Intranet, Office 365, Digital Workplace. How to go through a digital minefield

Most organizations go through the Digital Transformation stage. It affects many sections and departments in the organization. Some may make a mistake, and its price will be low. Others simply can not be mistaken and allow loss of productivity, knowledge or reputation of the organization.

Different organizations are in different starting positions. From "we have no Intranet" to "we have a full-fledged mobile personal account". We have seen many such different starting points. In this article I want to list them. In fact, by understanding your starting point, you can see and circumvent the mines laid before you. Below are some scenarios. You may see something familiar here ...

We have no intranet or collaboration platform. But there is an email and a calendar.

Perhaps now you will say "Wow!". But organizations that are located here can start building their roadmap from scratch and without skepticism like “here we tried five years ago, nothing happened.” Obviously, it is necessary to start moving, but the project can pass quickly, and also bring results as quickly.

We have an intranet, we made it for a very long time, this is essentially the company's internal website, collaboration or document exchange is not here.

I would say that this is the second largest group of organizations. Their intranet is their big cow that has never flown. And the main reason for marking time is that it has not yet decided on what to develop the project. Should it be SharePoint or Google? Do I need a content management module or do I need to understand the collaboration features?

We have an intranet on SharePoint. We spent money and time, but the business did not use it. Strange feeling.

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The largest group. And that awkward feeling of failure associated with SharePoint. However, the implementation of SharePoint can be successful. It's just that most people treat it like a collaboration platform. And it is not. This is a super cool developer kit (Software Development Kit), which in some cases can really become a collaboration platform. Many projects on SharePoint go out of control, a large number of additions and improvements are added, and the business at this time is slowly losing interest in it. On the other hand, you paid money for the technology, and you want it to work. With SharePoint everything is possible, just carry the money.

We build teamwork based on Office 365 and Yammer. Now the future is ours. Microsoft promised us! It will be awesome!

Well, we see history repeating itself. From Office 365, the same e-mail and calendar are used, the rest of the functions are still too coarse for a regular user to accept. IT professionals will not agree with this statement, but they will be supported by ordinary users. More and more companies see the initial limitations of Office 365. The sooner we realize that we are serving employees rather than IT projects, the sooner we will accept and overcome the disadvantages of Office 365.

We are in Office 365, but the business does not like it. Not adaptive and not friendly. Project managers roll out all Yammer, tick off “collaboration” and start new projects. Not cool!

Well. If you are in this situation - it is not very good. There must be a hero who, based on the experience of the user’s business, will be able to go to the IT director and explain the situation to him. The worst thing is that you need to add a budget to fix it. You need to find a solution that has a user-friendly interface and solves a business problem. It's more than just making Office 365 beautiful. You need to connect a convenient interface with business logic. Where to start, what to do?

Once we used a third-party solution for purchased SharePoint, and it worked great! We have collaboration, Intranet and a strategy for building a Digital Workplace. Now we have moved to Office 365, and at the same time we use the same third-party solution. We now just store everything in Office 365 instead of SharePoint, we have conjured a little with Active Directory, and, perhaps, everything. End users do not even know that their documents are now stored in the Office 365 cloud. All is for the good of users!

So you want to be here ... No decision can be static and final. Everything develops, and you need to develop after him. What changes await you in the future?

• From SharePoint 2010/2013 to Office 365
  

  
  

• From intranet to digital workplace and personal account
  

  
  

• From own data center to cloud services
  

  
  

• From socialization to the integration of business applications in collaboration
  

  
  

And it would be great to have one solution that would allow all this ... Want to know more?

Translator's note: there is a bit of advertising from the author, so we remove it)))

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From translators. If you know about other scenarios not mentioned in the article, tell us. We will give them to the author!

about the author

Carwin Heierman advises large organizations on collaboration and digital transformation. Supplier selection and project implementation are key competencies. In addition to collaboration issues, Carwin advises companies on IT infrastructure management and analytics in Office 365.