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.

 

The 5 minute business case for a mobile website and intranet

Blurred phoneYour website must support your overall business strategy, and you no doubt care about engagement, conversions (of some kind), and ultimately, sales.

Equally, your intranet must support your business strategy, and help employees get things done efficiently and effectively.

But your website, alongside your social channels, also supports your PR and reputation.

Hopefully, you and your stakeholders consider your online estate, of website and intranet, to be invaluable, but youre missing out if they do not work well on mobiles and tablets. If people cant use your website on smaller screens, they go elsewhere meaning your website is not as valuable as it could be. Further, the frustration caused to your mobile visitors could harm your reputation.

Employees with mobile access to a non-optimised intranet will struggle to complete tasks even tablets may offer a poor experience owing to the small navigation targets that can be hard to touch with a finger.

Yet it can be daunting to prove that moving to a mobile friendly design is worth the effort, and so heres exactly what to do go straight to your stats.

Step 1 compare the dwell time of visitors

Find the average length of time people spend on individual pages; this is sometimes called dwell time in conversation. Remember that very short visits are considered bounces and are of little value. When you compare time spent on your site by desktop users with time spent by mobile users, youll see a stark difference.

Google Analytics gives you the average session duration for desktop, mobile, and tablet users within the Audience > Mobile > Overview report.

Google Analytics

If your website is not optimised for mobile surfers, you might see that the average session duration for mobile is in the seconds basically, people bounce off your site when they realise its taking too long to load, or when they get frustrated with having to zoom in on tiny navigation.

In comparison, desktop dwell time should be in the minutes as people take the time to look around, and properly read your content.

A further column within the same Google Analytics report may tell you that people look at four or five pages on desktop, but only one or two on their mobile.

Yes, people have different priorities when using their mobile device to surf your site they may just want your location, or your latest blog article, but these things are still very much enhanced by a site design that is optimised for mobile and tablet use.

Employees have different priorities when using mobiles too often its about locations, phone numbers, and maybe approving documents and decisions. Optimising your intranet for mobile use isnt about making all the content available, its about making the right content and functions work well on smaller screens.

Step 2 make the case for mobile

The business case is clear. Now that youve done your three minutes of statistical research, you need only communicate what your company is missing out on.

X% of our web visitors use a mobile device, yet our website is not optimised for smaller screens and so performs poorly for these mobile visitors. Desktop visitors spend Y minutes on our site, giving them time to understand our offer, whereas mobile visitors spend around Z minutes on our site they reject our websites design and go elsewhere.

Desktop visitors tend to view V number of pages, and mobile visitors tend to view only W.

With these facts, we know we are missing an opportunity to engage certain potential clients, who expect a company like ours to be available to them any time, anywhere.

Optimising our website design for mobile use would capture this missed opportunity, and we would then see a marked increase in dwell time and page views, affording us greater chance to truly engage more potential clients.

If employees have mobile access to a non-optimised intranet, you could write a similarly concise business case based on your intranet stats. If employees do not have mobile / home access to the intranet at all then youll need to build a case for providing secure access and a mobile solution.

In five minutes, you can justify the move to a responsive web design or a mobile version of your online presence. The solution may take some time to implement, but once stakeholders agree that mobile must be part of your website strategy, momentum and budget will follow.

Mobile intranet

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