organisations Teams usage is positively exploding with people keen to try out the tool; many are finding it fills an essential gap for team communication and coordination, an area where other online tools have been less successful in the past.

Can Teams really run out of control?

This is great news for digital workplace teams and IT functions that have been tasked with promoting Teams. But Teams can also prove to be too successful. When Teams does go truly viral and where use is not being co-ordinated or managed in any way, it can lead to issues that ultimately may damage the overall success of the platform and the business value it delivers. These issues include:

  • Teams being used for purposes that its not best suited for, when a Yammer community or other collaboration tool would be better suited for a particular use case
  • Spaces that get set up initially, often to see what the fuss is all about, but then never end up getting used
  • A duplication of Teams spaces that are used for the same purpose, causing confusion for users and limiting collaboration
  • A proliferation of so many sites that individual users find it very difficult to keep on top of all their site updates and increasingly difficult to find what they need
  • A lack of clarity and confusion at the individual site level about what a Teams space has been set up for
  • Problems with who should be responsible for managing an individual Teams space if somebody leaves the organisation
  • People getting invited to Teams spaces that shouldnt be, resulting in individuals seeing sensitive content or being onboarded early onto Teams while it is still being rolled out

Does this really matter?

As any advanced enterprise technology gets rolled out there are inevitably going to be a few issues encountered, and a few bumps in the road can be expected. At first, as digital workplace professionals focus on adoption, they may care less about issues such as site proliferation; these issues are not necessarily serious. However, in the medium to long term, all the above issues highlighted can become real problems.

Individual users will find it hard to find individual Teams sites, but also the discussion threads and files within them. They will also find the overall ease of use of Teams starts to depreciate, with extra time and effort spent keeping up with too many sites.  The overall management of the platform will also become much harder. For example running any compliance processes across so many sites. Adoption of other collaboration and digital workplace tools may also suffer as Teams is perceived as the only tool in town.

Introducing appropriate governance

In the same way that email inboxes have become unwieldy, network file shares have become dumping grounds and SharePoint sites feel like a digital wild west, its all too easy to let Teams run out of control. The answer is to introduce some light governance that can help to prevent Teams running out of control, but without the governance becoming a barrier to usage or painful to manage.

By governance we mean some of the polices, processes and rules that need to be put in place to make Teams work in the best way for users, team and the whole organisation.

Some digital workplace and collaboration professional feel uneasy about putting governance in place because they worry it will stifle innovation and collaboration. It may also create an administrative overhead that they simply cannot manage.

It is true that too much governance can lead to issues. For example, if you are over-prescriptive about the use of Teams (and actively police it to check people are using it properly), need three levels of approval to actually create a Teams space and then have a policy to delete any Teams space that hasnt had anything added for two months, you will very quickly run into problems. Teams will become unusable and people will inevitably turn to other solutions.

But putting in an appropriate level of governance will lead to a better-managed platform and a better user experience of Teams.

What sort of governance does Teams need?

What governance measures are needed for each organisation varies, but we have observed the following as what works well:

  • On an organizational level, every Teams space has an owner who understands what their responsibilities are, with clarity over who is responsible for inviting individuals to a Teams space
  • A clear handover process is in place whenever a Teams owner leaves your organisation.
  • A search facility or process so individuals can search for other Teams before they create a new space, ensuring there is no duplication of sites
  • The ability to drive a consistent naming convention for Teams, supported on an organizational level.
  • Standard templates with meta data, with an overview of all existing Teams and Workspaces
  • A site provisioning process that may also take in other examples of collaboration sites (e.g. a community site) depending on the use case, so that the best type of space is created for different needs
  • A clear policy and process to make sure that Teams get decommissioned at the right time.

The net impact of all these governance measures will be:

  • A reduction in the creation of duplicate and unnecessary sites
  • The use of better tools for different use cases e.g. Yammer for wider community sites
  • Better findability and easier overall management of Teams.

How we baked governance into Wizdom

Knowing the importance of governance of Microsoft Teams and governance in general weve sought to hard bake governance features into the Wizdom product. Several of these are perfect for controlling Teams, including:

  • A provisioning machine that enables users to easily create teams that live up to standards for roles/permissions and metadata.
  • The ability to create a template for Teams that includes the right default features based on use case, in a custom-made solution e.g. including Planner if Teams is being used for a project.
  • A form that ensures the right information including site purpose and nominated owners and roles are captured and are also available centrally to review by the digital workplace team
  • A central register of sites for digital workplace teams, making it easier to enable processes relating to the archiving of sites or handing a site over to a new owner
  • The ability for viewers to link to the Teams spaces they are members of within the Wizdom intranet (there are different ways to achieve this)
  • And, of course, a Wizdom intranet can be used to distribute resources on the best way to use Teams or as a channel to ask questions to experts.

Dont ignore Teams governance

If Teams feels like its starting to get out of control, then do something about it. Its never too late to introduce some governance, perform a clean-up operation and make life easier for everybody and avoid bigger problems further down the line. You can use many of the features of Wizdom to help you, particularly with our powerful provisioning engine. If youd like to discuss Teams governance and how Wizdom can help, then get in touch!

 

The original article was published here

Intranet governance infographic

The original article was published here

LiveTiles Bots integration with MS Flow and MS Teams

We are proud to announce an update to the LiveTiles Bots product that will make it even easier to deploy bots into your organisation or team.

Flow Connectors

LiveTiles Bots allows integration with Microsoft Flow to expand the functionality of what a bot can do, and the systems it can integrate with. This process, of connecting a bot with a flow, is now significantly simpler than before by providing LiveTiles Bots Connectors within Microsoft Flow, which will take care of all of the heavy lifting for you. This allows you to really focus on the workflow or the business outcome that you are trying to achieve, rather than getting the bot and flow connected. For more information on how to use this, see our Knowledge Base article. These connectors are going through the final stages of approval from Microsoft, and well push out the release as soon as we have confirmation.

Microsoft Teams Channel

In case you missed it, LiveTiles Bots can be deployed to Microsoft Teams so that your users can leverage it where they already are. See how it works here.

Extended Channel Data

To expand the power of what can be done with LiveTiles Bots, weve had requests to allow for extended channel data information to be passed through. We have now enabled this functionality and you will have access to whatever data the applicable channel has available.

If you are interested in leveraging the productivity gains that the LiveTiles Bot Assistants can deliver in your Digital Workplace, get in touch with us.

 

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