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Interact for Office 365 Maximizing the value of your digital workplace
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365 As Microsoft’s flagship offering for businesses worldwide, Office 365 provides an ever-increasing suite of cloud-based applications designed to make organizations more productive and efficient. From well-known and core business applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Skype for Business, to more niche offerings such as PowerBI and Staff Hub, Office 365 has established its value in the workplace, becoming the default choice for organizations worldwide with over 100 million monthly active users. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Interact has worked closely with Microsoft technologies for many years. We believe the intranet should be the centrepiece of any organization’s digital workplace, working seamlessly
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with Office 365 and other applications to provide a frictionless experience for employees. This guide is designed to support businesses in understanding how these different technologies can support and work intuitively with one another. Whether you already have Office 365 deployed, are currently undertaking an Office 365 project, or you’re considering implementation in the future, this guide can help you make an educated decision on the right intranet solution for your organization.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Contents The Digital Workplace
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Office 365: an overview
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What is an intranet, and where does it fit?
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Interact for Office 365
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Interact and SharePoint
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Azure Active Directory, Skype
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Microsoft Teams, Yammer, PowerBI, Calendar
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The role of SharePoint Online
Is SharePoint Online an intranet?
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Hub Sites
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Limitations of Hub Sites
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Communication Sites
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Interact and SharePoint - an in-depth look
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Interact beyond Office 365
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Corporate communications
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One-to-many communications
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Many-to-many communications
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Search
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Seamless integrations
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Engagement tools
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Productivity tools
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Keeping your organization compliant
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A streamlined and branded mobile experience
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Interact for Office 365: for a centralized digital workplace
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
The digital workplace Before exploring the role and functionality of both Office 365 and Interact in more detail, it’s worth considering the bigger picture of what constitutes ‘the digital workplace’.
In a digitized world, technology and applications are at the heart of how we work. In order to perform essential tasks and connect with the people and information required to do their jobs effectively, ‘line of business’ departments and employees are sourcing an array of applications to support their day-to-day roles. Cloud-based tools and the growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) models for enterprise applications have increased flexibility and choice. Factor in a growing BYOD and BYOA
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culture, as well as the sharp rise in mobile working, and it will come as no surprise that enterprise organizations have seen the average number of applications rise to over 500 in recent years. (Source: Ben Kepes, Forbes) These applications each serve a single, defined purpose. They’re best of breed products, designed to solve a particular problem. Together, they create the digital workplace landscape.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Broadly, the common digital landscape can be categorized into the following:
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Personal file storage: for the cloud-based storage of day-to-day files that don’t need to be centrally or collectively available to the business as a whole
Document Management System: enterprise-wide document storage for shared and centralized access to information, often with additional features to facilitate collaborative working, file sharing, and version control
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Private, small group communications and ESNs: used to facilitate teams to collaborate or work on projects quickly and intuitively, with functionality such as real-time messaging and file sharing
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Intranet platforms, such as Interact: employee-focused applications designed to facilitate corporate communication, improve the employee experience, and complement the digital workplace by connecting with other tools
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Business productivity: specialist applications designed to solve a diverse range of business productivity challenges, ranging from customer service and human capital management to project management and more
In order to drive productivity, efficiency, and a positive user experience for employees, each of these distinct types must work intuitively and seamlessly with one another.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Office 365: an overview A core foundation of the digital workplace for many, Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of typically over 20 applications for the common S3 licensing subscription, made available on a cloud-based model to organizations. In the digital workplace landscape, these offerings are dispersed across the different categories within the suite including the most popular applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Online, but also lower adoption applications such as Planner, Sway, or Delve. For the majority of employees, whether Office applications are cloud hosted has little impact on their dayto-day roles. Work is still performed in the popular native applications, such as producing documents in Word or calculations in Excel on their laptop or PC. For front-line employees, such as store workers, delivery drivers, or production line staff, the Microsoft Office suite may not feature in their daily roles at all. At a strategic level from the IT perspective, it’s a different story. A marked shift away from traditional on-premise and self-managed solutions is now commonplace in many forward-thinking organizations; for most industries, a move to the cloud is a long-term strategic decision. As a cloud-first solution with everything handled ‘as a service’, including hosting and back-up of products like Exchange and SharePoint, Office 365 provides an
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answer that aligns with this long-term vision. When considering the expansion and future-proofing of the corporate technology stack, therefore, it’s imperative that any future purchases or projects will align, complement, and/or integrate with Office 365. IT departments are increasingly using this as a benchmark to drive decision-making. Furthermore, the need to avoid future complexity, increase efficiency, and provide a seamless user experience is a constant focus for today’s CTO/CIO. Alongside this, there is a continual and critical need to avoid risk and maintain security of data. In an evergrowing digital workplace, this is no small task.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
What is an intranet and where does it fit? Like any business tool or application, an intranet has a defined purpose and role in an organization. Understanding where the intranet fits in the bigger picture of the digital workplace is vital to its long-term success and value to an organization. Historically, intranets have been regarded as serving a multitude of purposes; from a content management system to a team collaboration or productivity tool. At Interact, we believe the role of the intranet has evolved:
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The purpose of the modern intranet is to support organizations in connecting and informing each and
Contrary to previous definitions, an intranet is not designed for team collaboration; purpose-built applications such as Microsoft Teams or Slack are ideal for this purpose. Nor is an intranet a document management system; solutions such as Microsoft’s SharePoint are designed to meet this specific need. This isn’t to say that an intranet can’t support these goals; however, this isn’t its core purpose. Where an intranet delivers true value for a business is in the process of connecting and informing employees.
individuals to the organization and its goals, vision, and direction is an acute painpoint with potentially damaging and long-term implications for those organizations who fail to get it right. This purpose, therefore, is crucial. The more this purpose can be aligned with broader business objectives and needs, the easier it is to get the resources and budget needed.
Dispersed or globalized organizations in particular face a constant challenge in this regard, with employees based in multiple offices, on the front-line, on the production line, constantly transient, or home-based. Distributing information and connecting those
every employee.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact and SharePoint Interact offers out-the-box deeplevel integration with SharePoint Online allowing you to bypass the issue of having to create multiple sites and folders to ensure you only make relevant information available. Selectively choose and index the sites and/or specific folders you want users to search and surface through your intranet, empowering staff to access
Interact is designed to support your business and its users in maximizing their Office 365 experience and getting the most from your investment and licences. Our out-the-box intranet solution can be quickly and easily configured to work alongside a number of your Office 365 applications, creating an intuitive and seamless digital workplace experience.
SharePoint
Skype for Business
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Azure Active Directory
Teams
Calendar
Yammer
Outlook
Stream
vital, up-to-date information from a single and centralized point. Users can have unhindered access to the latest versions of your Office 365 documents, without ever needing to leave your intranet. And once located, they can use Interact’s popular features to add value and context to your content.
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Stay compliant by maintaining an audit trail of who has read key documentation
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Add a quiz to your content to assess how well employees have understood content
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Search SharePoint files via Interact, then view documents inline within the intranet
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Allow users to comment on documents, @mentioning co-workers or other content
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Tag content for more accurate search results
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Allow users to be notified when key content is updated
Tasks
PowerBi
Search in Interact includes indexed SharePoint files, and simple @ mentioning of documents hosted in your SharePoint DMS, for a seamless and user-focused experience.
We explore the role of SharePoint and how Interact can maximize and enhance its value in your workplace more fully later in this guide.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Calendar Present your shared Office 365 calendars inside Interact, giving employees quick access to what’s happening in your organization. From meeting room availability to corporate events, employees can quickly view what’s happening on any device, in any location.
Outlook Reduce the number of apps that are used day-to-day by providing your employees with real-time access to emails from within their intranet. Unread new emails are shown on your intranet homepage for speed, ease and convenience.
Tasks Help your employees keep in control of their productivity by presenting their personal Office 365 Tasks directly through your intranet. Mark tasks as complete or edit as required.
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Skype for Business
Azure Active Directory
If Skype plays a crucial role in your business communications, launch those conversations directly from your intranet. Interact and Skype for Business enable your employees find colleagues quickly and initiate chat sessions, conduct online meetings, and launch video and audio calls quickly and easily.
Interact can be automatically synchronized with Azure Active Directory, allowing any updates to central profiles to be seamlessly reflected within your intranet People Directory. Creation and deprovisioning of users is easy and efficient, reducing the IT burden and ensuring users are viewing profile data that is current and correct.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Delve Find and organize all Office 365 files and documents that are of most interest to the user – and present them in your intranet. Add favourites, create boards and see what colleagues are working on to create an area that is customized and closely aligned to the individual without compromising permissions or security.
Stream From your CEO’s latest presentation to your bestselling products, easily embed your Microsoft Stream videos inside your content. Receive instant feedback with likes, shares, and comments.
Power BI Get easy visibility of your critical dashboards and analytics from within your intranet, embedding them onto your homepages, team pages, or department areas.
Yammer Add your Yammer feed into Interact using Yammer Embed and bring all your enterprise social networking conversations together in one place.
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Interact is continually developing how it integrates with the Office 365 suite, understanding not only the purpose and value of the different applications available, but also their limitations – and where an intranet can complement or support these.
Looking back at that digital workplace landscape, we will now explore more fully the defined purpose of these different categories and in particular, how Interact works with, and improves the employee experience of, SharePoint Online as part of Office 365.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
The role of SharePoint Online Document Management Systems (DMS) such as SharePoint Online (as part of Office 365) offer organizations enterprise-wide document storage, alongside additional features such as collaborative working (for example, enabling multiple users to work simultaneously in Word or Excel) or version control and secure access. Microsoft SharePoint is a recognized leader in this market, as the core DMS product offered by Microsoft since its inception in 2001. SharePoint Online is the latest iteration, delivered as part of the Office 365 suite. Its core purpose is enterprise file storage and management for electronic documents and records, including functionality such as storage, archiving, searching and retrieval.
In addition, SharePoint Online offers further benefits aligned to the Office 365 ecosystem, such as integration with Yammer and Office 365 Groups, and native integration with Active Directory for encrypted/information rights managed synchronization. It is generally used as a replacement for the traditional on-premise corporate file server, offering a futureproof solution that is scalable, accessible, backed-up, and managed.
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There’s no point having a fantastic looking intranet if an employee still can’t find what they’re looking for.
Since the advent of Office 365 with SharePoint Online, a number of vendors have sought to offer solutions ‘built’ on Office 365: however, the underlying issue of merging these two purposes still resides. Products designed to move SharePoint from its core purpose as a DMS into a
communication tool with bolt-on applications will still retain that vast volume of information stored in the DMS. There’s no point having a fantastic looking intranet if an employee still can’t find what they’re looking for.
But what about SharePoint Hub Sites and Communication Sites? SharePoint’s architecture is based on the principle of ‘sites’, which has been a long-standing pain point for internal communicators and IT alike. The curse of ‘site creep’ is common, and in larger organizations, this can result in hundreds of sites with unique permission settings, containing thousands of documents.
It’s a spider web that quickly becomes unmanageable. In addition, sites are self-contained. This reinforces siloes of information, as there is no easy mechanism to surface and display information to end-users from multiple sites to one homepage.
Is SharePoint Online an intranet? The answer to this question lies in looking at its core purpose. A DMS is primarily used to store files; it’s around this foundational purpose that Microsoft SharePoint is designed. By nature, any document management system will grow and evolve to house thousands of files over time, particularly in enterprise-level organizations. For this reason, many historic SharePoint on-premise deployments that have been customized and positioned as an ‘intranet’ have
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quickly ceased to viable. Organizations with existing SharePoint products, such as v.2007 or v.2010, are realizing their redundancy; due to the sheer volume of content, they are unfit for purpose as an intranet. However, seeking a resolution by looking at another DMS product – even a cloud-based version - also fails to address the core purpose of an intranet: to connect and inform each and every employee.
Hub Sites As a proposed resolution, SharePoint introduced Hub Sites. These aggregate news or content from all the sites connected to it, curating information for a collective experience of those sites.
However, Hub Sites have their limitations. To function correctly, they ideally require a ‘shared responsibility model’ between the site owners and IT; it’s highly likely considerable technical effort will be required to effectively create a Hub Site that can serve as a corporate intranet homepage.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Limitations of Hub Sites It’s been noted by many in the industry that Hub Sites will likely struggle to deliver standard requirements for internal communication professionals. These include:
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As ever when you invest in SharePoint, you end up
they require a ‘shared responsibility model’ between the site owners and IT; considerable technical effort is required to effectively create a Hub Site that can serve as a corporate intranet.
working the way Microsoft thinks is best. Sam Marshall - Clearbox Consulting
Hub Sites don’t work as a corporate homepage: Using a Hub Site as a home page will not provide the required functionality. The usual requirements, such as communication controls, targeting, personalization, and user experience flexibility are missing for communication professionals. Lack of content control: Communication professionals want control of content on a homepage including where headlines are positioned and how long they’ll remain in place. For smaller organizations this may suffice but larger organizations will not accept this missing functionality. Heavy Administrative Burden: whether it’s governance of groups and permissions, communications controls or targeting and personalization, to get SharePoint to work as a true enterprise intranet requires a great deal of technical effort.
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Hub Sites have their limitations. To function correctly,
Communication Sites Launched in 2017, Communication sites were introduced in Office 365 as a means to improve the user experience of a site. Communication Sites allow those with permissions to create a responsive and visually appealing front-end to a site, using web parts and a building-block approach.
push corporate news out, for example, there is no way of assigning priority or anchoring a story to the homepage of either a Communication Site or a Hub Site. Any new story will displace the older ones. Communication Sites can soon look stale if content is not refreshed regularly.
These are best-suited to visual content and offer some of the experience of an intranet in terms of look and feel; however, the functionality is otherwise limited. Again, these present silo-ed content from a single site, rather than a curation from multiple sites; volume of documents and information remains an issue. A lack of governance or workflow around publishing means control over information pushed out is limited; for internal communicators looking to
In addition, a Communication Site cannot be retrospectively applied to an existing SharePoint Site. To utilize this functionality, all documents within an existing Site – for example, your HR Site, which hosts important information and documents for employees – would need to be transferred to a new Communication Site. Multiply this over many sites, and you have a time-consuming and IT intensive task.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact and SharePoint - an in-depth look With the understanding that the core purpose of a successful intranet is to inform and connect employees, Interact has approached the challenges presented by SharePoint by understanding its role and limitations as a corporate file storage system. Vital policies and information may be stored in SharePoint, which are critical for company-wide employees to access. However, SharePoint can also become the dedicated ‘document dumping ground’ in an organization.
A useful intranet pushes relevant, timely, current information to employees: not, as a SharePoint site would, every historic version or draft saved previously.
To put this in context, let’s imagine a SharePoint site owned by the HR department. Within this site will be essential policies, onboarding information, vital forms and information employees need and want to access regularly – for example, your travel expenses form, or your work from home policy. There will also be previous drafts or versions; an outdated data protection policy maybe, or the unfinished draft of your confidentiality policy. Most HR departments will also house confidential employee records and personnel files; perhaps recorded grievances or complaints; alongside contracts, salary information, or performance reviews. These are all strictly private and if a SharePoint site needs to be accessed by employees, couldn’t be housed here. This means using multiple sites or sub-sites – leading to site creep, or the need for IT to manage complex and often untrustworthy permissions, making privileged information vulnerable or information stored on individual PCs or internal servers, undermining the strategic goal of cloud-based hosting and management of company information.
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Interact offers out-the-box connectivity with SharePoint Online (alongside v2013 and v 2016) with the ability to selectively choose and index which sites and/or specific folder(s) your communications team wishes to surface for employees. This is simple, quick, and easy to set up and manage, offering real-time connection with your SharePoint DMS to ensure staff are accessing the latest versions of important documents and information. In the case of the HR site, the department could confidently and securely store all their information within one site. Single or multiple folders within that HR department site, which are approved for employees to access and have the most up-to-date content in, would be indexed and pulled into Interact. Users and the HR team alike can be confident staff are accessing the right information quickly and efficiently, with no compromise of privileged information or data.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact beyond Office 365
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85% of non-desk employees say the communication they receive on the job is not enough.
While Interact is designed to work intuitively with a broad range of Office 365 tools, its unique position and purpose within the digital workplace landscape means it can answer some of those critical gaps not fulfilled by the Microsoft suite or other technoligies. By complementing and supporting the other elements of the technology stack, the intranet has a valuable role to play in bringing it all together for an outstanding employee experience.
Connecting staff to critical business information without an Office 365 licence
In many organizations, there will be a proportion of the workforce who are either non-desk based or don’t have access to technology as a day-to-day part of their role; for example, front-line workers, those on the production line, or perhaps those delivering goods on the road. As a result, they won’t have a corporate Office 365 account: making the proposal of using SharePoint as an intranet problematic, unless heavy investments are in additional licenses. Interact offers an ideal solution for connecting and informing offline or hard-to-reach employees without the unnecessary additional cost of Office 365 licences for each individual employee. Despite out-the-box integration with SharePoint, Interact has no underlying reliance on either SharePoint or Office 365 in terms of functionality; furthermore, an intuitive and easy-to-use content management system (CMS) as part of Interact ensures valuable and relevant content can be displayed to staff without demanding a corporate account.
Corporate communications One of the primary drivers for employee engagement and experience of the workplace lies in how connected and informed your staff feel to the business and its strategic direction, demanding company-wide communications that connect each and every employee:
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not just those who happen to be in head office, or who are easy-to-reach. This includes remote workers, frontline employees dealing with your customers, offline staff who help create and deliver your product, or simply those without regular access to technology.
The business cost for failing to communicate effectively with employees is extensive, causing everything from low morale and high staff turnover to poor customer service, decreased productivity levels, and an impact on company brand and reputation. Lack of engagement often only comes to light during employee feedback mechanisms such as annual or pulse surveys, at which point C-suite sponsorship of new initiatives to address the issue come to light.
At Interact, our primary purpose and mission is to support organizations by facilitating corporate communications and helping them to inform and connect their greatest asset: their employees. Our intranet software and services are designed to empower communicators to deliver one-to-many, and many-to-many communications.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
One-to-many communications One-to-many communications are the foundation of any successful intranet. The ability for a centralized communications team to easily push out relevant and timely content in a top-down format to defined audience groups is essential to keep staff informed about their organization.
From more formal communication around policies or compliance to latest news and events, informal blogs, or broadcasting critical information during a crisis situation, Interact offers a suite of tailored features designed to facilitate one-to-many communications for any situation or requirement. These include:
Broadcasts for when you need to communicate important information, quickly; for example in times of crisis or emergency Content areas and pages; for example, for the publication of company news and updates The ability to upload or pull SharePoint documents into defined content areas; for example, your HR or IT policies Blogs for more informal content Calendars and events
What about hard-to-reach employees? On average, up to 75% of employees in any given organization are nondesk-based. While this figure includes individuals who will have access to a computer – for example, remote workers and telecommuters, or sales staff on the road – there are also a proportion of employees who won’t have easy access to technology at all. However, 95% of American and UK citizens own a cellphone of some kind. Interact offers a mobile-first responsive intranet experience, alongside native apps for iOS and Android: enabling organizations to reach each and every employee. For those times when it’s vital to get the message out, our Broadcasts feature empowers communicators to get critical or timely information to all employees regardless of their device or location – all from within your intranet. Display a banner on the intranet; send an SMS message or e-mail; or block users from visiting any areas on the intranet until they have read and acknowledged the message.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
With Interact, communicators can reach users regardless of device, department, or location. The Interact Personas feature allows for flexible segmentation according to a diverse range of criteria, while flexible and engaging homepages push relevant information to users as soon as they
login. Homepages can also be tailored to ensure users are viewing relevant communication; for example, by creating an onboarding homepage for new starters, or a management homepage to display business KPI boards to those at senior level.
Many-to-many communications Lack of engagement amongst employees not only arises from a lack of effective top-down communication, but from the feeling that they aren’t heard or are disconnected from the organization. Empowering staff with a voice and facilitating two-way conversations through the use of ‘many-to-many’ communication tools not only provides opportunity for employees to feedback and be involved with their
organization; it also provides a selfservice approach to resolve common questions or challenges. When staff can connect with one another and crowdsource for input, ideas, or experiences, true collaboration and innovation can flourish. Interact facilitates this enterprisewide need with collaboration features designed for many-t0-many communications. These include:
Forums For corporate communication teams looking to gain input from across their organization or tap into employee knowledge and expertise, Forums offer an ideal solution. Using discussions, questions, and ideas, forums can be utilized to encourage a culture of knowledge sharing. Forums offer an enterprise-wide space for users to get involved, no matter where they’re based.
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In one customer example at Interact, an intranet project was launched with a primary objective to cut calls to central operations by up to 90%, reducing not only
Answers or solutions are centrally hosted and searchable, saving time lost to repeat requests; for example, rather than multiple individuals calling a HR representative to ask about the flexible working policy, hosting this on the intranet can significantly reduce the number of calls, saving time and money internally. In one customer example at Interact, an intranet project was
launched with a primary objective to cut calls to central operations by up to 90%, reducing not only resource requirements and time spent, but also associated overtime costs. Ideation can also be facilitated through an intranet, enabling organizations to tap into the diverse range of skills, expertise, and interests amongst their staff. Topics such as environment concerns (e.g., ‘How can we be greener?’), employee benefits (e.g., ‘would gym membership or a cycle to work program be beneficial to our staff?) and operational improvements (e.g., ‘the Customer Team could really benefit from faster access to information’) can be identified and rolled out across the business, encouraging all employees to have their say.
resource requirements and time spent, but also associated overtime costs.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Seamless integrations
Social features Employees who are empowered to feedback, contribute, and have their voices heard show higher levels of engagement and brand advocacy towards their organization. Social technology has given millions of users worldwide a voice; it can serve the same purpose in an intranet, facilitating enterprise-wide collaboration and input. Features such as being able to comment, @mention, share, upload shared galleries, add events to calendars, engage with polls or surveys, or
Alongside deep-level integration with Office 365, Interact facilitates a more efficient and productive way of working through the use of integration functionality and
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enterprise search, providing users with a natural and centralized access point to an organization’s toolset and information.
At enterprise level, the average organization has over 500 applications as part of its technology stack.
simply add a reaction to a post or piece of information, are all powerful yet subtle ways to tap into a companywide collaborative way of working.
Search An intranet’s purpose is to connect and inform employees; providing information that is timely, relevant, and trusted. Powerful search functionality is the number one feature requested by communication professionals when seeking an intranet solution; particularly as the digital workplace continues to expand across multiple applications, with vital information often residing across a variety of different locations. Research suggests knowledge workers spend up to 19% of their working week searching for and gathering information; significant productivity and efficiency gains can be made from making this more seamless and intuitive for staff. Enabling relevant information to be sourced in a single application, rather than having to
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search many, is key to achieving the operational efficiency aspirations of communication professionals. Interact’s Enterprise Search includes out of the box integration with SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2013 / 2016 on-premise, alongside alternative storage providers (i.e. Google Drive, Box) using our powerful Enterprise Search API. CMS functionality as part of Interact, including #tagging and keywords, ‘Best Bets’ (which enable intranet managers to prioritize particular content for certain search terms, ensuring it appears top of the list) and ‘Failure to find’ search analytics make for an intelligent and intuitive search experience that supports users to find the right information, quickly.
There is now a plethora of enterprise applications available, designed to solve a diverse range of business productivity challenges. From Zendesk for customer service and Workday for human capital management, to Asana for project management and Salesforce for customer relationship management: the enterprise application marketplace has expanded exponentially in recent years. Now, there is a business productivity tool to solve every niche need or challenge.
Naturally, the challenge with this diverse ecosystem is how to provide a frictionless and intuitive user experience for employees, without creating the inevitable technology fatigue of ‘yet another application’. In addition, the constant hopping from application to application, alongside multiple logins and the inevitable duplication of information or effort across different platforms, has a direct impact on employee productivity levels.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Single sign-on Interact supports a seamless experience for employees using out-the-box single sign-on (SSO) functionality; offering secure and simplified integration not only with
Engagement tools Office 365, but a vast range of business productivity tools to give quick and easy access to the applications they need to perform their roles.
Employee engagement has risen on the management agenda in recent years, and for good reason. Engaged employees bring a vast range of
benefits to their organization, driving improvements in everything from customer service to the bottom-line.
Engage and enable your employees and here’s how you could benefit Authentications Interact partners identity management providers such as OKTA, OneLogin and G Suite, as well as native support for ADFS for Office
365; providing peace of mind for IT decision makers when considering integration. To find out more, visit the Interact Authentications page.
Increase employee
Increase customer
performance by
satisfaction rate by
40%
18%
Multiply your
Decrease employee turnover by
x4 1/2
14%
Source: Hay Group
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Interact for Office 365
Interact offers a variety of tools to not only support an engaged workforce,
Interact for Office 365
Productivity tools
but to help benchmark and measure engagement within your organization. These include: Polls to obtain and gauge the engagement level of staff A comprehensive analytics suite, to understand how your employees are engaging with and using your intranet; covering everything from frequency of use to the most popular or engaged-with pages and content Endorsements to supplement employee profiles on your intranet with endorsed skills, recognizing their strengths and value to the business Rewards and Recognition Badges to cultivate a strong culture of recognition that will motivate and engage staff
The demand to improve productivity and drive efficiency in business continues to be at the top of the C-suite priority list; particularly in an
age of digital noise and distractions. An intranet can streamline many processes and improve efficiency in a variety of ways:
Enterprise search: as we’ve already explored, empowering staff to find reliable and relevant information quickly is critical to efficient working. A centralized search that pulls information from a variety of sources and can recommend the ‘Best Bet’ can save significant time and effort, helping employees be more productive. A homepage to the workplace: using ‘quick links’ and Single Sign-On (SSO) to connect with other vital business tools and applications from a single point can reduce time spent logging into different tools Self-service: hosting answers to commonly asked questions and vital business policies in an intuitive and easy-to-find way empowers staff to selfserve, reducing internal tickets or strain on operations staff People Directory: Interact’s rich people profiles go beyond name, email, department. Adding skills and expertise alongside interests onto individual profiles can help employees connect with colleagues who can help more quickly; for example, searching for an Italian speaker to help with a customer, or someone with CSS knowledge to fix an issue. Workflow and forms: bringing commonplace operational workflows and processes into your intranet can create significant time savings and efficiencies. By making paper-based forms electronic and accessible via your intranet you can save valuable employee time, as well as improve the accuracy of information.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Keeping your organization compliant
Interact has a number of tools to help with this: Mandatory Read: Interact’s Mandatory Read functionality within an easy-to-manage CMS enables communicators to quickly and easily create essential documents and push them out to defined employee user groups. Asking users to confirm they have read and understood the communication ensures you have an audit trail for compliance purposes. Broadcasts: Send and track important information across multiple channels from within your intranet, and monitor receipt and acknowledgments with visibility into messages delivered and read, and how many have yet to be seen. Quizzes: these can be used to test user understanding and knowledge, while analytics allow your communications team to track who’s read and responded, sending reminders via email or push notifications to those who have yet to confirm.
Ensuring employees adhere to best practice and abide by compliance requirements or standard operating procedures is vital not only for legal purposes, but to reduce risk, safeguard both staff and customers, meet health and safety requirements, and reduce accidents or incidents in the workplace. With a growing focus on data protection and the introduction of GDPR in Europe, alongside political turbulence leading to changes in regulatory requirements, international trade agreements, tariffs and more, keeping employees compliant is more vital than ever
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before. However, with up to 75% of employees classed as non-deskbased, potentially without access to technology as part of their day-today roles, keeping those individuals informed and acting in accordance with best practice is a significant challenge. These hard-to-reach staff are, however, typically those on the frontline who are the most essential to keep informed, as well as be able to gauge whether they have indeed read communications that have been sent out.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
A streamlined and branded mobile experience Encouraging hard-to-reach employees to adopt mobile business applications can be a common barrier for internal communications. This is particularly true of the Office 365 suite. Personalize your Interact app to align to your organization’s brand. Instrumental in encouraging employees to download and access your intranet from any place at any time.
Microsoft offers a range of mobile apps aligned to its Office 365 offering, with an individual app created for each application; from Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to Yammer, SharePoint, PowerBI and more. The result is an often overwhelming and confusing experience for employees, who may be faced with the reality of requiring five, 10, even 15 apps to fully utilize the mobile Office 365 experience. On a company-owned device with Mobile Device Management (MDM), these apps can be installed as a mandatory requirement; however, the sheer volume will be a barrier to adoption. In organizations operating a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) model, in which employees use their personal cellphone to connect with the business, it is unrealistic to expect individuals to install this number of applications.
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Interact offers a single, businesspersonalized mobile experience that offers an ideal solution. Employees can download a single native app for iOS or Android that will serve as the access point to vital business communications, as well as providing integration with the major Office 365 applications. This streamlined experience removes the burden of multiple apps, making it easier and more intuitive for employees to adopt and use.
Your app here
In addition, the Interact mobile app offers white labelling functionality, meaning it can be completely personalized and aligned to your organization’s internal brand. This tailored experience delivers higher levels of engagement, helping to get those hard-to-reach employees downloading – and using – your business’s intranet.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365: for a centralized digital workplace
About Interact Interact is a global enterprise software company that serves intranet software to over one million users across more than 850 organizations. We specialize in solving internal communication and collaboration challenges by combining our sophisticated intranet software with outstanding professional services, focusing on developing long-term strategic partnerships with our customers.
The demand for individuals to come together as teams to collaborate or work on projects has always existed. In today’s modern workplace, however, those individuals may be working from a variety of locations, making that process more challenging than ever. In order to connect employees effectively and empower them to achieve their goals, organizations need powerful tools to bring together people, conversations, and content. The Office 365 suite will continue to
The partnership between Interact
be a staple for global businesses and
and Office 365, therefore, is
each individual piece of software has a
complementary. The two serve
distinct role to play. An intranet plays
distinct purposes within an
a critical role in facilitating corporate
organization, each offering a variety
communications as its primary
of benefits; however, when the two are
purpose; it can also offer a broad
unified and work together intuitively,
spectrum of other benefits through
organizations can realize the true
integration with other vital business
value and potential of the digital
tools, including Office 365, alongside
workplace.
Interact has offices in Manchester and New York, and operates across the whole of the US and Canada, EMEA and Australia. Contact Us: New York: +1 (646) 564 5775 Manchester: +44 (0)161 927 3222 [email protected] www.interactsoftware.com
out-the-box features designed to bring that digital workplace together.
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Interact for Office 365
Station House, Stamford New Road, Altrincham, Cheshire WA14 1EP, UK
21 W. 46th St. 16th FL, New York NY 10036
+44 (0) 161 927 3222 [email protected]
+1 (646) 564 5775 [email protected]
www.interactsoftware.com 44
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365 As Microsoft’s flagship offering for businesses worldwide, Office 365 provides an ever-increasing suite of cloud-based applications designed to make organizations more productive and efficient. From well-known and core business applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Skype for Business, to more niche offerings such as PowerBI and Staff Hub, Office 365 has established its value in the workplace, becoming the default choice for organizations worldwide with over 100 million monthly active users. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Interact has worked closely with Microsoft technologies for many years. We believe the intranet should be the centrepiece of any organization’s digital workplace, working seamlessly
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with Office 365 and other applications to provide a frictionless experience for employees. This guide is designed to support businesses in understanding how these different technologies can support and work intuitively with one another. Whether you already have Office 365 deployed, are currently undertaking an Office 365 project, or you’re considering implementation in the future, this guide can help you make an educated decision on the right intranet solution for your organization.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Contents The Digital Workplace
6
Office 365: an overview
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What is an intranet, and where does it fit?
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Interact for Office 365
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Interact and SharePoint
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Azure Active Directory, Skype
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Microsoft Teams, Yammer, PowerBI, Calendar
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The role of SharePoint Online
Is SharePoint Online an intranet?
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Hub Sites
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Limitations of Hub Sites
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Communication Sites
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Interact and SharePoint - an in-depth look
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Interact beyond Office 365
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Corporate communications
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One-to-many communications
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Many-to-many communications
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Search
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Seamless integrations
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Engagement tools
33
Productivity tools
35
Keeping your organization compliant
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A streamlined and branded mobile experience
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Interact for Office 365: for a centralized digital workplace
4
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
The digital workplace Before exploring the role and functionality of both Office 365 and Interact in more detail, it’s worth considering the bigger picture of what constitutes ‘the digital workplace’.
In a digitized world, technology and applications are at the heart of how we work. In order to perform essential tasks and connect with the people and information required to do their jobs effectively, ‘line of business’ departments and employees are sourcing an array of applications to support their day-to-day roles. Cloud-based tools and the growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) models for enterprise applications have increased flexibility and choice. Factor in a growing BYOD and BYOA
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culture, as well as the sharp rise in mobile working, and it will come as no surprise that enterprise organizations have seen the average number of applications rise to over 500 in recent years. (Source: Ben Kepes, Forbes) These applications each serve a single, defined purpose. They’re best of breed products, designed to solve a particular problem. Together, they create the digital workplace landscape.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Broadly, the common digital landscape can be categorized into the following:
01 02
Personal file storage: for the cloud-based storage of day-to-day files that don’t need to be centrally or collectively available to the business as a whole
Document Management System: enterprise-wide document storage for shared and centralized access to information, often with additional features to facilitate collaborative working, file sharing, and version control
03
Private, small group communications and ESNs: used to facilitate teams to collaborate or work on projects quickly and intuitively, with functionality such as real-time messaging and file sharing
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Intranet platforms, such as Interact: employee-focused applications designed to facilitate corporate communication, improve the employee experience, and complement the digital workplace by connecting with other tools
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Business productivity: specialist applications designed to solve a diverse range of business productivity challenges, ranging from customer service and human capital management to project management and more
In order to drive productivity, efficiency, and a positive user experience for employees, each of these distinct types must work intuitively and seamlessly with one another.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Office 365: an overview A core foundation of the digital workplace for many, Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of typically over 20 applications for the common S3 licensing subscription, made available on a cloud-based model to organizations. In the digital workplace landscape, these offerings are dispersed across the different categories within the suite including the most popular applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Online, but also lower adoption applications such as Planner, Sway, or Delve. For the majority of employees, whether Office applications are cloud hosted has little impact on their dayto-day roles. Work is still performed in the popular native applications, such as producing documents in Word or calculations in Excel on their laptop or PC. For front-line employees, such as store workers, delivery drivers, or production line staff, the Microsoft Office suite may not feature in their daily roles at all. At a strategic level from the IT perspective, it’s a different story. A marked shift away from traditional on-premise and self-managed solutions is now commonplace in many forward-thinking organizations; for most industries, a move to the cloud is a long-term strategic decision. As a cloud-first solution with everything handled ‘as a service’, including hosting and back-up of products like Exchange and SharePoint, Office 365 provides an
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answer that aligns with this long-term vision. When considering the expansion and future-proofing of the corporate technology stack, therefore, it’s imperative that any future purchases or projects will align, complement, and/or integrate with Office 365. IT departments are increasingly using this as a benchmark to drive decision-making. Furthermore, the need to avoid future complexity, increase efficiency, and provide a seamless user experience is a constant focus for today’s CTO/CIO. Alongside this, there is a continual and critical need to avoid risk and maintain security of data. In an evergrowing digital workplace, this is no small task.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
What is an intranet and where does it fit? Like any business tool or application, an intranet has a defined purpose and role in an organization. Understanding where the intranet fits in the bigger picture of the digital workplace is vital to its long-term success and value to an organization. Historically, intranets have been regarded as serving a multitude of purposes; from a content management system to a team collaboration or productivity tool. At Interact, we believe the role of the intranet has evolved:
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The purpose of the modern intranet is to support organizations in connecting and informing each and
Contrary to previous definitions, an intranet is not designed for team collaboration; purpose-built applications such as Microsoft Teams or Slack are ideal for this purpose. Nor is an intranet a document management system; solutions such as Microsoft’s SharePoint are designed to meet this specific need. This isn’t to say that an intranet can’t support these goals; however, this isn’t its core purpose. Where an intranet delivers true value for a business is in the process of connecting and informing employees.
individuals to the organization and its goals, vision, and direction is an acute painpoint with potentially damaging and long-term implications for those organizations who fail to get it right. This purpose, therefore, is crucial. The more this purpose can be aligned with broader business objectives and needs, the easier it is to get the resources and budget needed.
Dispersed or globalized organizations in particular face a constant challenge in this regard, with employees based in multiple offices, on the front-line, on the production line, constantly transient, or home-based. Distributing information and connecting those
every employee.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact and SharePoint Interact offers out-the-box deeplevel integration with SharePoint Online allowing you to bypass the issue of having to create multiple sites and folders to ensure you only make relevant information available. Selectively choose and index the sites and/or specific folders you want users to search and surface through your intranet, empowering staff to access
Interact is designed to support your business and its users in maximizing their Office 365 experience and getting the most from your investment and licences. Our out-the-box intranet solution can be quickly and easily configured to work alongside a number of your Office 365 applications, creating an intuitive and seamless digital workplace experience.
SharePoint
Skype for Business
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Azure Active Directory
Teams
Calendar
Yammer
Outlook
Stream
vital, up-to-date information from a single and centralized point. Users can have unhindered access to the latest versions of your Office 365 documents, without ever needing to leave your intranet. And once located, they can use Interact’s popular features to add value and context to your content.
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Stay compliant by maintaining an audit trail of who has read key documentation
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Add a quiz to your content to assess how well employees have understood content
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Search SharePoint files via Interact, then view documents inline within the intranet
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Allow users to comment on documents, @mentioning co-workers or other content
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Tag content for more accurate search results
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Allow users to be notified when key content is updated
Tasks
PowerBi
Search in Interact includes indexed SharePoint files, and simple @ mentioning of documents hosted in your SharePoint DMS, for a seamless and user-focused experience.
We explore the role of SharePoint and how Interact can maximize and enhance its value in your workplace more fully later in this guide.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Calendar Present your shared Office 365 calendars inside Interact, giving employees quick access to what’s happening in your organization. From meeting room availability to corporate events, employees can quickly view what’s happening on any device, in any location.
Outlook Reduce the number of apps that are used day-to-day by providing your employees with real-time access to emails from within their intranet. Unread new emails are shown on your intranet homepage for speed, ease and convenience.
Tasks Help your employees keep in control of their productivity by presenting their personal Office 365 Tasks directly through your intranet. Mark tasks as complete or edit as required.
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Skype for Business
Azure Active Directory
If Skype plays a crucial role in your business communications, launch those conversations directly from your intranet. Interact and Skype for Business enable your employees find colleagues quickly and initiate chat sessions, conduct online meetings, and launch video and audio calls quickly and easily.
Interact can be automatically synchronized with Azure Active Directory, allowing any updates to central profiles to be seamlessly reflected within your intranet People Directory. Creation and deprovisioning of users is easy and efficient, reducing the IT burden and ensuring users are viewing profile data that is current and correct.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Delve Find and organize all Office 365 files and documents that are of most interest to the user – and present them in your intranet. Add favourites, create boards and see what colleagues are working on to create an area that is customized and closely aligned to the individual without compromising permissions or security.
Stream From your CEO’s latest presentation to your bestselling products, easily embed your Microsoft Stream videos inside your content. Receive instant feedback with likes, shares, and comments.
Power BI Get easy visibility of your critical dashboards and analytics from within your intranet, embedding them onto your homepages, team pages, or department areas.
Yammer Add your Yammer feed into Interact using Yammer Embed and bring all your enterprise social networking conversations together in one place.
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Interact is continually developing how it integrates with the Office 365 suite, understanding not only the purpose and value of the different applications available, but also their limitations – and where an intranet can complement or support these.
Looking back at that digital workplace landscape, we will now explore more fully the defined purpose of these different categories and in particular, how Interact works with, and improves the employee experience of, SharePoint Online as part of Office 365.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
The role of SharePoint Online Document Management Systems (DMS) such as SharePoint Online (as part of Office 365) offer organizations enterprise-wide document storage, alongside additional features such as collaborative working (for example, enabling multiple users to work simultaneously in Word or Excel) or version control and secure access. Microsoft SharePoint is a recognized leader in this market, as the core DMS product offered by Microsoft since its inception in 2001. SharePoint Online is the latest iteration, delivered as part of the Office 365 suite. Its core purpose is enterprise file storage and management for electronic documents and records, including functionality such as storage, archiving, searching and retrieval.
In addition, SharePoint Online offers further benefits aligned to the Office 365 ecosystem, such as integration with Yammer and Office 365 Groups, and native integration with Active Directory for encrypted/information rights managed synchronization. It is generally used as a replacement for the traditional on-premise corporate file server, offering a futureproof solution that is scalable, accessible, backed-up, and managed.
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There’s no point having a fantastic looking intranet if an employee still can’t find what they’re looking for.
Since the advent of Office 365 with SharePoint Online, a number of vendors have sought to offer solutions ‘built’ on Office 365: however, the underlying issue of merging these two purposes still resides. Products designed to move SharePoint from its core purpose as a DMS into a
communication tool with bolt-on applications will still retain that vast volume of information stored in the DMS. There’s no point having a fantastic looking intranet if an employee still can’t find what they’re looking for.
But what about SharePoint Hub Sites and Communication Sites? SharePoint’s architecture is based on the principle of ‘sites’, which has been a long-standing pain point for internal communicators and IT alike. The curse of ‘site creep’ is common, and in larger organizations, this can result in hundreds of sites with unique permission settings, containing thousands of documents.
It’s a spider web that quickly becomes unmanageable. In addition, sites are self-contained. This reinforces siloes of information, as there is no easy mechanism to surface and display information to end-users from multiple sites to one homepage.
Is SharePoint Online an intranet? The answer to this question lies in looking at its core purpose. A DMS is primarily used to store files; it’s around this foundational purpose that Microsoft SharePoint is designed. By nature, any document management system will grow and evolve to house thousands of files over time, particularly in enterprise-level organizations. For this reason, many historic SharePoint on-premise deployments that have been customized and positioned as an ‘intranet’ have
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quickly ceased to viable. Organizations with existing SharePoint products, such as v.2007 or v.2010, are realizing their redundancy; due to the sheer volume of content, they are unfit for purpose as an intranet. However, seeking a resolution by looking at another DMS product – even a cloud-based version - also fails to address the core purpose of an intranet: to connect and inform each and every employee.
Hub Sites As a proposed resolution, SharePoint introduced Hub Sites. These aggregate news or content from all the sites connected to it, curating information for a collective experience of those sites.
However, Hub Sites have their limitations. To function correctly, they ideally require a ‘shared responsibility model’ between the site owners and IT; it’s highly likely considerable technical effort will be required to effectively create a Hub Site that can serve as a corporate intranet homepage.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Limitations of Hub Sites It’s been noted by many in the industry that Hub Sites will likely struggle to deliver standard requirements for internal communication professionals. These include:
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As ever when you invest in SharePoint, you end up
they require a ‘shared responsibility model’ between the site owners and IT; considerable technical effort is required to effectively create a Hub Site that can serve as a corporate intranet.
working the way Microsoft thinks is best. Sam Marshall - Clearbox Consulting
Hub Sites don’t work as a corporate homepage: Using a Hub Site as a home page will not provide the required functionality. The usual requirements, such as communication controls, targeting, personalization, and user experience flexibility are missing for communication professionals. Lack of content control: Communication professionals want control of content on a homepage including where headlines are positioned and how long they’ll remain in place. For smaller organizations this may suffice but larger organizations will not accept this missing functionality. Heavy Administrative Burden: whether it’s governance of groups and permissions, communications controls or targeting and personalization, to get SharePoint to work as a true enterprise intranet requires a great deal of technical effort.
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“
Hub Sites have their limitations. To function correctly,
Communication Sites Launched in 2017, Communication sites were introduced in Office 365 as a means to improve the user experience of a site. Communication Sites allow those with permissions to create a responsive and visually appealing front-end to a site, using web parts and a building-block approach.
push corporate news out, for example, there is no way of assigning priority or anchoring a story to the homepage of either a Communication Site or a Hub Site. Any new story will displace the older ones. Communication Sites can soon look stale if content is not refreshed regularly.
These are best-suited to visual content and offer some of the experience of an intranet in terms of look and feel; however, the functionality is otherwise limited. Again, these present silo-ed content from a single site, rather than a curation from multiple sites; volume of documents and information remains an issue. A lack of governance or workflow around publishing means control over information pushed out is limited; for internal communicators looking to
In addition, a Communication Site cannot be retrospectively applied to an existing SharePoint Site. To utilize this functionality, all documents within an existing Site – for example, your HR Site, which hosts important information and documents for employees – would need to be transferred to a new Communication Site. Multiply this over many sites, and you have a time-consuming and IT intensive task.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact and SharePoint - an in-depth look With the understanding that the core purpose of a successful intranet is to inform and connect employees, Interact has approached the challenges presented by SharePoint by understanding its role and limitations as a corporate file storage system. Vital policies and information may be stored in SharePoint, which are critical for company-wide employees to access. However, SharePoint can also become the dedicated ‘document dumping ground’ in an organization.
A useful intranet pushes relevant, timely, current information to employees: not, as a SharePoint site would, every historic version or draft saved previously.
To put this in context, let’s imagine a SharePoint site owned by the HR department. Within this site will be essential policies, onboarding information, vital forms and information employees need and want to access regularly – for example, your travel expenses form, or your work from home policy. There will also be previous drafts or versions; an outdated data protection policy maybe, or the unfinished draft of your confidentiality policy. Most HR departments will also house confidential employee records and personnel files; perhaps recorded grievances or complaints; alongside contracts, salary information, or performance reviews. These are all strictly private and if a SharePoint site needs to be accessed by employees, couldn’t be housed here. This means using multiple sites or sub-sites – leading to site creep, or the need for IT to manage complex and often untrustworthy permissions, making privileged information vulnerable or information stored on individual PCs or internal servers, undermining the strategic goal of cloud-based hosting and management of company information.
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Interact offers out-the-box connectivity with SharePoint Online (alongside v2013 and v 2016) with the ability to selectively choose and index which sites and/or specific folder(s) your communications team wishes to surface for employees. This is simple, quick, and easy to set up and manage, offering real-time connection with your SharePoint DMS to ensure staff are accessing the latest versions of important documents and information. In the case of the HR site, the department could confidently and securely store all their information within one site. Single or multiple folders within that HR department site, which are approved for employees to access and have the most up-to-date content in, would be indexed and pulled into Interact. Users and the HR team alike can be confident staff are accessing the right information quickly and efficiently, with no compromise of privileged information or data.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact beyond Office 365
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85% of non-desk employees say the communication they receive on the job is not enough.
While Interact is designed to work intuitively with a broad range of Office 365 tools, its unique position and purpose within the digital workplace landscape means it can answer some of those critical gaps not fulfilled by the Microsoft suite or other technoligies. By complementing and supporting the other elements of the technology stack, the intranet has a valuable role to play in bringing it all together for an outstanding employee experience.
Connecting staff to critical business information without an Office 365 licence
In many organizations, there will be a proportion of the workforce who are either non-desk based or don’t have access to technology as a day-to-day part of their role; for example, front-line workers, those on the production line, or perhaps those delivering goods on the road. As a result, they won’t have a corporate Office 365 account: making the proposal of using SharePoint as an intranet problematic, unless heavy investments are in additional licenses. Interact offers an ideal solution for connecting and informing offline or hard-to-reach employees without the unnecessary additional cost of Office 365 licences for each individual employee. Despite out-the-box integration with SharePoint, Interact has no underlying reliance on either SharePoint or Office 365 in terms of functionality; furthermore, an intuitive and easy-to-use content management system (CMS) as part of Interact ensures valuable and relevant content can be displayed to staff without demanding a corporate account.
Corporate communications One of the primary drivers for employee engagement and experience of the workplace lies in how connected and informed your staff feel to the business and its strategic direction, demanding company-wide communications that connect each and every employee:
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not just those who happen to be in head office, or who are easy-to-reach. This includes remote workers, frontline employees dealing with your customers, offline staff who help create and deliver your product, or simply those without regular access to technology.
The business cost for failing to communicate effectively with employees is extensive, causing everything from low morale and high staff turnover to poor customer service, decreased productivity levels, and an impact on company brand and reputation. Lack of engagement often only comes to light during employee feedback mechanisms such as annual or pulse surveys, at which point C-suite sponsorship of new initiatives to address the issue come to light.
At Interact, our primary purpose and mission is to support organizations by facilitating corporate communications and helping them to inform and connect their greatest asset: their employees. Our intranet software and services are designed to empower communicators to deliver one-to-many, and many-to-many communications.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
One-to-many communications One-to-many communications are the foundation of any successful intranet. The ability for a centralized communications team to easily push out relevant and timely content in a top-down format to defined audience groups is essential to keep staff informed about their organization.
From more formal communication around policies or compliance to latest news and events, informal blogs, or broadcasting critical information during a crisis situation, Interact offers a suite of tailored features designed to facilitate one-to-many communications for any situation or requirement. These include:
Broadcasts for when you need to communicate important information, quickly; for example in times of crisis or emergency Content areas and pages; for example, for the publication of company news and updates The ability to upload or pull SharePoint documents into defined content areas; for example, your HR or IT policies Blogs for more informal content Calendars and events
What about hard-to-reach employees? On average, up to 75% of employees in any given organization are nondesk-based. While this figure includes individuals who will have access to a computer – for example, remote workers and telecommuters, or sales staff on the road – there are also a proportion of employees who won’t have easy access to technology at all. However, 95% of American and UK citizens own a cellphone of some kind. Interact offers a mobile-first responsive intranet experience, alongside native apps for iOS and Android: enabling organizations to reach each and every employee. For those times when it’s vital to get the message out, our Broadcasts feature empowers communicators to get critical or timely information to all employees regardless of their device or location – all from within your intranet. Display a banner on the intranet; send an SMS message or e-mail; or block users from visiting any areas on the intranet until they have read and acknowledged the message.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
With Interact, communicators can reach users regardless of device, department, or location. The Interact Personas feature allows for flexible segmentation according to a diverse range of criteria, while flexible and engaging homepages push relevant information to users as soon as they
login. Homepages can also be tailored to ensure users are viewing relevant communication; for example, by creating an onboarding homepage for new starters, or a management homepage to display business KPI boards to those at senior level.
Many-to-many communications Lack of engagement amongst employees not only arises from a lack of effective top-down communication, but from the feeling that they aren’t heard or are disconnected from the organization. Empowering staff with a voice and facilitating two-way conversations through the use of ‘many-to-many’ communication tools not only provides opportunity for employees to feedback and be involved with their
organization; it also provides a selfservice approach to resolve common questions or challenges. When staff can connect with one another and crowdsource for input, ideas, or experiences, true collaboration and innovation can flourish. Interact facilitates this enterprisewide need with collaboration features designed for many-t0-many communications. These include:
Forums For corporate communication teams looking to gain input from across their organization or tap into employee knowledge and expertise, Forums offer an ideal solution. Using discussions, questions, and ideas, forums can be utilized to encourage a culture of knowledge sharing. Forums offer an enterprise-wide space for users to get involved, no matter where they’re based.
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In one customer example at Interact, an intranet project was launched with a primary objective to cut calls to central operations by up to 90%, reducing not only
Answers or solutions are centrally hosted and searchable, saving time lost to repeat requests; for example, rather than multiple individuals calling a HR representative to ask about the flexible working policy, hosting this on the intranet can significantly reduce the number of calls, saving time and money internally. In one customer example at Interact, an intranet project was
launched with a primary objective to cut calls to central operations by up to 90%, reducing not only resource requirements and time spent, but also associated overtime costs. Ideation can also be facilitated through an intranet, enabling organizations to tap into the diverse range of skills, expertise, and interests amongst their staff. Topics such as environment concerns (e.g., ‘How can we be greener?’), employee benefits (e.g., ‘would gym membership or a cycle to work program be beneficial to our staff?) and operational improvements (e.g., ‘the Customer Team could really benefit from faster access to information’) can be identified and rolled out across the business, encouraging all employees to have their say.
resource requirements and time spent, but also associated overtime costs.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Seamless integrations
Social features Employees who are empowered to feedback, contribute, and have their voices heard show higher levels of engagement and brand advocacy towards their organization. Social technology has given millions of users worldwide a voice; it can serve the same purpose in an intranet, facilitating enterprise-wide collaboration and input. Features such as being able to comment, @mention, share, upload shared galleries, add events to calendars, engage with polls or surveys, or
Alongside deep-level integration with Office 365, Interact facilitates a more efficient and productive way of working through the use of integration functionality and
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enterprise search, providing users with a natural and centralized access point to an organization’s toolset and information.
At enterprise level, the average organization has over 500 applications as part of its technology stack.
simply add a reaction to a post or piece of information, are all powerful yet subtle ways to tap into a companywide collaborative way of working.
Search An intranet’s purpose is to connect and inform employees; providing information that is timely, relevant, and trusted. Powerful search functionality is the number one feature requested by communication professionals when seeking an intranet solution; particularly as the digital workplace continues to expand across multiple applications, with vital information often residing across a variety of different locations. Research suggests knowledge workers spend up to 19% of their working week searching for and gathering information; significant productivity and efficiency gains can be made from making this more seamless and intuitive for staff. Enabling relevant information to be sourced in a single application, rather than having to
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search many, is key to achieving the operational efficiency aspirations of communication professionals. Interact’s Enterprise Search includes out of the box integration with SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2013 / 2016 on-premise, alongside alternative storage providers (i.e. Google Drive, Box) using our powerful Enterprise Search API. CMS functionality as part of Interact, including #tagging and keywords, ‘Best Bets’ (which enable intranet managers to prioritize particular content for certain search terms, ensuring it appears top of the list) and ‘Failure to find’ search analytics make for an intelligent and intuitive search experience that supports users to find the right information, quickly.
There is now a plethora of enterprise applications available, designed to solve a diverse range of business productivity challenges. From Zendesk for customer service and Workday for human capital management, to Asana for project management and Salesforce for customer relationship management: the enterprise application marketplace has expanded exponentially in recent years. Now, there is a business productivity tool to solve every niche need or challenge.
Naturally, the challenge with this diverse ecosystem is how to provide a frictionless and intuitive user experience for employees, without creating the inevitable technology fatigue of ‘yet another application’. In addition, the constant hopping from application to application, alongside multiple logins and the inevitable duplication of information or effort across different platforms, has a direct impact on employee productivity levels.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Single sign-on Interact supports a seamless experience for employees using out-the-box single sign-on (SSO) functionality; offering secure and simplified integration not only with
Engagement tools Office 365, but a vast range of business productivity tools to give quick and easy access to the applications they need to perform their roles.
Employee engagement has risen on the management agenda in recent years, and for good reason. Engaged employees bring a vast range of
benefits to their organization, driving improvements in everything from customer service to the bottom-line.
Engage and enable your employees and here’s how you could benefit Authentications Interact partners identity management providers such as OKTA, OneLogin and G Suite, as well as native support for ADFS for Office
365; providing peace of mind for IT decision makers when considering integration. To find out more, visit the Interact Authentications page.
Increase employee
Increase customer
performance by
satisfaction rate by
40%
18%
Multiply your
Decrease employee turnover by
x4 1/2
14%
Source: Hay Group
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Interact for Office 365
Interact offers a variety of tools to not only support an engaged workforce,
Interact for Office 365
Productivity tools
but to help benchmark and measure engagement within your organization. These include: Polls to obtain and gauge the engagement level of staff A comprehensive analytics suite, to understand how your employees are engaging with and using your intranet; covering everything from frequency of use to the most popular or engaged-with pages and content Endorsements to supplement employee profiles on your intranet with endorsed skills, recognizing their strengths and value to the business Rewards and Recognition Badges to cultivate a strong culture of recognition that will motivate and engage staff
The demand to improve productivity and drive efficiency in business continues to be at the top of the C-suite priority list; particularly in an
age of digital noise and distractions. An intranet can streamline many processes and improve efficiency in a variety of ways:
Enterprise search: as we’ve already explored, empowering staff to find reliable and relevant information quickly is critical to efficient working. A centralized search that pulls information from a variety of sources and can recommend the ‘Best Bet’ can save significant time and effort, helping employees be more productive. A homepage to the workplace: using ‘quick links’ and Single Sign-On (SSO) to connect with other vital business tools and applications from a single point can reduce time spent logging into different tools Self-service: hosting answers to commonly asked questions and vital business policies in an intuitive and easy-to-find way empowers staff to selfserve, reducing internal tickets or strain on operations staff People Directory: Interact’s rich people profiles go beyond name, email, department. Adding skills and expertise alongside interests onto individual profiles can help employees connect with colleagues who can help more quickly; for example, searching for an Italian speaker to help with a customer, or someone with CSS knowledge to fix an issue. Workflow and forms: bringing commonplace operational workflows and processes into your intranet can create significant time savings and efficiencies. By making paper-based forms electronic and accessible via your intranet you can save valuable employee time, as well as improve the accuracy of information.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Keeping your organization compliant
Interact has a number of tools to help with this: Mandatory Read: Interact’s Mandatory Read functionality within an easy-to-manage CMS enables communicators to quickly and easily create essential documents and push them out to defined employee user groups. Asking users to confirm they have read and understood the communication ensures you have an audit trail for compliance purposes. Broadcasts: Send and track important information across multiple channels from within your intranet, and monitor receipt and acknowledgments with visibility into messages delivered and read, and how many have yet to be seen. Quizzes: these can be used to test user understanding and knowledge, while analytics allow your communications team to track who’s read and responded, sending reminders via email or push notifications to those who have yet to confirm.
Ensuring employees adhere to best practice and abide by compliance requirements or standard operating procedures is vital not only for legal purposes, but to reduce risk, safeguard both staff and customers, meet health and safety requirements, and reduce accidents or incidents in the workplace. With a growing focus on data protection and the introduction of GDPR in Europe, alongside political turbulence leading to changes in regulatory requirements, international trade agreements, tariffs and more, keeping employees compliant is more vital than ever
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before. However, with up to 75% of employees classed as non-deskbased, potentially without access to technology as part of their day-today roles, keeping those individuals informed and acting in accordance with best practice is a significant challenge. These hard-to-reach staff are, however, typically those on the frontline who are the most essential to keep informed, as well as be able to gauge whether they have indeed read communications that have been sent out.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
A streamlined and branded mobile experience Encouraging hard-to-reach employees to adopt mobile business applications can be a common barrier for internal communications. This is particularly true of the Office 365 suite. Personalize your Interact app to align to your organization’s brand. Instrumental in encouraging employees to download and access your intranet from any place at any time.
Microsoft offers a range of mobile apps aligned to its Office 365 offering, with an individual app created for each application; from Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to Yammer, SharePoint, PowerBI and more. The result is an often overwhelming and confusing experience for employees, who may be faced with the reality of requiring five, 10, even 15 apps to fully utilize the mobile Office 365 experience. On a company-owned device with Mobile Device Management (MDM), these apps can be installed as a mandatory requirement; however, the sheer volume will be a barrier to adoption. In organizations operating a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) model, in which employees use their personal cellphone to connect with the business, it is unrealistic to expect individuals to install this number of applications.
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Interact offers a single, businesspersonalized mobile experience that offers an ideal solution. Employees can download a single native app for iOS or Android that will serve as the access point to vital business communications, as well as providing integration with the major Office 365 applications. This streamlined experience removes the burden of multiple apps, making it easier and more intuitive for employees to adopt and use.
Your app here
In addition, the Interact mobile app offers white labelling functionality, meaning it can be completely personalized and aligned to your organization’s internal brand. This tailored experience delivers higher levels of engagement, helping to get those hard-to-reach employees downloading – and using – your business’s intranet.
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Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365
Interact for Office 365: for a centralized digital workplace
About Interact Interact is a global enterprise software company that serves intranet software to over one million users across more than 850 organizations. We specialize in solving internal communication and collaboration challenges by combining our sophisticated intranet software with outstanding professional services, focusing on developing long-term strategic partnerships with our customers.
The demand for individuals to come together as teams to collaborate or work on projects has always existed. In today’s modern workplace, however, those individuals may be working from a variety of locations, making that process more challenging than ever. In order to connect employees effectively and empower them to achieve their goals, organizations need powerful tools to bring together people, conversations, and content. The Office 365 suite will continue to
The partnership between Interact
be a staple for global businesses and
and Office 365, therefore, is
each individual piece of software has a
complementary. The two serve
distinct role to play. An intranet plays
distinct purposes within an
a critical role in facilitating corporate
organization, each offering a variety
communications as its primary
of benefits; however, when the two are
purpose; it can also offer a broad
unified and work together intuitively,
spectrum of other benefits through
organizations can realize the true
integration with other vital business
value and potential of the digital
tools, including Office 365, alongside
workplace.
Interact has offices in Manchester and New York, and operates across the whole of the US and Canada, EMEA and Australia. Contact Us: New York: +1 (646) 564 5775 Manchester: +44 (0)161 927 3222 [email protected] www.interactsoftware.com
out-the-box features designed to bring that digital workplace together.
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Interact for Office 365
Station House, Stamford New Road, Altrincham, Cheshire WA14 1EP, UK
21 W. 46th St. 16th FL, New York NY 10036
+44 (0) 161 927 3222 [email protected]
+1 (646) 564 5775 [email protected]
www.interactsoftware.com 44
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