Office 365 based Delve is a cloud-based service which helps users find and discover pertinent information

across integrated Microsoft products by pulling user content from Exchange (Emails), OneDrive for Business (File Share), SharePoint 2016 (Collaboration) and Yammer (Chat). In addition to traditional search tools, Delve has a discovery function, which brings potentially relevant information to the attention of users, based on relationships and the past activity of other users within the same organisation (or company based).

How this works?

Delve users receive a personalised profile page, which includes displays for recently accessed documents, colleague profiles and a suggested-content feed. The suggested-content feed is powered by Microsoft’s Office Graph, which tracks user interactions with people and documents across Office 365 and Microsoft OneDrive for Business. It uses machine learning to determine which topics are likely to be of interest for a given user.

Note: It is important to note that Delve never presents users with content they don’t have permission to view.

Three main functions that you need to know

Mobile apps for Delve

Microsoft has published three mobile apps for Delve:

1. Delve for Android
2. Delve for iOS
3. Delve for Windows.

Mobile app users who subscribe to Office 365 can update and curate their profiles from their mobile devices, view documents, and connect to co-workers at any time and from any location. Users also get updates on colleagues’ projects, find relevant documents and easily access documents they are actively working on.

So why use Delve? There are a few key benefits:

• From an end user perspective, using Delve is simple and straightforward. It doesn’t take long to learn how Delve is laid out and how to view and sort files.
• Office Graph’s machine learning capability takes over some of the content management and organisation that would otherwise need to be done manually.
• Delve never changes any file permissions, so private documents stay private. Viewing activity on Delve is also private.

What are some downsides of Delve?

• There’s no admin UI, so it’s difficult (or impossible) for administrators to control or report on any Delve activity.
• Content can become disorganised quickly since there’s no ability to enforce a certain
• Delve may offer more challenges at a larger organisation.

The positives of Office Delve outweigh the negatives, and we’re pretty excited about using the new technology. Please feel free to contact Prometix to understand more about Delve or any other Office 365 App and how it can be used within your organisation.

Prometix have organised a breakfast seminar  –  Learn how to transform your organisation with Digital Workspaces using SharePoint/Office 365 and strategies to make them usable and useful for your business case.  For information and registration please click here.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au

Digital is constantly evolving and bringing along positive changes to the organisation.

New tools are being rolled out to support staff productivity and enhance collaborative working across teams. Embracing change and communicating benefits forms one of the biggest challenges.

The Microsoft ecosystem is no exception. With SharePoint and Office 365, we now have a complete collaboration structure that can be scaled to about any desired size. There always a confusion how some of these cool application can co-exist, importantly when to use what?

Let’s today look at Microsoft Teams vs Office 365 groups vs SharePoint team sites.

There are no hard & fast rule when to use what? However based on experience here are some of our thoughts.

Before diving into details, we need to understand what these are?

• Office 365 groups is a service that enables teams to come together and get work done by establishing a single team identity and a single set of permissions across Office 365 apps including Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, Planner, Power BI, and Dynamics CRM.
• Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations, documents and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve
• SharePoint team site is a collaboration area for team within SharePoint eco-system. It provides tools and to help with the collaboration.

So the next question is, when do we use these?

Here is the summary table that provides feature comparison in detail:

Here are some of the PROS & CONS for the apps mentioned:

Finally apps are there to increase productivity. Identifying right tool for your requirement is the key to our successful outcome.

If you need any assistance to determine which application fits for your requirements please contact one of our experienced consultants.

You can email: enquiries@prometix.com.au Or call (02) 8072 0666

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email: enquiries@prometix.com.au

Organisations  plans for going paperless will come to a screeching halt when you need to get someone’s signature on a document.

That process typically involves printing the document, signing it yourself, faxing it to the other party, and waiting for them to print, sign, and fax it back—where it’s printed yet a third time and filed away in a cabinet forever.

This process takes time in turn cost to the business. Is there a better way to manage this?

Electronic signature have been in place for long time and not many people have the inside knowledge in understanding this.

What is an electronic signature?

An electronic signature can be defined as any electronic method carrying the intention of being a signature, for example, a scan of a person’s signature into a contract.

An ‘electronic signature’ is a broader concept than that of a ‘digital signature’, which is a mathematical process for determining the authenticity of a digital message. Keep in mind, however, that a digital signature is a type of electronic signature.

Electronic signature software and their purpose

Electronic signature schemes have become big business. In fact, the electronic signature software is on track to grow north of $5 billion by the end of the decade, according to DocuSign (an electronic signature software) web site. These software tools represent a high-tech and much-needed response to the vast inefficiencies of dealing with physical signatures.

While these software’s vary from provider to provider, the general idea behind them is the same. You upload a document—Word, PDF, or even an image file—to an online service, then tag it with special annotations where signatures eventually need to go. The service sends this marked-up file to your specified recipients, who then “sign” it with a few clicks, either with stock cursive fonts or with a scrawl they draw using their mouse (or a finger, using a tablet) on the fly. When finished, the signed file is sent back to you, mission accomplished.

What are the applicable laws in Australia?

Electronic signatures are governed by a wide range of laws in Australia, under both Commonwealth and state legislation:

• Commonwealth: Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth);
• NSW: Electronic Transactions Act 2000 (NSW);
• Queensland: Electronic Transactions (Queensland) Act 2001 (Qld);
• Victoria: Victoria: Electronic Transactions (Victoria) Act 2000 (Vic);
• ACT: Electronic Transactions Act 2001 (ACT);
• South Australia: Electronic Transactions Act 2000 (SA);
• Western Australia: Electronic Transactions Act 2011 (WA);
• Tasmania: Electronic Transactions Act 2000 (Tas); and
• Northern Territory: Electronic Transactions (Northern Territory) Act (NT).

If a party wishes to sign a legal document electronically, whether this will be effective will depend on:

• The jurisdiction — what law applies to the document or transaction?
• The transaction — is the legal requirement excluded from the electronic communications laws?
• The method used — does it identify the signatory? Is it reliable?
• The signatories — do the parties consent to the method used?

If all of these criteria are satisfied, the electronic signature will most likely be binding on the parties to the contract.

Electronic signature softwares

Based on your organisational requirements, technology landscape and required outcomes one of the following can be shortlisted –

DocuSign : A major service provider to the real estate industry, Google-backed (for google drive) DocuSign is a straightforward and feature-filled service that any business should find simple. Upload files to DocuSign (DocuSign puts your files in “envelopes” that you can send as a group), then drag and drop signature boxes onto the documents where you want those autographs. DocuSign then emails the documents to the recipients you specify. You can also set reminders that prod your recipients to e-eign, and set documents to expire if they haven’t been signed in a timely fashion. A dashboard lets you keep track of all your outstanding and completed contracts. iOS and Windows 8 tablet versions are available.

EchoSign : EchoSign (from Adobe) looks and acts a lot like DocuSign, and is comparable to it in most ways. You upload documents, set signature locations (or just specify one signature at the end), and send contracts via email. A simple dashboard lets you track the status of all outgoing and incoming contracts.

A couple of interesting features in EchoSign include the ability to incorporate faxed signatures for recipients who prefer to sign by hand, and an extra layer of verification that lets you require the recipient to enter a password you provide or other personal information, such as the last four digits of their Social Security Number. Naturally, integration with various Adobe products makes this an appealing option for PDF-centric shops. iOS and Windows 8 tablet versions are available.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au

NFPs  are embracing the digital pathway to better support their staff in maximizing donor interactions and fundraising.

Raising funds and channeling available resources into frontline services is of highest priority for Not for Profits.  NFP sector has some of the best social marketers around. They are very successful at running fundraising campaigns and connecting with donors and the wider public through social media such as Facebook, Twitter & You Tube. While the likes of Facebook and Twitter are great front-facing communication tools, they are not so effective for internal communications.

NFP staff need a digital platform that can streamline their operations, simply processes and help them optimise their tasks. A large portion of NFP workforce are casual and pro-bono workers. And so its always a big challenge to put in place systems that are usable and useful. Internal communications and the availability of information is a particularly important issue for NFP as they often have a large volunteer workforce that is geographically dispersed. Also, their governance structures involving boards and committees as well as stakeholders and employees means that there are diverse information and communication needs all within the one organisation. NFP have the data regulations that need to be followed defined by National State Archive and other governance agencies.

Finding a unified platform that will address all those requirements as well as being cost-effective is a challenge. Or is it?

At Prometix, we have developed digital work space platform for not for profit organisations based on Microsoft’s Office 365 as a platform. This solution provides following benefits:

• Increased communication
• Improved processes and information sharing
• Better engagement with staff and volunteers
• Cost-effectiveness and mobile access.
• Staff/volunteers on boarding/off boarding
• Documents sharing and collaboration
• Share content/documents with external parties
• Meeting management solution
• Staff/volunteers contact details search feature

This solution is a great enabler of communication and is particularly relevant for organisations and staff members that are in different locations or who work outside the standard office environment.

A intuitive Intranet forms the gateway to the digital platform. An intranet home page featuring your top news updates with what’s hot buttons, engaging visuals or videos is a great way to increase communication and knowledge sharing within the organisation.

Access to information on the intranet can also be controlled by permission rights (which are invisible to the user). In this way, intranet users, be it employees, board members or volunteers, can only see the information that is relevant to them. This negates the need for several slightly different versions of the same email being sent around the organisation, or for the endless forwarding of email messages. There are also savings to be made in the reduction of printing costs as demand for paper copies of documents decreases.

An intranet company calendar highlighting key events, fundraising campaigns or closing dates for funding applications is another great communication tool. Having this information in one place for all users to access is a great time saver and makes life much easier across the organisation.

Another aspect is improved opportunities for collaborative working. The Yammer (Facebook like solution), discussion forums and project areas within this intranet solution enable and encourage collaborative working across the NFP  organisation. Furthermore, NFP can be confident that all information shared on the intranet is secured with the latest SSL encryption technology.

Similarly, internal processes can be streamlined using the intranet solution. For example, booking leave, completing an expenses claim or ordering stationery is a much easier process when completed online with a few clicks of the mouse. Again this represents a considerable saving for the NFP organisation in time and resources and releases funds that could be spent on frontline services.

Using the intranet’s interactive tools such as quizzes and surveys, blogs, staff biographies and messaging will improve the levels of engagement, team morale and loyalty to the non-profit organisation. Staff and volunteers of non-profits are traditionally highly committed and motivated individuals. Maintaining and enhancing that commitment and loyalty is, however, a real possibility with this intranet platform.

Integrate you line of business applications, Salesforce CRM and more with the platform to provide your users with a unified workspace for all their information needs.

Having mobile access for employees or volunteers that are out in the field is another must for non-profits. Cloud intranets can be accessed remotely using a PC, tablet or smartphone and an internet connection. Staff and volunteers will have access to all the company information they need, 24/7.

What is the cost to you as a non-profit organisation of not having an effective internal business management tool?

Inefficient processes, wasted resources, disengaged staff and volunteers, higher staff and volunteer turnover are all real possibilities. Keeping running costs and overheads to an absolute minimum is a priority for non-profits that rely on donor funding. Ask us how a digital platform could support your cause by empowering NFP staff  and volunteers.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au

Successful projects deliver the desired benefits and outcomes. We have been talking to various organisations and here are some lesson learned.

Usually the complaints range from  –  “my application runs very slowly”, “there are too many sites and we don’t know why and who is using it”, “not many people are using the application” & “it is a failed project”. These complains varies from governance, user adoption to solution architecture.

These are some of the lesson learned that we have gathered over the years based from our successfully implemented SharePoint based projects:

Don’t boil the ocean- all or nothing approach

SharePoint platform provides a huge amount of features and capabilities. In order to be digitalised quickly, we have seen organisations trying implement all the features at once. These features are great but they can be overwhelming for end users. If they are not rolled out in a managed and structured way, this can be a disaster in waiting.

In order to create a successful SharePoint platform in your company, you need to take it step-by-step approach.

We at Prometix always have a simple motto – “Don’t boil the ocean at once”

SharePoint is like a Swiss knife – you only turn on the feature that is required. This allows users to learn and improve. By prioritising and delivering these features in phased approach can certainly will certainly get some wins on the board. This will then allow greater success and user adoption.

When people see the results, they become enthusiastic to follow suit, then start working with the remaining departments. You will have a much better chance of user engagement and success.

Clearly understanding the limits and boundaries

Before you commence your commence your next SharePoint based project please take your time to understand its threshold limits & boundaries. This will surely stop head

Also clearly understand the differences between limits and boundaries:

• Boundaries: These are hard limits that cannot be changed by you, your site owner, or your IT department. This is a strict limit set by Microsoft.
• Thresholds limits: Both are suggested limits that can be changed or surpassed, but values put in place are recommended based on Microsoft testing. You want to break the limit? Take your chances on performance. The limits are based on the ability for SharePoint to perform a given action (e.g., you can upload a 2-GB file—SharePoint’s cool with it—but it takes a long time and you could experience a browser timeout error during it, making the limit a practical one, and not even one that SharePoint can always control) or limit performance issues on the user side of things (e.g., having tens of millions of files in one document library will affect how quickly that library loads whenever you open it).

Setup governance plan from DAY ONE

We have seen organisations leave governance to the end of the solution build. This can be a disaster – before you realise the content will 200Gig mark. Setting up policies, defining roles and responsibilities and processes to guide how your company is going to use SharePoint is crucial. Without doing so, you’re taking a huge risk.

Without a governance plan, the people in your organisation (e.g., end users, managers, developers, support staff, administration staff) will not have realistic expectations. Realistic expectations can only be set by defining the policies, people, and processes that will deliver SharePoint services.

So, if you don’t have a governance plan in place, dedicate your time and resources into formulating one, even if you’ve already implemented some SharePoint projects. (Make formulating a governance plan your next SharePoint project.)

Don’t take SharePoint project lightly

Project resourcing and  specialist skills forms one of the most important aspects of SharePoint project. A successful team has a good combination of technical resources, Business users. and specialist skills (PM, Change Manager, Ux Designer,  SharePoint specific skills and more)   SharePoint has a real potential for increasing end user productivity and offers array of features – collaboration, search, portal, business process automation, content management, and business intelligence—BI.

Unfortunately, most organisations don’t take the time to accurately estimate the cost of employees’ time when determining how much money a SharePoint project can save a company.

Horses for courses

Making a SharePoint project success has many facets. Some organisations rely completely on their internal IT staff who has some SharePoint knowledge to get projects over the line. This lack of knowledge can lead to a disaster.

For example, SharePoint is pretty easy to install. But if the administrator doesn’t understand the effect of version control, archiving, records management, and a whole lot more, then the site can come to a grinding halt within 12 months. Make sure you have the right resources to complete the SharePoint based projects.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au

Intranets have been around for more than few decades and have evolved like any other business solution..

They are no longer set of static pages that once would just give you access to company policies ( which btw are equally important).

Intranets of today do much more than just providing access to documents. They also offer more than just collaborative working capabilities. Enhancing communication channels is one of the advantages that good intranets provides to organisations. Intranets now have become a platform to engage your staff, provide relevant services while helping get work done and forms a gateway to your digital and social workspace.

Intranet platforms are very powerful in assisting with organisation’s digital transformation and usually forms a part of larger program of work. In fact one of our customers have named their Intranet redevelopment project as – Enterprise Moderinsation program.

Intranets in the digital economy truly brings people together with information and processes allowing your staff anytime anywhere access to various line of business applications allowing them to make timely informed decision. In order to achieve this  the digital workspaces needs a cohesive architecture. Various studies have revealed that  in next few years many of manual repeat tasks will be automated using information and knowledge extracted from organisational data sets and organisations will prefer using visual and graph based applications for their information analysis needs. There are various tools  already available in the market space  that support analytical and visual representation of data.

Here are some of our recommendations to consider for your Digital workspace-

• The traditional Intranet features that have been popular are still relevant including but not limited to:
  • Organisational information and communications (News/Announcements/Feedback/User Voice/ Polls/Surveys/Documents)
  • Staff Search and Employee Directory including Org charts and Staff profiles
  • Team collaboration (Blogs/Wikis/Team Sites/Communities/Forums)
  • Dashboards providing key analytics
  • Applications gateway
  • Admin activities like – Timesheets / Leaves/Travel/Approvals/Onboarding
  • Rich content including videos
  • Search continues to be one of the most important make or break factor for your users. If they can find what they have been looking for they will come back for more. Tools like Office Graph or Microsoft Delve allow connections between staff and work related information artefacts allowing staff to follow other team members and also follow information sets for latest updates.
• Business stakeholders today discover and utilise technology on their own (and without sometimes consulting IT) to support their business outcomes. Easy access to anything from cloud based storage apps to third party products and applications has resulted in an Information Management challenge and increased data silos. Staff also bring their digital legacy along to from their previous roles. Consumerisation of IT has made us all “ tech savvy”. Your Intranet platform needs to be carefully architected to support the digital needs of your users while supporting applications framework.
• Intranet forms the landing page that allows personalised information from various LOB systems to be searchable and accessed directly and not just a place to go for hyperlinks. Try Office 365 PowerApps and Microsoft Flow and to connect to your LOB systems while allowing your business processes.
• Modern reporting and visualization tools allows to showcase your dashboards within your Intranet. Access Power BI reports directly from within SharePoint Online based intranet.
• Intranet of things (IOT) allows your intranets to connect to various in field devices allowing to tap into the vast amount of data collected and finally using that data via an analytical & visual intelligence tool to dashboard on your intranet.
• Support self service by using intelligent Bots on your intranet to assist your users with a specific service for example Level 0 support type queries. Or even helping them look for answers/information around the company. “ Do we have a social club for bike riders?”, develop a bot for your staff to book meeting rooms, their next leave and many more. Microsoft provides cognitive services and language interpreters (LUIS) to support your next bot application.
• Integrate your Document Management system to leverage organisational Knowledge and provide your users with unified experience.
• With various modern platforms (including Microsoft tool sets, SharePoint and Office 365 applications like Groups, Planner, Delve, Yammer  and the latest StaffHub) Intranet today should targeted information to follow your users giving them a pleasant surprise
• Better support your staff via providing them access to relevant information and actions while on mobile rather than just a responsive design with nice design
• Enterprise Social Networks(ESN) are not just cool to have features, rather they truly support collaborative work management and helps connect people and information in a context by supporting conversations about specific information and content. Based around your organisational culture fun features like Gamification could result in team building and better supporting your staff.
• Delivering successful outcomes for any digital project needs carefully crafted change management. Adoption is the key to any business systems.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au

Let’s face it, talking about document control or document management is probably not a topic you would pick to discuss at any gathering.

However, understanding document management can make a major impact for your organisation. In this article we will cover the fundamentals of document management.

In a nutshell, document management is the capture, storage and retrieval of documents. With or without document management solution, your organisation already captures, stores and retrieves documents every day. In many organisation this process is not properly implemented. These are some of the pitfalls in not running a proper document management solution:

1. No version control
2. Multiple source locations dependent upon business unit
3. Uncertain ownership between business units
4. Processes not streamlined
5. No integration with business system for the core data
6. Not secure

Information these days is not just stored in documents. Key knowledge elements of information can be found in social posts or a team chat room, even in blogs, discussion groups and many more. A stand alone Document management system that only manages document based information is not enough. That is where organisations today are integrating various sources of information into a Knowledge Management hub. With the digital transformation phenomenon, Knowledge Management and digitalisation of data  has been helping organisations retain, reuse important information and assists in making quick and informed decisions.

In understanding this need, Prometix has developed a framework to deliver the Document and Knowledge management in Microsoft’s SharePoint platform (on premise or cloud).

Prometix document management planning process consists of the following high level steps:

Identifying roles of various stakeholders: This is the first step in overall document management planning, wherein, we define and analyse organisations’ key stakeholders.

Identifying the different business units: This is the step to identify which business units will be using this document management.

Identifying various data sources: including file shares, social groups and forums, various information hubs, structured and unstructured data sets and many more

Change Management and Adoption: forms one of the most important aspects of any successful documents and knowledge management roll outs.

Identifying different document types and associated process: This is key step in getting information from various business units to collect all the document types are being used. This process will collect following information:

• What type documents?
• Who owns the document?
• Who can view/edit the document
• What is the process of creating and approving the documents?

Define document lifecycle: includes the process from creating a document to either archiving it or completely deleting it from the knowledge system.

Information architecture: Information architecture (IA) is the art and science of structuring and organising documents that support business goals and objectives. The construction of an IA is the act of specifying the systems that will hold the data that support the business. Within the IA the navigational, operational and business taxonomies’ provide the means to help users, ‘store’ and ‘retrieve’ information.  This also covers who can view/edit documents. Prometix has developed a framework to create an effective information architecture for different business sectors.

Workflow planning: Defining document approval process for a specific document type.

Plan for ongoing governance: SharePoint roles and responsibilities define the people who will govern and manage the SharePoint environment, along with their various areas of responsibility.  Documenting roles and responsibilities is a critical aspect of the governance framework for a SharePoint rollout.

Document Migration: It is expected that there will be a significant portion of documents that will need to be migrated from the current location to the new document management solution. Prometix proposes following activities included as part of the migration process –

• Analysis of Data Migration Requirements
  • Scoping of data to be migrated
  • Analysis of nature of data to be migrated which includes rules for migration and potential issues
  • Required data cleansing activities
• Design Data Migration processes Mechanism
  • Define areas for – Automated Vs Manual migration
  • Design mechanism for ensuing traceability and auditability of the data migration process.

Finally Transition: is a key factor and includes accessing various technical and functional dependencies before teams can be transitioned to the new Knowledge platform.

About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.

For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au