WHITEPAPER
Boost the value of
Office 365 with a
people-powered
digital workplace
Microsoft Office 365
A good first step towards peak
productivity
If you’re one of the many companies that have adopted Microsoft
Office 365, you’ve made a sound investment. You’ve gained
powerful productivity tools that allow your staff to work wherever
and however they want.
Yet, for most companies, Microsoft Office 365 can’t do it all.
Employees still have to juggle a range of purpose-built applications
designed to facilitate every aspect of their work.
With every new application, company knowledge becomes a little
more distributed, people become a little less connected, and,
eventually, productivity starts to slide – especially as you scale.
To tame the chaos and unify the siloes, you need an integrated
portal where employees can easily access everything they need –
wherever they are, with whatever device they’re using.
Get more out of Office 365: Combine it
with a best-of-breed intranet portal
Combine Office 365’s promise of productivity with a modern
intranet that solves key communication, collaboration, and
knowledge management challenges. The result: a best-of-breed
intranet portal to harness your company’s collective intelligence,
turning busy work into meaningful work.
This powerful combination means that geographically
distributed workers, mobile teams, independent contractors,
and traditional on-site staff can all work together with ease.
When people see the bigger impact of their efforts, they’re more
engaged and more productive.
Having a single digital location for your organization simplifies
and centralizes routine workflows, such as contacting an expert,
searching for information, publishing content, and sharing
business results. This means employees can avoid duplication
of work and focus on activities that add incremental value.
Specific workgroups, project teams, departments, and other
subgroups can even have their own digital space. The result:
dramatically increased consistency and efficiency for your company.
A modern intranet portal:
A home for everything you do
The days when intranets were IT-sanctioned document stores
or link farms are long gone; and if not, they should be. Today,
employee portals are must-have tools for organizations that want to
bring all their communication, collaboration, and knowledge under
one effectively branded roof.
That said, an intranet shouldn’t have to replace the third-party
apps you rely on today. Instead, a modern intranet should
maximize your existing technology investments by weaving
them together and making them accessible in an engaging
digital destination where people have all the tools and information
they need to do their jobs well.
Igloo’s intranet platform empowers a sophisticated digital
workplace that connects your entire organization – across borders,
boundaries and structures, which is why innovation often starts and
ends with Igloo. It’s a place where employees go to find company
news, executive thought leadership, published work, available
technologies, information on processes and policies, and most
importantly, the right people to collaborate with for the task at
hand. As a result, it becomes an intuitive part of a person’s routine,
and is where they will eventually publish and socialize final content
and, business results.
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Here’s what you stand to gain
Igloo and Office 365
Senior Management
More than the sum of their parts
From formal executive updates to chats at the water cooler,
good communication is core to a healthy culture.
Igloo is a neutral platform for centralizing company knowledge,
communications, processes, people, and applications. It improves
overall communication and decision-making by giving your
employees access to what they need, using tools they already
know. And its fully customizable information architecture and user
interface allow you to represent your brand and culture, so Igloo
looks – and feels – like you.
Senior managers want their people on the same page, no matter
where they’re working and what apps and devices they’re using.
Igloo helps foster alignment with the company’s vision,
mission, and strategy.
Human Resources and Communications
As they grow, companies can’t communicate through the
informal channels they used in their early stages. Executives don’t
have as much time for one-on-one communication anymore.
Also, bringing new teams and roles on board becomes more formal
and more process driven. Igloo helps these growing companies
maintain their culture as they scale, bringing physical traditions
into the digital workplace.
Communications teams at large companies also face a
double-edged challenge: maintaining employees’ connection
to the broad corporate culture, vision, and strategy while
nurturing departmental sub-cultures and requirements.
Here again, Igloo empowers company-wide communication, while
delivering customized spaces for departments and teams
to collaborate and share cross-functionally. The result is a selfservice organization in which employees can discover and connect
with the people and information they need, when they need it.
Igloo adds value to Office 365 by giving Microsoft’s productivity tools
(including Office Online, OneDrive, Yammer, Skype, Calendar, and
even SharePoint), as well as other third-party apps, a logical and
contextual place to live. For example, Igloo can surround Microsoft’s
tools with workgroup-related information (members, knowledge
bases, recent activity, forums, team calendars, etc.) and other
best-of-breed applications (like Salesforce, Zendesk, Google, and
Dropbox) to meet your company’s needs.
Igloo also integrates seamlessly with Azure Active Directory, which
provides users with effortless single sign-on using their IT-approved
work credentials. That’s not only a benefit for users, it also gives IT
a higher degree of control and cost savings. With Igloo, regardless
of which authentication method you choose, only authorized users
have access to your valuable company data.
Informaton Technology
People have varied work styles, and they’re more productive and
engaged when they have a say in what technology they use.
The IT challenge is to find a way to support employee preferences
while reducing fragmentation, cost, and risk. Igloo reduces
fragmentation by surfacing applications that are already being
supported – both company-wide tools and ad hoc additions
by individuals and teams. It also provides a means for IT to
support employees (and employees to support each other)
directly within the intranet, creating a destination for technology
support and guidance.
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What about Microsoft
SharePoint Online?
If you’re using Microsoft Office 365’s productivity suite but
looking for a way to collaborate, it makes sense to take a look
at SharePoint Online.
As a document repository and basic file-sharing tool for
workgroups, SharePoint Online can be useful. Perhaps that’s
why many Office 365 subscribers have attempted to leverage it as
an intranet platform. But as a platform for building a company-wide
intranet portal, it requires significant costly customizations.
Ironically, SharePoint Online doesn’t work seamlessly with
Microsoft’s ecosystem of apps and services, such as Yammer,
for example. SharePoint Online also has limitations in its ability
to integrate with other cloud or line-of-business apps people rely
on, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, and Dropbox.
Lessons from the
SharePoint trenches
The Nielsen Norman Group, well-known in user experience
design circles, advises clients on intranet portal development and
implementation. When it comes to using SharePoint for intranet
they issue careful guidance:
• SharePoint intranets need “in-depth planning, design,
research and development,” which may include business
analysis, organizational change management, content
migration strategies, IA planning and usability research
• Enlist UX designers – not just developers – who know SharePoint
• Allow more time if using a version of SharePoint that’s
new to your developers; otherwise, designs can prove
more difficult than estimated
• Interview SharePoint consultants thoroughly “to ensure
you can work effectively and comfortably together for
some time”
• Plan infrastructure for features that can be switched on later:
“Search and social features were two notable features that
caused unanticipated grief”
Inevitably, implementation is a headache. It requires significant
expertise, configuration, and training to get set up and secured.
In fact, hidden costs crop up during SharePoint implementation
and long after. Depending on the size of your organization, it can
take between six months (in small firms) and five years (in large
enterprises) to achieve successful adoption.
The bottom line is that SharePoint expertise is required across
many fronts. While there’s no shortage of SharePoint consultants,
it can be hard to find the right one, and expensive to keep them
(in many cases, they’re needed for the long haul). You’ll also need
SharePoint developers who know the platform and know it well.
Even ordinary tasks, like customizing site design, implementing
multi-language support, or migrating existing content, can become
a burden in SharePoint.
• A customized look-and-feel takes a lot of work and expertise:
“Those who wanted to change the page layouts significantly
said it took many hours to do so”
It’s enough to give many organizations pause. And rightly so,
particularly if you answer yes to any of the following questions –
areas that customers running SharePoint intranets have identified
as potential trouble spots:
• Do you require integration with third-party apps?
• Is alignment with your brand values, guidelines, and culture
important?
• Do you want a customized user experience or information
architecture?
• Do you want social feeds built right into your intranet portal?
• Is a well-designed, customized search option important?
Finally, it’s important to note that Microsoft adapted SharePoint
Online from its on-premises product. There are distinct differences
in capabilities between the two, with some reviewers citing bugs
and unreliability in the cloud-based version.
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How Igloo compares to SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is highly focused on document storage and basic file sharing for
the organization. Igloo’s strengths as a modern digital workplace go so much further.
Far better time to value
Deploying SharePoint Online is a lengthy, labour-intensive,
and expensive process that requires significant professional
expertise. With Igloo, you can be fully up and running in weeks.
Best of all, Igloo is so easy to manage and configure that the
majority of maintenance and new page creation can be done
by the business units themselves. Building your pages’
functionality is easy with Igloo’s intuitive widgets and simple
drag-and-drop page builder.
All the deployment resources you need, in-house
The talented team at Igloo (including solutions consultants,
intranet designers, and customer success professionals) will be
there every step of the way, ensuring that your intranet portal
looks, feels, and operates exactly the way you want it to.
After you’ve launched, Igloo’s customer success team partners with
you to help your community evolve with your business needs and
will advocate your feedback and feature requests to our product
team for roadmap consideration.
Simple, cost-effective maintenance (aka happier IT staff)
Even after SharePoint Online is up and running, companies
usually need a full-time SharePoint administrator to manage
and maintain it. Igloo’s intuitive interface means you can redirect
the IT resources you would otherwise spend on maintenance to
higher-value activities. Lower complexity, less management,
and fewer complications open up more time for everyone to
do meaningful work.
Build your brand and culture
Your company culture is the glue that holds everyone together.
To build it, your employees must know what your company stands
for and how they contribute to its success. SharePoint Online limits
your ability to cost-effectively customize the interface, so it’s a
missed opportunity to communicate and reinforce your culture
and brand across the organization. Igloo gives you complete control
over the information architecture and a simple means to modify
it – including navigation, page structure, and hierarchy – so you can
digitally express your company’s physical traditions, brand, and
personality. It looks and feels like you.
Encourages employee engagement and smarter
interdepartmental workflows
While both SharePoint Online and Igloo support document
sharing, only Igloo can easily and intuitively tie all of an
organization’s communication and knowledge management
requirements together into one company-wide community.
Igloo supports knowledge sharing that builds connections,
while encouraging teamwork and feedback. It adds context and
workflows to documents, information, people, and applications.
The result: happier, more productive, and better informed people.
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Curated communications, company-wide
Igloo gives your employees a unified digital workplace where they
can contribute and find everything they need to do their best work.
Whether it’s forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, people directories,
calendars, or any custom pages and spaces you might have, it’s all
in one place. And employees can use their choice of device, apps,
and service to get there. When they want to add their voices to
the conversation, publishing their own rich media and content is
effortless with Igloo’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What
You Get) editing interface.
Full-fidelity mobile access
Igloo is a cross-platform intranet solution, accessible through
any web browser. The interface dynamically adapts to any device,
whether it’s running on your computer or on your Android, iOS,
or BlackBerry smartphone. No matter what OS you’re using,
you get the same full one-click community experience,
regardless of screen size.
Seamless third-party integration
SharePoint Online ties together some of Microsoft’s most
widely adopted services – Office 365 productivity tools to be more
specific ¬– but useful third-party integration support is limited. Igloo
not only enables drag-and-drop integration of Microsoft services,
it allows you to bring non-Microsoft apps in too (like Dropbox, Box,
Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Salesforce, Google for Work, and
Zendesk) into your portal. Igloo unifies files, conversations, and data
that would otherwise be stranded in inboxes, corporate servers, and
the dark shadowy corners of IT, and keeps them up to date in one
place.
With virtual teams, flexible work arrangements, and globally
distributed operations, the need for open and efficient
communications has never been greater. Teams work best
when they can collaborate anywhere, anytime. With Igloo,
your employees will be more connected, more engaged,
and more productive.
How Igloo integrations connect people and information
Igloo helps growing companies scale and transform their culture
by improving the strength of communications, user experience,
and engagement.
Igloo’s out-of-the-box integrations bring the tools your employees
use right into your modern intranet portal. Need to access a new
service in your Igloo? It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the
app widgets you want onto your page.
Here are some of the things you can do from a single Igloo
intranet web page – versus a string of tabs across your browser:
• Add a Salesforce widget for deal interaction and a dashboard
for visual representation of analytics.
• Submit and track your IT help desk requests with Zendesk –
or browse older IT questions and answers to find what you
need – from right inside your intranet while you work.
• Share files with partners and clients through OneDrive, Google
Drive, SharePoint Online, Box or Dropbox.
• Keep conversations together by placing Slack or Yammer
directly into an Igloo team space.
With Igloo, everything lives in the intranet, in context, right where
people can find it.
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Take the next step
Learn more about how Igloo works with Office 365 to deliver more value,
with high employee engagement and an extraordinary emphasis on user
experience over competing solutions.
Visit igloosoftware.com to learn more, start a free trial or book a demo ›
About Igloo
Igloo helps organizations create a digital destination where employees can access the
information, tools, and expertise they need to do their best work, from wherever they are.
This modern intranet platform provides a seamless work experience that brings together
content and conversation and integrates an organization’s preferred apps and tools.
Learn more at:
igloosoftware.com
[email protected]
1 877 664 4566
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