UI design is the most obvious and distinct feature; like the cover of the book, people will judge it first.
The less obvious is how you make it so employees keep coming to your site daily!
Here is how you do it.
What is SharePoint and why use it? Ultimate Guide for End Users
SharePoint Intranet Solution with Guaranteed Results
SharePoint is one of the best tools to build your company’s intranet.
However, we often hear that the platform is too restrictive and requires customization to:
Make the design look modern
Make the search easy
Integrate with other corporate systems
Above are the top reasons why companies feel they need custom SharePoint development.
According to Nielsen Norman, the best intranets can take an average of 23 months and a team of 17 to build. That’s long and expensive.
In contrast, using an intranet solution, you can reduce development by 9X for a medium-sized organization.
Here is a comparison of alternatives for building your SharePoint intranet.
Will this intranet solution meet my needs?
The best part of using SharePoint intranet solutions is that there is no waiting around for a 2-month design. You can see your design immediately.
Of course, the example designs may not be custom-tailored to your brand, but you’ll see what you’re getting into.
Fun fact: a few of our customers, months before they even reached out to us, have used the examples on our website to mock up their designs!
You’re welcome to do that too.
To help you out, below is a downloadable PDF with our top examples in high resolution.
What if I need to change something?
When intranet solutions first appeared, they were rigid (some still are).
You want a modular SharePoint intranet solution, meaning every major part of the page can be taken out of the page.
This way, you can mix and match parts of the page.
With an intranet solution like that, you can always update functionality on a page when needed.
This is precisely what we do with Origami. When design trends change (and they do), we give customers new tools to update parts of their page at will.
You don’t want a SharePoint intranet portal that tells you what you can and can’t add to the page.
Warranty
One valid question many IT leaders have with any solution is:
“What if Microsoft changes something and it breaks the intranet solution?”
You might hear responses such as “nothing ever breaks” or “we follow best practices, so nothing should ever break.”
That may be comforting but not reassuring.
Our response to that is that we provide a warranty for any defects. It’s that simple.
References: are they as good as they say they are?
Usually, customers want to know these three areas when comparing Origami’s SharePoint intranet in a box with other solutions.
How do we perform during the project?
The implementation process was perfect: the schedule, the project management, and the brainstorming activity. It helped us visualize what we're going to build. Without this process, it would have taken way longer to build our intranet, and we might have created something that is not a fit ... read more
Oscar
IT Manager at Servicon Systems inc.
How is the support post-go live?
Origami has been absolutely fantastic about their support, it's definitely the best support I've ever received from any of the external products that we use ... read more
Ilona
Application Specialist at Wise Group
How is the overall intranet solution?
Best custom intranet out there. I researched several intranet options, and Origami made the use and administration of SharePoint easy, intuitive, and design stunning. Their apps make a more engaging experience for our users ... read more
Kris
EWC Experience
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Building a Phenomenal Information Architecture for your Intranet
SharePoint Implementation: Intranet Project Plan
Most companies have never done an intranet project—and the lack of process often gets them in trouble. Without a clear process, stakeholders often come to meetings but fail to reach a consensus. They may look at the design and hate it but may not be able to articulate why it’s not working.
Fortunately, a refined process can make everything easier: the visual design, getting constructive feedback from stakeholders, content authoring, and configuration.
Office 365 Intranet: Everything You Need to Know
34 Intranet Launch Ideas for the Best Adoption Results
5 Great Intranet Examples You Can't Miss
SharePoint for Project Management: Tools and Templates
40 Eye-Opening HR Transformation Statistics
How to Structure Intranet Content: by Department or by Function
Top 7 Enhancements to Explore in Origami Intranet’s Release Built on Modern SharePoint
Creating SharePoint Intranet Governance
Summary: Intranet governance may sound complicated, but it can help you drive engaging content and decrease the burden of maintenance on your IT and Communications teams. What’s included in the initial governance list will depend on which features you’re using on your intranet. In addition to having an initial set of rules, plan to have an ongoing governance review to update the list.
Intranet governance is simply a list of processes along with responsible parties involved.
Let’s say, someone from HR wants to update an expense form template on the intranet.
Who should do it? Whoever is less busy or a specific person?
Should we keep an old version?
Should we let everyone know about the update? If so, how would we communicate this change?
Is everyone on the HR team aware of how to handle this new template?
Should anyone approve the template before it’s published?
What happens if employees have questions about the new template and, who should they contact?
As you can see, without these questions answered there are lots of potential routes. Having governance around templates, in this case, will help everyone on the intranet team understand their roles and who’s accountable for what, and the process to follow.
The alternative is to handle each request in an ad-hoc way, which increases the burden on your resources; in organizations, with > 200 users that’s not even sustainable.
What should the intranet governance document contain?
Avoid generic templates of 100 pages worth of SharePoint governance. These are too general to be useful. They provide a lot of details around out-of-the-box features but nothing related to your organization.
It doesn’t take a lot to create an efficient governance document of a few pages which tackle relevant parts of your intranet.
Here are the key SharePoint intranet governance considerations we see on every intranet project:
Sites
Creating New Generic Content Site & Team Site. If you have several templates on your site such as project sites, ensure you have checklist for those too
Naming conventions (Title and URL)
Branding
Permissions for Readers, Contributors and Owners. Ensure restricted sites have adequate permissions set up
Update to Footer Links, if the site lives under 2nd, or 3rd navigation levels
Update to other navigation links and apps
Pages
Creating a Page
Using WIKI versus Site Page
URL and naming conventions
Determine apps required for the page in this section
If apps require dependencies, add them as needed
Layout
Which page layout to use for which type of the page
[One column with sidebar]
[One column]
etc.
Content and Styles
Styles for Headings
Styles for normal text
Font sizes
Embedding rules
Home Page (this being the most prominent page it needs strict editing rules)
Rules about editing the content on the page
Rules about changing the layout of the page
Rules related to updating key apps on the home page such as new carousels, links, shout-outs, polls, etc.
Landing Pages (these are the second most prominent types of the page; they also need editing rules)
Rules about editing the content on the page
Rules about changing the layout of the page
Apps
Apps related to the home page and related rules. Such as ‘do not place more than 10 quick links on the page’, or ‘keep naming conventions of the links on the page’
Dependencies for specific apps. For example, whether apps require lists and libraries to operate, what are those, and what is the required metadata
Image resolutions for apps to best render their pages
Processes
Renaming of sites and pages to avoid broken links
Alerts on lists that collect user input
Versioning rules
Content review process
Archiving rules
Removing obsolete content
Roles and Responsibilities
An intranet contains content from a variety of sources and being able to find out quickly who is responsible for which content is not always so easy.
Every governance document must contain roles and responsibilities when it comes to key areas of running the intranet, those are:
Intranet Owners (individuals who own the home page, landing pages, and key areas of the site, they also assign area owners but are not technical users)
Area Owners (individuals who control specific areas of the site, such as HR; they also assign Area Authors)
Area Authors (individuals who create content for the area of the site)
Platform Owners (technical users who monitor and control the platform: Office 365, SharePoint, etc.)
For every area in your intranet information architecture, you need to determine who of the above will have which role, including:
Who are the key contacts?
What is the approval process?
What is the support process?
Governance Committee
The governance committee is the key to ensuring your governance evolves based on the lessons learned and decisions are made quickly to accommodate changes.
To ensure you get the most out of your governance committee, follow these key considerations:
Have a mechanism to capture issues and feedback.
Issues rarely happen randomly, they are likely a pattern or a gap that can lead to more of the same
Provide the ability to provide feedback for your users
Communicate expected SLA
Capture issues in the issues log and determine the patterns
Prioritize issues and impact (diagram below illustrates how updates can be prioritized)
Determine updates to your governance
Communicate governance changes to affected parties: Area Owners, Authors, etc
This chart illustrates how proposed governance updates can be prioritized to determine which ones to tackle next.
Conclusion
The value of governance is its practicality and transparency. The easier it is for everyone to know the process, the less of a burden managing the site will be.
Do you maintain governance plan? What are the challenges you find with it?
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.
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How-To: Create modern SharePoint site designs and SharePoint Office 365 site templates
With Office 365 you can create SharePoint site templates so that users can quickly build up their content without having to worry about configuring pages and components on them over and over again.
This technical video below demonstrates how to do that in a few steps.
In this quick how-to video, we look at how you can easily script site template provisioning in SharePoint Online modern communication and team sites.
Links in this video:
Code used in the video:
//------------------------------
// Theme Provisioning
$themepallette = @{
"themePrimary" = "#9b59b6";
"themeLighterAlt" = "#faf7fb";
"themeLighter" = "#f5eef8";
"themeLight" = "#ebdef0";
"themeTertiary" = "#d5b9e0";
"themeSecondary" = "#a569bc";
"themeDarkAlt" = "#8e4ba8";
"themeDark" = "#6e3a83";
"themeDarker" = "#572e67";
"neutralLighterAlt" = "#f8f8f8";
"neutralLighter" = "#f4f4f4";
"neutralLight" = "#eaeaea";
"neutralQuaternaryAlt" = "#dadada";
"neutralQuaternary" = "#d0d0d0";
"neutralTertiaryAlt" = "#c8c8c8";
"neutralTertiary" = "#d6d6d6";
"neutralSecondary" = "#474747";
"neutralPrimaryAlt" = "#2e2e2e";
"neutralPrimary" = "#333333";
"neutralDark" = "#242424";
"black" = "#1c1c1c";
"white" = "#ffffff";
"primaryBackground" = "#ffffff";
"primaryText" = "#333333";
"bodyBackground" = "#ffffff";
"bodyText" = "#333333";
"disabledBackground" = "#f4f4f4";
"disabledText" = "#c8c8c8";
}
Add-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Purple" -Palette $themepallette -IsInverted $false
//------------------------------
//Site Structure Provisioning
$site_script = @'
{
"$schema": "schema.json",
"actions": [
{
"verb": "applyTheme",
"themeName": "Origami Purple"
},
{
"verb": "addNavLink",
"url": "/",
"displayName": "Employee Services",
"isWebRelative": true
},
{
"verb": "addNavLink",
"url": "/",
"displayName": "Business Services",
"isWebRelative": true
},
{
"verb": "addNavLink",
"url": "/",
"displayName": "Workspaces",
"isWebRelative": true
},
{
"verb": "setSiteLogo",
"url": "https://[your logo url].png"
}
],
"bindata": { },
"version": 1
}
'@
Add-SPOSiteScript -Title "Origami" -Content $site_script -Description "Creates Origami Site Script"
Add-SPOSiteDesign -Title "Origami" -WebTemplate "68" -SiteScripts "" -Description "Origami Site"
//------------------------------
// Cleanup
Remove-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Purple"
Remove-SPOSiteScript
Remove-SPOSiteDesign
If you feel like this video is too technical, you’re not alone.
We’ve been receiving requests from many Communication Managers, Project Manager, and Designers to help them set up their intranet or a site template.
We have created a pre-built SharePoint intranet solution to help you with any customizations or configurations you may need to set up your intranet, below is an example of a modern SharePoint site template available with Origami web parts.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Director of Product at Origami. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.
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Org Chart for your SharePoint Intranet
Branding SharePoint Modern Communication Sites - Adding Corporate Color Themes
In this quick how-to video, we look at how you can apply your own company colors to SharePoint Online modern communication site. I'd call this how-to no code since small amount of code you have to copy is just copy & paste.
Links in this video:
Code used to update the theme:
$themepallette = @{
"themePrimary" = "#eab905";
"themeLighterAlt" = "#fffcf2";
"themeLighter" = "#fef9e4";
"themeLight" = "#fef3ca";
"themeTertiary" = "#fde590";
"themeSecondary" = "#fac810";
"themeDarkAlt" = "#d3a604";
"themeDark" = "#a48103";
"themeDarker" = "#816603";
"neutralLighterAlt" = "#e8dfdf";
"neutralLighter" = "#e5dada";
"neutralLight" = "#ddd0d0";
"neutralQuaternaryAlt" = "#d1bfbf";
"neutralQuaternary" = "#c9b4b4";
"neutralTertiaryAlt" = "#c3abab";
"neutralTertiary" = "#d6d6d6";
"neutralSecondary" = "#474747";
"neutralPrimaryAlt" = "#2e2e2e";
"neutralPrimary" = "#333333";
"neutralDark" = "#242424";
"black" = "#1c1c1c";
"white" = "#ece5e5";
"primaryBackground" = "#ece5e5";
"primaryText" = "#333333";
"bodyBackground" = "#ece5e5";
"bodyText" = "#333333";
"disabledBackground" = "#e5dada";
"disabledText" = "#c3abab";
}
Add-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Yellow" -Palette $themepallette -IsInverted $false
Code to remove the theme:
Remove-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Yellow"
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.
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16 Top Intranet Ideas that can guarantee User Adoption
Let me first start with this: Creating an intranet that's adopted right from the get-go is not complicated!
But often companies focus on what the intranet should look like, and not on why do we need it in the first place. This has led to too many company intranets going down the wrong path of mediocre user adoption.
SharePoint Online Security: Best Practices for 2022
SharePoint Migration: The Ultimate Guide to Planning and Tools
Quick Links
What is SharePoint migration?
SharePoint migration is a process of moving content and applications from an older version of SharePoint, or another platform altogether, to a new version of SharePoint.
Most common SharePoint migrations?
According to the study Origami did at the beginning of 2022, we found that of all SharePoint-related projects, about 14% are SharePoint migrations (including migrations to the cloud and Hybrid).
Where are companies migrating from and to?
Migration from SharePoint 2016 to 2019 [most popular]
Companies moving to 2019, in general, have heavy IT investments and dependencies that don’t make it easy for them to move to the cloud.
According to our study, more than half of current on-prem customers plan to stay on-prem.
Benefits of migrating to SharePoint 2016/2019
Protect sensitive data / regulatory or compliance requirements
Preserve customizations that would break in online infrastructure
Reduce the costs associated with moving
Retain tighter control over software updates
Limitations of migrating to SharePoint 2016/2019
Cost of maintaining the IT infrastructure/patches/security
Dated look & feel (the look can be improved with using SharePoint 2019 modern experience)
Newer features may not be as readily available as SharePoint online version (some more recent features may be available with SharePoint Subscription Edition)
Migration from on-prem to SharePoint Online [2nd most popular]
Benefits of migrating to SharePoint Online
Latest features and integrations such as Microsoft Lists, Yammer, Viva, Compliance and Security tools
Most of the infrastructure, security and redundancy are taken care of and supported by Microsoft
User licences may be less expensive
Limitations of migrating to SharePoint Online
Storage limitation with the file size in SharePoint Online limited to 100 GB (for the document library). Also, there is a limit of 1 TB plus 10 GB per user license
API limits such as the famous 500-item limit to retrieve list data from SharePoint
Data residency issues as some features in SharePoint Online can only live in US-based data centers, and that can be a problem for some non-US based organizations
Page load can be slower. SharePoint Online uses a shared online infrastructure
Migration from on-prem to Hybrid [3rd most popular]
Benefits of migrating to Hybrid
Take advantage of the newer features such as shared search, hybrid links, Power Automate etc
Stay compliant with regulatory guidelines
Save costs by keeping applications that are not compatible with SharePoint Online (custom code, full-trust solutions, workflows, in-house applications) without needing to rebuild them
Limitations of migrating to Hybrid
Complexity and costs of configuring the hybrid environment
Costs of maintaining hybrid infrastructure including patches, security, monitoring and support
How do I plan for a SharePoint migration? And what are SharePoint migration steps?
When planning SharePoint migration, the steps depend on your current environment and your end goal.
Here are the high-level steps to help you understand what to do and who to ask for input:
Review your current SharePoint environment
How many pages and sites do you have?
How many of those pages or sites have been updated in the last 3 or 6 months?
How many authors currently update content on your SharePoint site?
Who is the owner of the site or a page?
List content and solutions
List all of the custom solutions you have running in your SharePoint and where on your site are they used, and who owns them
List all of the third-party applications and where are they used, and who owns them
List all sites, libraries, and pages in a spreadsheet along with their owner
Choose SharePoint migration scope
Moving content only
Are you moving content exactly as-is (lift and shift), or are you updating pages, deleting old pages, or splitting them?
Do you have a point of contact for each piece of content (site, page)?
How much time will they have available to migrate the content?
Moving functionality and applications
Are your custom and third-party solutions compatible with the new version of SharePoint, and if not, which one of the following migration options will you choose:
Redirect/leave as-is – do you plan to keep the application on the existing platform and link to it from a new SharePoint page. This could be an inexpensive, short-term solution.
Rebuild the application/workflow to make it compatible with the new SharePoint. This might be expensive, so it only makes sense for critical applications. You’ll also need to know all users of the application so that you can verify that a replacement will meet all their needs.
Replace the applications.
Replacement is common for non-business-critical features of SharePoint, like visual design.
For example, Origami is often used as a cost-effective replacement for older custom-built intranet features—see intranet design examples.
Moving both content and the functionality
If you’re migrating from SharePoint on-prem to SharePoint Online, we recommend running Microsoft’s SharePoint migration assessment tool. This tool will scan the contents of your on-prem SharePoint and help identify the impact of migrating to SharePoint Online.
How long does SharePoint migration take?
The timeline will depend on the desired scope (as discussed in the previous section) and the resources you have available or are willing to hire.
For example, let’s say you plan to move applications from your existing SharePoint to a new SharePoint Online. In this case, you’ll need to:
Create an inventory of those applications you want to move
Get in touch with the users of each application to confirm their requirements
Have a SharePoint developer build a new solution to replace each of the applications
Test the resulting solution with users
To better understand how long your SharePoint migration will take, we recommend splitting your migration project into pilot and full migrations.
The pilot migration scope might be smaller.
It could be one site or a set of Team Sites belonging to a specific department. It’ll help you understand how things will go during full migration and how long it might take
Full migration can involve migrating the entire company SharePoint to a new version
SharePoint Migration Tools
There are so many tools that can help you speed up your SharePoint migration that it’s not possible to cover them in all fairness here.
The comparison below comes from five independent consultants who shared their high-level experience with each of the four popular tools. We recommend reaching out to migration tool vendors to get more details.
Preparing for SharePoint Migration unknowns
A few more items to help prevent unexpected delays during the migration project:
Involve content owners when planning the migration
Ask for their requirements and work on the scope so that everyone knows what they’re getting and when
Book time for people who will be doing manual content migration. Manual content updates and page rework often takes more time than expected
Set up weekly check-ins with content authors and IT and track migration tasks and velocity.
Some team members might feel optimistic and push things off to the last minute, risking delays
Test the compatibility of any tools/solutions you’re currently using and plan on using in the new SharePoint environment
Migrate to a beautiful, website like SharePoint intranet
Origami helps companies reinvent their intranet with clean, user-friendly SharePoint intranet templates.
Thank you, Miguel Angel Tena and Jim Ehrenberg, for contributing your experience and knowledge working with SharePoint migration tools.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.
6 Microsoft MVPs Share What's to Come in 2022 and Beyond as Microsoft Matches Technology to a Changing World
The workplace as we know continues to evolve with much of that change driven by technology.
Companies planning for 2022 and beyond can shape their priorities and budgets with a deeper focus on technology, thanks to some insights from Microsoft MVPs.
The best way to spend your technology dollars
When it comes to budgeting, understanding what's happening in organizations similar to yours and in the industry—particularly what is working and what isn’t—is helpful. Likewise, taking a closer look at how other organizations solve their IT challenges can help your company look ahead and prepare for technology challenges and opportunities in 2022.
Both the biggest and smallest organizations worldwide use Microsoft technology, so we convened a panel of 6 Microsoft MVPs from Canada, the United States, and the UK to discover tips and strategies for the Microsoft ecosystem.
Microsoft MVPs work with hundreds of customers across the globe, including some of the biggest names in the business. Through this exposure, MVPs gain a wealth of practical insights.
Our panel provided honest feedback about what's working and what needs improvement in Microsoft 365 Office Apps & Services. This feedback can help your organization:
Get the scoop on what other organizations are doing today and planning for tomorrow
Expand awareness of industry trends
Prepare by knowing what's likely to come next
In particular, our MVP panelists said organizations today need:
Better change management and better adoption
Improved user experience
Solid governance and compliance
Better integration
More opportunities for Microsoft Partners
Better change management and better adoption
Earlier this year, ORIGAMI conducted a study with a random sample of IT leaders from North America and Europe. When asked about their chief concerns, these leaders agreed with the Microsoft MVPs that technology adoption and change management top the list.
We took a closer look to determine why this is such a critical issue for organizations of all sizes.
Top concerns of IT leaders
Adoption is amongst the highest concerns for IT leaders.
Marc D. Anderson, Office Services and Apps MVP, sheds some light. Marc runs a consulting company called Sympraxis Consulting with an elite team of consultants specializing in building intranets, migrating to SharePoint Online, and reorganizing existing SharePoint tenants.
He says that:
"The level of enhancements from Microsoft is so fast right now that it's almost impossible to keep up!"
Marc added that he would like to see better communication about changes to the platform.
The fast pace of changes is not exclusive to professionals; in fact, end-users struggle the most when it comes to these constant changes.
Frequent changes require more training and support, and that's what Asif Rehmani's company VisualSP specializes in. Here is how Asif describes the situation:
"Our clients at VisualSP are interested in making sure that they are getting good ROI from their enterprise application investments. The only way to ensure good ROI is to make sure that there is the effective use of these applications by the users."
Asif feels many of his customer's Gen Z employees are used to lighter applications that work wherever they are without downloading a desktop application. He predicts that Microsoft, over time, will enhance the functionality of its Office and Teams web apps so that they no longer require downloading a bulky desktop app.
From the IT perspective, not having to maintain a desktop app and having users access what they need right from the browser is also a great benefit. However, many organizations are struggling with providing this experience due to security and compliance reasons. For now, Asif's company tries to reduce the friction by providing great contextual help experiences to users to enhance the adoption of many enterprise web applications.
Clearly, better adoption is directly tied to user experience.
Improved user experience
User experience touches many areas and is closely related to integrated employee experience, where all applications work together to support user flow.
Cindy Lewis specializes in Microsoft Project/Project Online and Project Management training for her customers through her business 4 Pillars of Success®. She shared a story that sheds some light on how user experience impacts employees:
"Clients continue to demonstrate to me that even though they have access to a complex set of features, they often just need the basic features to run the business. For example, multi-national companies are running major projects with Microsoft Planner and Project for the Web. They may not need a more complex solution such as Project Online or Project Desktop client. Clients often tell me they really want a nice interface."
This story confirms the experience that Asif mentioned earlier. Likewise, our own research from this summer concurs that IT leaders are concerned about employees thinking their corporate systems being too hard to use, which negatively affects adoption.
How do you know you have an adoption problem?
Leaders fear that users will feel that the system is difficult to use and abandon using it.
However, having too many smaller tools can also create confusion.
If tools are becoming more granular, then there will be more of them to choose from. The more users can choose their tool, the more data might live in more places, even if they are all on the Microsoft platform.
This abundance of available tools raises the question from users,
"I have all these tools. What do I use when?"
It also sparks concern about the governance from IT and compliance teams who wonder:
"Our data lives in 100 different places. How do we ensure compliance?"
Fortunately, one of our MVP panellists focuses almost exclusively on compliance and has insight on this topic.
Solid governance and compliance
Joanne C. Klein is an independent consultant and her work centers around ensuring compliance for organizations.
Here is the shift Joanne is seeing:
"Although many of my past engagements were focused on road-mapping the compliance journey for an organization, the focus has now shifted to implementing real controls [...]. I believe this is due to increased pressure from regulators. I work with both compliance professionals—Privacy, Security, Records Managers, HR, Legal, Risk—as well as IT technical professionals and I often find myself ‘bridging the gap’ between these two disciplines. It's fascinating to see these two areas come together – a necessary requirement for success."
Joanne believes Microsoft will make more progress in the security and compliance controls extending across the modern workplace tools users engage with today. She adds that organizations face tremendous pressure not only from regulators but also from customers, partners, and employees to ensure they're meeting their obligations, particularly in the data privacy space.
Joanne is predicting that this will call for more automated tools, reporting, and auditing to support their efforts.
Better integration
This summer, we asked our own study participants to name their top 4 technology needs, and 56% of them called out "integration with work apps."
Top features called out by IT leaders
Integration with other work apps is the top priority amongst IT leaders.
Not surprisingly, users find it hard and unnecessary to log into several work applications. They want things to be available right there and then. IT leaders also say that they don't want to pay for separate applications to allow users to complete their workflow or simply view a report.
Cindy Lewis tells us another interesting story that shows how users' experience is closely tied to integrating applications to support employees' flow of work.
"Every client I work with tells me that no matter what role they are in, they have to make reports for their boss or executive leadership. All programs have features and reports built in, but I still hear that some things are too complex or hard to find for the average worker,” she said. “While I often share solutions available in Power Automate and Power BI, users often feel they should not need to go elsewhere."
Joanne C. Klein agrees that one of the things she'd like to see improved is
"Anything and everything to make it easier for an end-user to be compliant without interrupting their workflow."
Microsoft's modern experience in SharePoint has made integration much easier, but there are many legacy customers who still use the "classic" experience. Will "classic" go away with so many enterprise and on-prem customers still using it? That's what Marc D. Anderson wants to know.
Microsoft is indeed focusing a great deal more on the cloud, and Asif Rehmani predicts that in 2022, the ecosystem for Microsoft 365 will grow to include business applications in Dynamics 365. He adds that Microsoft 365 services will become a one-stop-shop for collaboration, communication, business services, and everything in between.
In Asif's opinion, Microsoft Teams will continue to gain momentum and will become even more mainstream with users around the world. He's not the only one putting bets on MS Teams.
Lesley Crook, Office Apps and Services MVP at UK company CloudWay, primarily works on adoption and change management for her customers. Lesley predicts that MS Teams will see more integration into employees' flow of work, including Mesh avatars for MS Teams meetings for those bad hair days! To that end, it is hard not to mention Viva. The new kid on the block, Viva has many of our own customers wondering where it fits with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. Lesley also thinks that Viva could benefit from its modules connecting better together, including Ally.io—the fifth module just added to Viva. This new module promises to align people’s work with team goals and company mission giving employees more clarity and purpose on the work they are doing, Lesley shares more on her new blog.
With so many integrations being called out, it's only natural to turn to Microsoft partners for help.
More opportunities for Microsoft Partners
MVPs often collaborate closely with the Microsoft product team while working independently or within other organizations.
Christian Buckley, Office Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, manages the global alliance between Microsoft and AvePoint, a renowned Microsoft partner, and says that he is excited about the expanded focus on improving the employee experience with the Microsoft Viva offerings and associated features, and he is
"Mostly interested in seeing the Viva APIs opened up to ISV partners so that partners can develop solutions against the 4 (soon to be 5) Viva solutions."
Availability of advanced integrations such as APIs naturally require a mature, well-adopted application. Developing APIs before wide user adoption is simply illogical, so adoption is a prerequisite to advanced integrations. With new tools like Viva, it might take a while for a wide array of APIs to be accessible.
In essence, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Adoption can impact partners' ability to integrate, and partners' appetite to build integrations may depend on wider customer adoption.
Christian remains optimistic, and he predicts that
"We're going to see deeper integrations and user experiences around the fluid framework (Microsoft Loop components) that will fill some of the major gaps we have with multi-tenancy, task management, and external collaboration scenarios."
Microsoft Loop, just announced in November 2021, might require more than a simple set of APIs. Unlike MS Teams, Loop has workspaces and pages that appear to store data. If Microsoft wants to expedite the adoption of Loop, it might need to enable vendors to migrate from existing non-Microsoft equivalents to Loop.
The bottom line
Microsoft's new product announcements show that the company is committed to improving the user experience and giving its customers better choices. There are opportunities for better integration in 2022 and beyond. For partners to take on integration, they will need help from Microsoft in providing necessary product APIs and roadmaps. It may be too early for some new products, but partners remain optimistic. Ultimately, Microsoft MVPs see a lot of potential and promise in the year to come.
What are your predictions?
Do you see the trends our MVP panel is sharing in your company?
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Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.
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