Content Formula

Wizdoms continual improvement: a look at Wizdoms product roadmap

One of the reasons Content Formula chose to partner with Wizdom is the teams continuing investment in the product and a strong commitment to continual improvement. Just as Microsoft continues to add to Office 365 and introduce new features, the team at Wizdom is very active in driving a programme of enhancements.

In fact, at the time of writing, there have already been seventeen releases to the Wizdom platform since the beginning of the calendar year already. By the time you are reading this there will probably have been an eighteenth release.

While the improvements and plans for WIzdom are heavily influenced by the latest developments on the Office 365 and SharePoint roadmap, the primary driver for prioritising changes is feedback from Wizdoms customers. The team back in Denmark are very good at listening to customers and assimilating their needs into the product roadmap. Were in frequent conversation with Wizdom HQ too, giving feedback from our customers who have installed or are on their way to installing a Wizdom intranet.

Wizdoms commitment to continual improvement means several features have recently been introduced, and that there are more enhancements on the horizon. Here are some of the recent and upcoming changes were most excited about.

Recent improvements

Many of the recent changes to Wizdom have improved the user experience. For example, notifications have recently gone through a complete overhaul with a notifications bar displaying personalised updates for individuals including @ mentions from other users in posts.

Other developments have been more about the configuration of the product.  These include the recent introduction of the Accelerate module, a semi-automated way to provision a whole site structure. After just one meeting (where we will go through a structured process with a client) an intranet team can have an intranet which they can start to add content to. This helps drive agile project delivery, reduces costs, speeds up implementation and allows intranet teams to better envisage their site structure and templates.

Lightning pages and cloud performance

The Accelerate module is just one way to make installing an intranet quicker, but there are other changes being made to improve speed and performance. The speed at which intranet pages load isnt always acknowledged as a key component of the intranet user experience, but theres nothing more frustrating than waiting for a page to fully render, particularly if youre accessing the intranet from outside your network and you have weak connectivity.

In response Wizdom has introduced the Lightning pages module, allowing certain popular templated pages within your intranet (such as the homepage) to load faster than they would in traditional SharePoint.  In parallel, Wizdom has also worked on various optimisations which also enhance cloud performance, working even on minor tweaks to code. Collectively weve seen all these changes make an improvement to page speeds which will be noticed by your users.

Multi-geo support

Speed and performance will be further improved over the next few months as the Wizdom team intend to work on a multi-housing arrangement for Wizdom, which will allow global companies to receive Wizdom from servers located in more than one region. Potentially this means Asia-Pacific based workers could receive Wizdom from a server based nearer to them rather than a server based in Europe, again resulting in better page load speeds. This development mirrors Microsofts commitment to give SharePoint a similar multi-geo capability which was recently announced at Ignite.

Introducing the Service Desk

Wizdom has already introduced employee services capability into its intranet, including a great course management module to drive employee learning and development.

The latest addition is the Service Desk capability, which organisations can use as a cost-effective way to run a lightweight IT or HR helpdesk. Employees can log tickets directly via the intranet and helpdesk teams can track progress to resolution.

This innovation was based on original functionality developed by Wizdom for a bank logging customer calls, so its already been through some robust use. Were expecting over the coming months there will be more enhancements to the Service Desk, giving customers another option to extend their intranet into a wider digital workplace. Note that there is an additional charge for the Service Desk module above the core Wizdom intranet product.

More help and training

Another improvement were looking forward to is an expansion of Wizdoms current help and training portal Wizdom Success Centre. We find that our clients like to be as self-sufficient as possible in extending the possibilities of their Wizdom intranet and an expanded help portal will help. Wizdom are going to be adding more knowledgebase content and how-to videos to truly make the portal the go to place for everything to do with Wizdom, ultimately allowing customers to get more out of their intranet.

The modern experience

A key change in SharePoint has been the introduction of modern experiences, resulting in pages which have an updated and more contemporary look and feel than classic SharePoint. Were expecting this to have a significant impact on Wizdoms roadmap into 2018, meaning that there will be full support for SharePonts modern experience over the coming months.

Well keep you posted

Were excited about whats ahead for the Wizdom platform. Its a great product with a continuing programme of investment, with new features and improvements coming through next year and beyond. Well be covering these on the Content Formula blog so check back often to keep up to date on the latest news!

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