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Category: LiveTiles

7 ways an internal communications app can benefit your company

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

The COVID-19 crisis has made it clear how important it is to connect remote employees and make sure they are well-informed through reliable and trusted digital communications channels. Business continuity, employee engagement and wellbeing are just some of the benefits that we have seen digital channels provide; of course, these elements have always been important, and will continue to be so when the pandemic is under control.

Weve written frequently about the contribution an employee mobile app with a focus on internal communications can make in connecting staff, particularly those on the frontline. Weve explored the reasons for deploying an app, such as its convenience and focus, as well as the essential features of a good mobile intranet app. This time around, were going to explore the deeper business benefits that can be achieved by deploying an internal comms app like LiveTiles Reach which is available to all employees.

Here are seven ways an internal communications app can contribute to the transformation of your business.

1 Enabling digital transformation by connecting all employees

In the past, there have been many challenges when creating a digital workplace and related digital communications channels that all employees can access. Having all employees accessing your digital workplace is usually a prerequisite for true digital transformation, ensuring:

  • You are a truly connected company
  • There is a level playing field in terms of access to information
  • Everyone has a voice
  • All employees can experience productivity gains and contribute to innovation.

Traditionally, it has been difficult to connect frontline employees to corporate intranets and channels which are predominantly aimed at knowledge workers. This is not only due to poor mobile experiences or a lack of access to corporate devices, but also because frontline employees sometimes do not have the Microsoft licenses or digital identities to access the intranet. There are also examples of other groups of employees who are disconnected, including outsourced workers or new acquisitions of companies where it takes time to arrange access for newly onboarded employees.

An internal comms and digital workplace mobile app that is available on both employee-owned and corporate devices is simply the quickest and most cost-efficient way to connect all your employees, bypassing many of the logistical barriers around identities, devices and access to the digital workplace during the working day. This means an app can be the springboard for digital transformation, unlocking new ways of working and providing opportunities for collaboration, innovation and more.

2 Improving every individuals digital employee experience

Employee experience is now a common area of focus for HR teams and senior leaders, helping drive a more joined-up and strategic approach to how employees experience their work with multiple benefits that flow. The digital element of this is important.

An internal communications app that also has some integrated elements of the digital workplace can support a better digital employee experience for each individual, particularly if personalisation makes sure the experience is relevant for that person. For example, an app might help a person stay up-to-date with changes, drive efficiencies through easier task completion and just make their working day a little easier. Achieving this across your entire workforce can be transformational, with significant collective benefits around engagement and productivity.

3 Supporting your employment value proposition

Having a strong value proposition as an employer and a reputation for being a great place to work is essential in attracting the best talent and reducing employee turnover – both common strategic aims for HR functions. An internal communications app can play a role in supporting your employment value proposition by:

  • Helping to encourage transparency
  • Giving everyone a voice to support engagement
  • Supporting Diversity and Inclusion, with all representatives of your workforce contributing to the digital workplace
  • Helping employees feel better informed about and connected to your organisations purpose and values, amplifying whats best about your organisational culture (this is explored further below)
  • Boosting confidence in senior leaders through internal communications
  • Providing access to learning assets, encouraging personal and career development
  • Supplying access to health and wellbeing initiatives
  • Supporting better connection between colleagues
  • Providing a better digital employee experience, as already stated
  • Specifically supporting employee advocacy initiatives, encouraging employees to share stories on their own social media channels and spreading awareness of a strong employee value proposition.

4 Driving process improvement

Digital transformation is often about improving and changing multiple processes across the enterprise; for example, many organisations have already gone through a process of digitisation by moving paper processes online, and are now looking at further aspects of automation, advanced workflow and self-service to improve productivity. Other process improvements could mean replacing email communication with more efficient methods of exchanging information, particularly if it means eliminating unnecessary steps and approvals. This is particularly true regarding processes where people are on-the-go or out in the field, and mobile access for viewing or submitting information makes a difference.

An internal communications app can play its part here, not only by ensuring all staff can access the information they need for improved processes, but also by driving better dialogue across the business and information flow. When multiple processes start to change, especially those involving frontline or mobile staff, an app can make a significant contribution to overall organisational efficiency.

5 Supporting business continuity

In a volatile and unpredictable world, business continuity has never been more important. Clear and trusted communications delivered in real-time are a critical part of executing business continuity, while ongoing two-way communication supports ongoing operations.

The digital workplace and its constituent communications and collaboration tools and channels have proved to be utterly essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, an employee app that all employees have access to can really support business continuity, helping deliver messages and ongoing dialogue which allows organisations, teams and individual employees to adapt rapidly to new situations and realities. If you remember the days when business continuity relied solely on cascading messages through managers phoning their team members at home, then youll know the difference a mobile internal comms app makes.

6 Driving agility and innovation

In a highly competitive world, the ability to be agile and respond quickly to the market is essential. Innovation is also important – being able to deliver news products and services, especially in difficult economic conditions.

Here, an internal communications app can make a surprising difference, for example, through:

  • The ability to get rapid feedback and input on new initiatives from all employees , helping with speed to market
  • Receiving messages in real-time in order to launch new offerings quickly and smoothly
  • Receiving real-time feedback from customer-facing staff on how customers are feeling or behaving, delivering insights which can improve products and services
  • Gathering ideas from all staff, including those who deal directly with customers, to feed innovation
  • Driving a culture of agility and innovation, as employees see the positive results from giving input and feedback.

7 Supporting a unified and positive culture

Senior leaders often want to drive a more unified culture for their organisation, particularly after mergers and acquisitions. They also want a positive and perhaps less hierarchical culture that reflects company values, celebrates successes, emphasises areas such as good customer service and makes people feel more connected to organisational purpose.

An internal comms app can really help shift and nurture company culture through access to leadership communications, messaging campaigns, peer-to-peer shout-outs and feel-good success stories, leading to the establishment of a strong sense of community.

Deploying an internal communications app? Get in touch!

We think an internal communications app or something similar can make a huge positive contribution to every business. If you want to discuss your options around launching an app, or the business benefits of doing so, then get in touch!

8 must have features of a mobile intranet app

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Strong mobile access for any intranet is now a given. Employees want to be able to consume information and access digital services in the way they do outside work, so an intranet app which presents a mobile-optimised user experience is important. It is especially critical in sectors such as retail, manufacturing, leisure, travel and healthcare; here a large proportion of employees are deskless and may not have digital identities. A mobile intranet app is therefore essential for firstline employees, particularly in these challenging times when all employees need access to trusted and up-to-date information.

A mobile intranet app does not always have the full functionality of a desktop intranet and may focus on the critical features and content that employees need to access on their mobile device. Choosing the right product is important for example, through our partnership with LiveTiles we help clients implement LiveTiles Reach mobile intranet app, a strong mobile intranet app which is focused on strong communication with all employees.

Lets look at eight essential ingredients of a mobile intranet app, all of which are available in LiveTiles Reach.

1 Remove barriers to access for all

A mobile intranet is an excellent way to reach all your employees, and a good intranet app removes the barriers to access that can exist in desktop intranets. Traditionally, not all the workforce has had  access to intranets because:

  • there is no easy access to a work computer during the day
  • employees do not have a corporate digital identity or email to be able to authenticate into the intranet
  • employees are not covered by Microsoft 365 or intranet software licensing
  • outsourced workers, consultants, contractors or regular freelancers need access to information but are not employees.

Here a mobile intranet app which allows potential access to employees or trusted external third parties on any device employee or corporate owned, iOS or Android, with a corporate ID or not removes all those barriers. To make this happen, strong security and onboarding features are important, ensuring that only the right people have access to the app and also install it easily.

2 Strong news delivery

A mobile intranet is a key channel in the digital communications landscape and plays an important role in delivering updates so every employee can stay up to date. This has never been more important during the COVID-19 pandemic where the situation remains fluid. A mobile intranet app should be able to deliver news and updates in an engaging and informative way, that also allows employees to comment, like and share.

While some news will be important for everybody to read, an app also needs to be able to target updates to different groups to ensure that the intrant remains relevant to each individual. Here, automatic translation capabilities (a feature on the LiveTiles Reach app) can also help overcome any language barriers for multinational workforces.

 

Book a demo

 

3 Social collaboration and community

Some of the most powerful features of any mobile intranet app  are social and collaboration tools  such as the ability to comment on news, participate in discussions, post social updates, celebrate success and create community spaces. This not only allows for focused collaboration, but also give everybody a voice, supporting both engagement and efficiency.

Social and collaborative capabilities are powerful in supporting everyday work, but also in gathering feedback on initiatives, supporting professional and even non-work communities, and also nurturing and amplifying a more positive organisational culture. When we are all working remotely, collaboration and culture can be impacted; a strong mobile intranet app makes a tangible difference.

4 Content and reference pages

At the core of any successful intranet is useful content that helps employees get things done and stay informed. While some of this will be news and updates, there are also likely to be many static or evergreen pages that contain essential reference information on different topics such as how to complete tasks, details of products and services, organisational strategy, operational information and key company policies. For customer-facing staff, access to this kind of content can be very important for supporting customer service.

Many employee communication or social collaboration apps are quite weak on this aspect, relying on PDFs to present structured information. A true mobile intranet app provides robust access to content pages as well as documents, allowing employees to access structured content and organisational knowledge, including policies and forms.

5 Employee directory

A must-have feature of any intranet, both desktop or mobile, is the employee directory, ensuring employees can find information about their colleagues, contact them, search for experts and more. Arguably, the humble employee directory does more than any other one feature on an intranet to break down siloes and barriers across an organisation.

A strong mobile intranet app should have a comprehensive employee directory, allowing employees to find contact information, view profiles of their peers with salient information, and search using a variety of different criteria, such as job role and expertise area.

6 Event calendar and registration

Events such as town halls, webinars, conferences, training and celebrations are an important part of organisational life. In the past, many firstline employees have not participated in events because they simply couldnt access information about them. A good mobile intranet app will include an event calendar with relevant information and even the ability to register, giving the opportunity for all employees to take part in events such as town halls, perhaps for the first time.

7 Integrations

Most intranet apps are focused on employee communication, but the ability to carry out integrations with other systems and applications can be important. Integrations help with two different capabilities:

  • allowing employees to view other essential information and content such as Microsoft 365 documents)
  • allowing employees to carry out simple transactions such as booking leave or viewing roster information, for example.

A good mobile intranet app should allow for the possibility of integrations, either through connectors out of the box, or through customisation options.

8 Easy administration and robust analytics

On a mobile intranet app, its not only the user experience which is critical. The administrator experience must also be intuitive so that the app and its content can be easily managed on a day-to-day basis, and that the initial roll-out is also simple and straightforward; ideally a Comms or intranet team should not have to involve their IT function.

A good intranet app should also provide access to strong analytics that help you to track success, make improvements and drive insights about engagement with content.

 

Book a demo

 

Any questions? Then get in touch!

Its essential to have a mobile intranet app, but it needs to have the right capabilities. If youd like to discuss setting up a mobile intranet app or want information about LiveTiles Reach, then why not get in touch or even organise a free demo?

11 reasons to implement an employee app

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey
If you’re considering an employee app for your organisation please check out LiveTiles Reach.

Reach is quick to deploy and gives you:

  • Targeted news with likes and comments
  • Pages for structured content such as policies and procedures
  • People directory
  • Events
  • Analytics

Reach is an iOS and Android app but is also available through MS Teams and standard browsers

The system is slick and easy to use whether you are a front line worker or a comms professional.

Find out more on our Reach employee app page.

2021 update – we now offer a leading employee app called LiveTiles Reach.

Digital communication is critical for work and even more so during the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential that we are able to communicate successfully, not only in a rapidly evolving and stressful situation, but also just to keep operations going. However, this can be more challenging when there is a remote, distributed workforce, some of whom may not even have corporate digital identities (usually an email address) or corporate-owned devices.

The power of an employee mobile app

Most organisations are finding that a robust and reliable way to communicate with the entire workforce is through an employee engagement app or internal communications app; this needs to be available on any device, either iOS or Android, either corporate-issued or employee-owned.

An employee app (sometimes also called an employee engagement app) helps to drive a better employee experience by acting as:

  • an app for internal communications
  • a place to access social, collaboration and messaging tools,
  • access important information, for example contact details or operational information
  • sometimes perform simple transactions.

Because employee apps are powerful, the market has exploded in recent years, with multiple offerings, including Reach from LiveTiles, which is available through Content Formula.

 

Get in touch to discuss your project

 

Eleven reasons to consider an employee mobile app

Lets explore some of the benefits of deploying an employee communication app.

1. We consume information on our mobile devices

These days we all consume information, carry out transactions and run our busy lives from our mobile device. The idea of being without a mobile device is unthinkable for many. By using an employee app, you can extend the patterns of communication carried out by most of us into the workplace. In terms of technology, workplace trends often follow consumer trends, so an employee app is a no brainer.

2. It can reach frontline and deskless employees

Many sectors such as retail, leisure, manufacturing, logistics, transport, travel and construction have a significant proportion of the workforce who can be considered to be frontline, deskless, blue collar or field employees. Essentially, they do not have easy access to a terminal during the working day and many more may not even have digital identities or corporate email addresses. A mobile app is simply the best way to communicate with this important demographic, who in the past have tended to miss out on digital communications.

3. All employees are on the go, even in the office

Although an employee communication app may be used to most frequently by frontline or deskless workers, actually all employees may find themselves on the go, visiting different locations or travelling between them. Even working within an office environment with meetings means that an employee communication app can be very useful for people who find themselves frequently moving around the building or those who are based on campus style environments.

4. An app supports crisis communications

The pandemic has shown the importance of crisis communications  that your entire workforce can reach quickly. This has never been more important in a rapidly evolving situation. A mobile app is simply the best way to reach your entire workforce in real time to send trusted, authoritative communications that keep people informed.

5. An app is better for real-time reactions

Sometimes you also need to get quick reactions from employees back to coordinate operations, to get feedback on something or even for people to check-in and confirm they are OK in a crisis. Because an app pretty much removes all barriers to use, if any communication needs a real-time reply quickly then a mobile app is the best way to get a reaction quickly or to get a quick pulse-check of employee sentiment.

 

Get in touch to discuss your project

 

6. An employee app is quick, easy and convenient

Sometimes an employee communication app is simply quicker and more efficient for information consumption, for example quickly scanning messages or reading updates. You are not necessarily having to open and authenticate into your intranet and employees may already be looking at their mobile device anyway. Collectively this can save everybody time and arguably can even contribute to increasing productivity.

7. An app encourages shorter and more focused messaging

An employee communication app that is used for messaging and for interaction, has an interesting impact in that it can encourage more focused, shorter communications and often ones that may be more social in nature, reflecting how we use social media, often from our own mobile device. This results in shorter and more engaging content, which is usually more impactful and saves everybody time.

8. Employee communication apps are great for uploading camera and video

One of the excellent things about any communication app on a mobile device is that it can utilise the native features of your phone, in particular the camera. With an app it is super-easy and feels natural to upload photos and video they have taken from their device; in practice this means people are far more likely to share media content than they would on a desktop-based intranet. This has loads of potential benefits including knowledge sharing, more poignant communications (for example a CED video) and also business processes where sharing photos is helpful, for example on reporting things which need fixing or comparing shop window displays.

9. You can run processes that require being off-site

An employee communication app can also be very useful when you need to either view information or submit information for processes when you are off-site or out in the field. For example, you may need to submit data when inspecting a site, need to view product information when with a customer, or send an update about the outcome of a meeting. An employee communication app supports processes where people are off-site.

10. Reducing risks

When employees dont have a good way to communicate or access information with their mobile phone inevitably, they will turn to alternative solutions and shadow IT. Using these unauthorised apps  (often designed for consumer use) can involve security and privacy risks, as they may not meet the criteria for your organisation. Having a fully approved and secure employee communication app can help reduce risks by reducing the need for employees to turn other apps.

11. It supports a more remote and mobile future

For a while now work has ceased be a place that you go to. The current pandemic has been a catalyst for digital workplace trends that were already happening in terms of far greater emphasis on remote working and a mobile future. An employee app that you can build upon and expand in terms of its range of services can you help to prepare for the future.

 

Get in touch to discuss your project

 

The advantages of using Reach, an employee app from LiveTiles

Through our established partnership with LiveTiles we are able to help customers implement the Reach employee app. This is a robust and user-friendly employee communications app that is proving to be valuable during the current COVID-19 pandemic as a way to communicate with all employees through the crisis.

The strengths of LiveTiles Reach include:

  • The ability to provide internal communications to keep employees informed
  • More social posts and interaction to drive engagement and boost morale
  • Access to a people directory with contact details
  • Provide access to critical documents and pages of reference material to support processes and aid operations
  • Encourage knowledge sharing and discussions via social sharing
  • Provide one app, connecting employees across locations including frontline and deskless workers
  • Ability to be accessed on all devices, including personal iOS and Android phones, while also retaining robust security
  • No need to have a Microsoft 365 license
  • Can integrate with Microsoft 365, MS Teams, core HR systems and more
  • Supports multi-language
  • Very scalable and flexible, suiting from very large to small organisations
  • In-built analytics.

Considering an employee app?

Implementing an employee app has several benefits, particularly in driving a great employee experience across a workforce with frontline, deskless or blue collar workers. If you are considering an employee app then LiveTiles Reach is a strong option to consider. Get in touch if you would like to discuss deploying an employee app or would like a product demo.

Get a free employee app to help with comms during the Covid crisis

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

 

Many countries are in some form of lock down and social distancing to contain the coronavirus and slow down its spread. Organisations that can have introduced work-from-home at large scale to keep their operations going. Some are finding communications with their employees a challenge because they do not have a reliable channel or because some employees do not have a company email or intranet account. If you are in this situation, we can help you with the LiveTiles mobile employee app.

Employee app for remote workers Employee communication app for mobile

Get the LiveTiles app free for your company

What does our offer include?

Thanks to LiveTiles, we can offer you free use of their mobile employee app (a.k.a pocket intranet), including free same-day setup and guidance to get you up and running as well as chat support 24/7.

Where and for how long can I use the platform?

Until 1 July 2020, a fully functional extended trial version of the LiveTiles employee app is offered to all organisations in the United States, Europe and Australia for a duration of 6 months free of charge (starting at the day of activation). This offer might be extended to other geographic areas upon request or as the situation requires and within the limits of available resources.

Get the LiveTiles app free for your company

What does the LiveTiles app do?

The LiveTiles app is our cloud service helping employees to stay connected and informed by enabling organizations to reach and align all staff via a mobile app (on all iOS and Android devices) or a browser, communicate important updates, send out alerts, gather feedback, find and stay in touch with colleagues and share work instructions, knowledge and information. The LiveTiles app does not require any base technology to be in place and works well with both Office 365, Microsoft Teams and Google, or even without any such platform.

Why use the LiveTiles employee app and not Email or WhatsApp?

Problem The LiveTiles Solution
Not all employees have a corporate email account The LiveTiles employee app does not require corporate user accounts but accepts any email account (incl. Gmail, Outlook, others).
WhatsApp does not provide good user and group management features
Maintaining mailing lists or WhatsApp groups is cumbersome and error-prone.		 The LiveTiles employee app provides powerful user and group management and comes with integrated Azure AD and an Azure AD B2C user directory.
Neither email nor WhatsApp are suited to distribute information in structured way (e.g. policies, work instructions, emergency plans that always need to be up to date and found and accessed quickly over a longer time) The LiveTiles employee app supports various content types such as structured pages, documents, news, alerts, social posts and events and allows to push update notifications to users if required.
Content in mailboxes and WhatsApp groups is often lost in information overload or spam The LiveTiles employee app is a dedicated mobile communication channel in a separate app controlled by the organisation

What’s in it for us?

We hope that you’ll like the app so much that you’ll continue using it long after the Covid-19 crisis is over and will therefore pay an annual subscription. As the UK partners of LiveTiles we earn a commission on any subscription fees.

Get the LiveTiles app free for your company

Webinar video: How to bring your intranet into MS Teams

Posted on by Livetiles

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

Posted on by Livetiles

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: How to bring your intranet into MS Teams

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

Webinar details

Date: 11th December 2019
Time: 2:00pm to 2:30pm UK time
Presented by: Nico de Jong, Innovation and Experience Lead, Wizdom & LiveTiles

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 will show 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.

Register today!

Wizdom Intelligent Intranet by LiveTiles leads the way in the Clearbox Sharepoint Intranet 2020 report

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

When it comes to authoritative reviews for intranets one name that stands out is the annual ClearBox report. The 2020 edition is hot off the press and we are pleased to announce that the Wizdom Intelligent Intranet by LiveTiles has emerged as the market leader, scoring consistently well across all assessment criteria.

We are the highest ranked overall from the 50+ options included in the report and performed especially well in features such as employee directories and out-of-the-box apps to support critical services including HR onboarding and policy management.

The importance of accurate and current employee profile data

Our AI-powered employee profile manager, complete with Modern SharePoint enabled user profile, directory and organization chart web parts were highly praised. These come standard and take the pain out of employee data management by automating the collection and ensuring the accuracy and currency of data in core systems of record including Active Directories and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS). With current and accurate data in place, organizations can unlock enormous value as it relates to an intranet, including:

  • Accurate and complete people and skills directories, allowing people to easily find the right person for the right job
  • Targeting role-based content at employees based on properties of their profile, cutting out the noise and promoting adoption through the enhanced experience of the intranet being relevant to me.
  • Automated organization chart maintenance, negating the need for time-consuming manual maintenance.
  • Effective business process automation (BPA) dependant on accurate definitions of data including department and manager.

Intranet must-haves: 5 essential features where LiveTiles scored highly

  1. News and internal communications publishing: ClearBox particularly liked how closely the custom Wizdom features work alongside the native SharePoint ones.
  2. User experience: Power Panel, a feature that unifies content and functionality from disparate applications into the intranet, was cited by ClearBox is a good example of how we improve UX.
  3. Collaboration, knowledge management and social: According to ClearBox our People Finder solution is well-rounded and focuses on doing one job well: finding people.
  4. Digital workplace integration: In our quest to completely unify the digital workplace it was great to see how ClearBox praised our ability to render both forms and alerts from other systems as certainly valuable.
  5. Employee services: ClearBox is a big fan of our learning and training app which allows management and filtering of online courses and resources.

Other LiveTiles features that got the ClearBox Big Love:

  • Power Panel and its ability to inject content and functionality from disparate applications into the intranet experience, from sources inside Office 365 or external line-of-business systems like HRIS, CRM and ITSM (IT Service Management).
  • Extending Microsoft Teams with provisioning and governance capabilities and allowing intranet content to be published in Teams, empowering communicators to reach people where they are working.
  • Sophisticated content targeting and amazing UX for news publishing.
  • Automated employee directories regarded as a must-have feature and commended for its excellent UI (user interface).
  • Governance features including the ability to generate GDPR-compliant reports.
  • Page Designer allows the Modern SharePoint UI to be easily customized to deliver the type of consumer-grade UX that is critical to high adoption and ROI.

We are extremely proud of our best-in-class ranking in this years ClearBox SharePoint Intranets in-a-box report. But still, we are so much more than an in-the-box solutions. Our intelligent intranet platform is also about solving information and application overload and delivering intranet solutions to companies of all sizes, including many key customers with more 100000 users. We are extremely focused on the critical requirement for better intranet governance, especially across Microsoft Teams. Additionally, we are passionate about supporting manual and front-line workers and creating a truly unified digital workplace. This is underscored by our recent acquisition of CYCL (another high performer in the ClearBox report) which further enables LiveTiles to service organizations with large deskless workforces. CYCLs low-touch mobile pocket-intranet, Condense, is purpose-built to serve the information needs of first-line employees.

To learn more about our world-class intelligent intranet solutions and how it can improve your organization, please visit our Wizdom by LiveTiles intranet page.

 

The original article was published here

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

Posted on by 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 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

Posted on by Livetiles

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.

Let's discuss your project...

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Alternatively, if you have a question and would like to find out more about us first, please use our contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

We look forward to meeting you.

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