We live in a time of opportunities!

And this reflects in the digital landscape were facing. For collaboration purposes alone, Office 365 and SharePoint offer a wide range of tools including modern team and collaboration sites, classic publishing sites, Yammer, and Teams.

Knowing which tool to use for which collaboration purpose can be confusing for users. Also, without appropriate guiding, the creation of new collaboration spaces can easily grow out of control.

Wizdom Workspaces module is a tool to manage and collaborate on projects or areas of interests from the intranet. But the module is more than that.

The Workspaces module in Wizdom provides an engine for collaboration governance that enables intranet admins to set up fixed standards for the creation of new collaboration spaces. Intuitively guiding users to choose the proper type of tool for a new collaboration project and maintaining the overview of all collaboration spaces created.

Today, were thrilled to introduce the full functionality of the Workspaces module to SharePoints modern experiences!

Overview of workspaces

The Workspaces modules overview web part enables you to list, and get an overview of, all workspaces created in one workspace instance. From the web part, users can create new workspaces that will automatically be connected to the same instance.

Filter and search let users quickly find relevant workspaces.

You can configure the overview web part to display only the workspaces favorited by the user. In this way, the web part can be set up to feature most relevant workspaces for each user. Behaving as Wizdoms Favorites web part for SharePoints classic experiences.

Guiding users to create collaboration spaces within company standards

Admins can define a fixed set of workspace types with distinct abilities, metadata information, and roles. This enables users to choose from a selection of workspace types, that all meet company standards, when theyre creating a new collaboration space.

The intranet admin can describe every workspace type with image, headline, and subheading making it simple for users to choose the right tool for a given collaboration project.

Aligned workspace information

From each workspace created, users can see information on the specific collaboration project like project team, phase, and status. Project managers can edit workspace information directly from the workspace in question.

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Intranets meet many different needs. An intranet helps to deliver Internal communications, content publishing, collaboration, support for customer services, onboarding, document management, HR self-service, learning, enterprise search, a front door to help employees navigate the wider digital workplace and more.

To a certain extent the needs around these different areas are similar from organisation to organisation, and subsequently intranets deployed in different organisations have similar capabilities. Its also why some of the core features of intranet in-a-box products like Wizdom are relatively similar for example in how news publishing is dealt with and is displayed.

When you have very specific requirements

The problem often comes when you want to meet the very specific requirements for your organisation. Perhaps you run your onboarding in a slightly different way to other companies or perhaps your project management methodology is unique to you? Perhaps you use a combination of different systems for one process or perhaps you have a creaking legacy system you built in-house which means employees complete tasks in a certain way?

Perhaps you have some very complex workflows and approvals for your content? Or perhaps you have a stubborn stakeholder who wants things done in a certain way? Maybe you need to have some unique branding on your intranet or different parts of your organisation do different things in different ways.

In most large or complex organisations, it is extremely likely that you will want to have some digital workplace or intranet feature that is unique to the way you operate.

Should you customise?

Sometimes when you need your intranet or digital workplace to deviate from the standard way of doing things, there is a perception that the intranet product wont  quite do exactly what you want. Thats when some organisations decide they need to customise a solution or even build their own to meet specific needs.

Customisation has some advantages in that you can meet your exact requirements, but it is expensive, means the implementation must be closely managed, has more risks and, crucially, means it is far harder to upgrade. In our view, it is better to buy than build. It also means you might not be able to take advantage of all the efficiency, usability and productivity advantages of an in-a-box product like Wizdom, especially when it is combined with a cloud platform like Office 365. For these reasons, many IT departments tend to avoid customisation if they can.

The result of avoiding customisation is that there can be tension when an IT department wants to implement a standard solution, and local stakeholders or groups of employees want to have highly customised solutions which meet their individual needs.

Sometimes is it possible for employees to change the way they work, but overall the best possible solution is when you have a highly flexible and configurable intranet and digital workplace which meets local or unique business requirements and avoids the negative associations of customisation. We often encounter perceptions that this cannot be done, but with the right product and approach, this is perfectly possible.

For example, a typical (and very powerful) combination of products is the use of Wizdom and Office 365 together. Together, were confident that they can solve the vast majority of very specific, individual intranet and digital workplace requirements.

Lets look at five ways this happens.

1. Range of features

One of the key strengths of combining Office 365 and Wizdom is the sheer breadth of capabilities and range of tools available for employees to use, meeting a variety of different needs and use cases across your organisation. In fact, its unlikely you will use all the functionality on offer, but these tools provide many options to provide a sophisticated digital workplace as new needs emerge.

For example, Office 365 alone has various options for messaging and collaboration for individuals, small teams, wider communities, project teams, those who want to collaborate on documents, and many more use cases.

Meanwhile Wizdom supports intranet publishing and internal communications for both your entire organisation and local departments. You can also establish a central policy library, manage events, provide access to learning resources, use a ticketing system for logging issues and more.  You really will be able to meet most of the requirements across your organisation.

2. Configuration of individual features

As well as the range of features available, each of the tools is also generally configurable to give as much flexibility as possible. For example, the range of different options in Wizdom allows you to build the intranet homepage you actually want with specific features and corporate branding, or to introduce the collaboration site that fully supports your project methodology.

Also, because there is the ability to introduce personalisation and content targeting, it means you can deliver targeted, relevant experiences for different audiences within your organisation, incorporating different sub-brands if necessary.

3. Wizdoms extensibility engine

We also know that there is always going to be some tweaking to standard functionality which users and organisations need and where products cannot meet every eventuality. Because of this, weve built Wizdom in such a way that it is possible to customise some elements of the product without impacting the long-term viability of the platform; you can still carry out upgrades.

While we believe the core tools of the platform will meet around 90 percent of user needs, Wizdoms extensibility engine means you can customise the last 10 percent you need and have a solution which exactly meets your requirements, but still safely evolve your digital workplace.

4. Integration with the wider digital workplace

Delivering a more integrated experience across different systems is a common direction of travel for advanced intranets and digital workplaces. This can involve a great deal of customisation, but at Wizdom we can easily integrate with the rest of the Office 365 suite, including Microsoft Teams and modern SharePoint sites. Your intranet becomes an integrated digital workplace experience.

5. Keeping up with emerging needs

There are always emerging needs within organisations caused by organisational changes, new services, the increased expectation of users and the release of new digital capabilities which are now commercially available.  Often intranet and digital workplace teams have requirements to meet these needs quickly, but find their intranet is not ready or able to do this.

One of the key advantages of Office 365 combined with an in a box product like Wizdom is that it can meet these emergent needs, either through the release of new tools within the Office 365 suite which can then be integrated seamlessly into your intranet, or through features within the intranet which have been introduced on the back of direct feedback from customers. This means your intranet is effectively up-to-date and future-proofed as an ever-expanding true digital workplace.

Meeting your requirements

Were confident that Wizdom, when combined with Office 365, can deliver most of the requirements of your business, even if they are highly specific to the way you work. You dont necessarily need to customise and if you do our extensibility engine means it can be done in a managed way.

If youve ever felt worried that an in-a-box product wont meet the very specific way your organisation works, then think again; it can be done.

The original article was published here

Go into any organisation or ask any employee and we can guarantee that there will be many business processes which can be improved or tasks which can be made easier to complete. Automation and using workflow are critical to ironing out inefficiencies, removing bottlenecks, streamlining tasks and creating new business applications. By replacing paper forms, email trails and spreadsheet-based reports, organisations save time, increase productivity and reduce frustration. Digital workplace teams can even start to reshape the things ways are done and create new opportunities to work better and serve clients.

A combination of Office 365, SharePoint Online and an intranet-in-a-box product like Wizdom provides an excellent digital workplace from which to introduce automation and workflows which will make a real difference to your organisation. Whats most exciting though, is that the options for automation with Office 365 and Wizdom include tools which no longer need to be coded or configured by developers. Instead, power-users and even content editors can create their own simpler workflows, meaning that automation and the benefits that flow from it no longer has to be exclusively delivered via your IT department.

Of course, process automation and workflows have always been possible with SharePoint, but you would generally have needed a resource who was very knowledgeable about SharePoint to be able to implement it for you. Other options would have included using a product like Nintex which some organisations have used successfully, but this comes at an additional cost. Without Nintex or a similar product, generally an average content editor using on-premises SharePoint 2013 would not have been able to produce any significant level of automation on their own without using a central IT resource.

We think this “democratisation” of automation has exciting potential for productivity improvement to reach every part of an organisation, particularly within lines of business and support functions, and individual teams. It can even spark innovation. While we think its still critical to work closely with central IT functions to reduce risk and optimise the configuration of sites, and developers will still need to be involved for complex processes, Office 365 does have the power to deliver tangible efficiencies and inspire a more digital mindset among employees.

Lets look at some of the options for delivering automation using Office 365, SharePoint Online and Wizdom.

1. Flow

Flow is an Office 365 tool that has made workflow and automation much more accessible to non-IT professionals. Flow delivers the power of automation through easy-to-use templates and the ability to build workflow experiences in the browser without leaving a page. For example, a site administrator might have created a list in SharePoint and wants to add some workflow associated with that list, such as adding a notification email if somebody adds an item to the list of a specific value. This can now be done easily within the page just by pointing and clicking.

There are also connectors inside Flow that allow interaction with third party systems. So, for example, you might want to raise a ticket on Jira every time somebody adds something to your SharePoint list or make a request to a third-party API based on some criteria. Before Flow doing that would have been very technical, but now Flow allows content editors and power users to set up their workflows independently.

2. PowerApps

PowerApps is another Office 365 tool which provides another option for automation, as well as the ability to create new experiences for users. PowerApps comes with its own app for mobile devices which can be used by those without an Office 365 license.

If you want to create some automation for a mobile workforce that use their own devices and dont have Office 365 identities, then PowerApps can be used to deliver functionality that will kick start various internal processes. For example, perhaps you want to create various approval workflows for simple business requests such as ordering a new uniform, requesting travel or raising an IT ticket. PowerApps can help you to automate employee requests via a handy mobile app.

3. Power BI

Power BI brings automation to versatile and attractive dashboards which can display the latest statistics, KPIs and other metrics. Because all dashboards update automatically, it means that reporting which previously had to be done manually and was hard to maintain, is now effortless. Power BI is used by everybody from management teams who want a snapshot of the latest company KPIs in real-time to Office 365 teams who want an overview of the adoption of different tools.

Power BI is incredibly powerful because it can pull data from a variety of sources, both within Office 365 but also from external resources. Once trained, power users should be able to create and administer several highly useful dashboards which can be consumed by any user. You can also put in options for different reports to be generated, based on the values of the data flowing in.

4. Wizdom forms and polls

Wizdom provides easy ways for content editors and site administrators to create forms and polls for users to enter information which can then be used to kick off a workflow and deliver an automated process. Lets say a content editor uses Wizdom Forms to easily build a form using drag and drop elements. Because data entered by users in the form can be captured inside a SharePoint list, it then means that list can be combined with Flow or one of the other tools to effectively create a business application. This can be straightforward to configure and end up delivering a powerful solution. A great example might be a form for booking maternity leave which would generate emails and approvals to various people that need to be involved and informed.

A similar approach can combine Wizdom polls with Flow to create workflows. For example, if an IT service was rated by users as poor in a Wizdom poll, you could automatically kick of a workflow to start a follow-up process with that user.

5. Artificial intelligence

AI is likely to become the way to deliver automation in the future, for example using chatbots as the interface to receive information to kick off workflows, but also to power different automation processes within Office 365. In fact, Wizdom will shortly be implementing some AI-powered automation into its toolset, with the ability for a bot to suggest automatic content tagging for any article as part of the standard publishing workflow. In this case, AI uses language understanding services to make sense of text and match phrases and keywords to a company taxonomy.

We can increasingly see AI as being part of automation, with new tools becoming available for content editors to be able to make meaningful independent configurations which exploit AI.

6. SharePoint workflows or SharePoint designer workflows

Before Office 365 if a SharePoint intranet needed any process automation (such as custom staged approvals) an IT professional might use SharePoint Workflows or SharePoint Designer Workflows to build the workflow. Using these tools today is still a valid approach for IT professionals, and there are other options in SharePoint too, but you need to be very savvy with how SharePoint works and be confident to make it succeed. For complex workflows and for less experienced power users who havent received the right training, initially speaking to your IT function or implementation partner is always the best first step.

Lets automate!

Automation and workflow are no longer specialist activities for central IT functions. Office 365 and tools like Wizdom are unlocking the potential to set up simple automation for power-users and even content editors. We think thats going to have a beneficial impact on organisations, not only in terms of making efficiency a habit, but also in creating a more digitally-confident workforce.

With several options, including Flow, Forms, Power BI and PowerApps, and with AI creating opportunities in the future, any organisation not currently considering automation-at-scale may be missing a trick. If youd like to discuss automation, workflow and improving processes using Office 365, SharePoint and Wizdom then get in touch!