Digital Workplace with Microsoft Technoloigies

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A Point of View on Digital Workplace with SharePoint Server

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A Point of View on Digital Workplace with

SharePoint



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Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 3 2. The Evolution of the Digital Workplace .......................................................................................................... 3 3. The Essential Facets of A Digital Workplace ................................................................................................... 5 4. Planning for the Digital Workplace ................................................................................................................. 9 5. SharePoint - The Right Choice of Technology ............................................................................................... 11 6. The Cloud Option .......................................................................................................................................... 14 7. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 16 8. Authors and Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 16



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1. Introduction This whitepaper explores the concept of digital workplace and the essential features that a digital workplace

should have, in an age dominated by social media. The need of the hour is to create a unified social intranet

portal with multi-device access, which enables more efficient employee communication, collaboration,

productivity and engaging experience and connects employees and systems across the enterprise. It also

explores how SharePoint is a good fit for implementing digital workplace and a brief note on when to go for on

premise and when to go for cloud based deployment.

2. The Evolution of the Digital Workplace Organizations have seen a proliferation of tools across departments to meet the needs of businesses. This has

led to maintenance nightmares, repetition of tools across departments, management and administration

overheads and the dissatisfying

experience employees get when

they have to log in to different

systems with varying user

experiences to carry out their day

to day activities.

The solution is a digital workplace

which serves as a unified gateway

to provide information, task lists,

social collaboration, search, and

engaging experience thus

improving employee productivity,

adoption and analytics to gain

insight into user adoption.

From being a single point of entry for employees to perform their day to day activities, Intranet portals have

evolved into virtual places where people can get in touch with other people who share interests.

There has been a paradigm shift from a traditional intranet portal to a digital workplace where employees

prefer to have the ability to access specific applications using devices of their own choice and collaborate

using social media tools.

Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and

feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which

otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Wikipedia.com

Enterprises without a consolidated portal incur more cost on

maintenance.

Silo applications create difficulty in managing and maintaining and

keeping them up to date and difficult to create a corporate branding

and solid user experience.

A consolidated portal will greatly improve employee productivity,

efficiency and profitability.



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Employees are seeking

personalized features to

organize their work by

community, interest, and

areas of focus, on-line

awareness and real-chat

capabilities.

88 percent of companies offer their workforce personal devices such as smartphones, PDAs, and tablets.

Nearly 90 percent of companies plan to increase their investment in productivity-enabling technologies such as voice activation and sophisticated videoconferencing by 2015.

62 percent of companies conduct remote meetings through desktop videoconferencing.

54 percent of companies say they actively use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other tools to engage their workforce, customers, and other stakeholders.

Companies report that workplace mobility programs generate bottom-line occupancy savings of as much as 30 percent.

By 2015, office space per employee will drop from 200 to between 50 and 100 square feet, depending on the industry.



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3. The Essential Facets of A Digital Workplace Key tenets when designing an intranet portal which need to be taken into account include social, technological

and behavioral implications.

Design around employees: Do not focus too much on technical features

Drive User Adoption: Provide an engaging experience

Provide a connected environment: Provide connection with the other applications as well as external social media networks like Yammer and also access through a wide range of mobile devices

Strategy: Start with a small set of basic features and build additional features after taking feedback from users.

The essential facets for an intranet portal based on the above tenets include:



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User Centric Framework

The portal information architecture and user interface should be based

on user centered design, focused on users to deliver an enhanced web

experience considering the following aspects: Availability and

Accessibility, Easy Navigation, Simplicity and Consistency, Learnability,

Relevant Content, Relevant information targeted at each individual in

real time.

Personalization

User Personalization would take employee portals to a different level:

Users should be provided with a list of widgets/apps with the option to choose to gain quick access to tools they commonly use, while some apps, such as IT Helpdesk and HR information, should be made mandatory.

From Broadcast to Targeted Messaging-Ability to subscribe / unsubscribe capabilities, users should feel they are in full control of information they get.

Targeted Content: Content should be localized and personalized and be available in multiple languages.

Based on the employees department, location, preferences etc, the site should automatically recommend news, Web sites, and apps.

The solution should provide a way to consume information and improve access to company resources securely by making it available from anywhere and anytime on any company (or company managed) device such as desktops, laptops, mobile platforms in multiple languages. This will increase the user adoption/adaptability making the digital workplace the central hub for all activities

Task Centric Framework

The portal should focus on task based experience, rather than providing an application-based experience.

The portal should provide a flexible integration platform to integrate with various underlying LOB systems and surface data and processes within employee portal to help improve employee productivity.

Tasks Dashboard: Should display the list of tasks the employee should act upon improving the employee efficiency.



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Governance

The success of the program is dependent on how effeciently the central IT is able to drive the governance of

core business processes and core IT processes through the program organization and businesses. It includes

policies for Information Management, Information Architecture, Development, Deployment, Administration

etc.

Governance addresses:

Who is responsible for making decisions

How decisions are made

Who is responsible for implementing &

enforcing decisions

How decisions are implemented or enforced

This model when put in place will enable the following benefits:

Improves systematized control and compliance to

processes

Controlled and Governed growth of SharePoint

environment

Increased reuse, knowledge share

Common Process Framework leverages both local and global best practices

Faster delivery and turnaround of future enhancements, cost effective

Increases visibility and accuracy across organization

Harmonization of processes/ KPIs result in better control

Align people, processes and technology with business objectives

Provide Strategic Direction



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Smart Search

The solution should provide a blended set of most recent and relevant

information seamlessly aggregated from multiple internal and external

sources (corporate/regional/business/function communication, application

feeds, and user-generated content and external feeds) which should be

filtered based on specific user requirements, preferences and needs.

Information is surfaced at various levels such as division, organization based on user profile, preferences and

relevance.

Content Management

The solution should provide an easy to use WYSIWYG content editing, content

authoring, and management, distributed and centralized content editing and

publishing framework for non IT professionals.

Social Collaboration

The solution should provide a powerful social and collaboration engine that would

strengthen and stimulate employee engagement through

collaboration, communication and social networking as well as creation and sharing

of information, knowledge and innovation beyond natural work groups.

The solution should provide Media/Video Messaging which helps in driving messages

more effectively, thereby improving user participation through recognition,

gamification etc

To remain relevant, organizations must adapt social knowledge and information-sharing tools like Yammer

and approaches to reflect the evolving expectations of employees which would foster new kinds of sharing,

ideation, communities, and decision making.

Drive user adoption

The solution should provide a strong platform to continuously monitor and track website usage and derive

insights based on website usage pattern of visitors. Performing user research and analyzing search logs and

site metrics help in identifying areas in need of improvement.

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4. Planning for the Digital Workplace Planning and implementing a successful digital workplace will typically will take a long time(years) and getting

it right the first time is very essential.

Typical phases for rolling out such a large initiative would include the following phases:

Base Framework: In creating some of the worlds best portal implementations, we have seen a number of

common challenges that organizations face. We

strongly recommend having a Base Platform to help

get to the finish line faster.

The Base Framework will provide a strong standardized and flexible platform enabling common

functionalities like Search, Collaboration, Security, Integration, Personalization, Governance, Training, Mobile

Strategy, Web Strategy and common cross cutting concerns like exception handling, alerts and notifications,

Audit Trail etc.

Greater quality, increased efficiency, and reduced

effort.



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5. SharePoint - The Right Choice of Technology SharePoint Server provides the scalability, agility and capability required for providing a comprehensive

solution to address the digital workplace needs of an organization by providing a robust framework to quickly

build, manage and deploy applications, leveraging content management, collaboration, search, composites

and business insights to connect and empower people, cut costs with a unified infrastructure and rapidly

respond to business needs.



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User and Task

Centric framework

SharePoints robust personalization capabilities that personalize users experience include

User Profile with information about user role, function, location, preferences.

My Sites

User tagging

Content targeting

Multilingual support

Email, blogs, calendar, contacts, discussion boards, document libraries, links, picture libraries, and tasks, users, groups management , community sites, survey.

User can explicitly choose the personalization preferences which will override implicit

personalization which will further improve user centric experience.

User can choose following components of personalization

Page Layouts for user created pages

App parts and their configurations

Applying restriction of some features on certain type of devices, such as large document download to be disabled if user is not connected to Wi Fi.

Mobile Device Support: SharePoint 2013 has advanced mobile device

rendering capabilities which can be leveraged to

develop custom page layout using 'Channel Panels'

in custom page layout to support different device

types (PC, Mobile).

SharePoint 2013 Publishing site with mobile

support enabled can be used to facilitate Device

Channel based rendering on client browsers.

Smart Enterprise

Search

SharePoint 2013 provides a rich set of advanced Search functionalities and a range of

deployment options to be exploited. Additionally SharePoint 2013 provisions for a federated

search which allows concatenation of search results at query time. SharePoint 2013 federates

the results into blocks within the main result list. It is possible to configure the sources and

number of results from each source that is to be displayed as a part of the result list.

Search relevancy is enhanced based on user behavior (views, clicks, etc.), popularity of

content and of topics in discussion threads which is driven from number of views as well as

number of unique users.

Search analytics analyzes crawled items and how users interact with search results.



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Refiners: These would be defined on managed properties from the search index. We can

also enable crawled properties that will be mapped to managed properties that would be

enabled as refiners.

Faceted Navigation: Enables browsing for content by filtering on refiners. The refiners defined use the indexed content from the term store to create a filtered navigation view of content.

Content

Management

Out of Box SharePoint ECM, WCM, Records Management capabilities like Uploading

Documents, Check-In / Check-Out of documents, Auditing of documents, File Upload /

Download, Viewing documents based on user permissions, Uploading documents with meta-

data, EDiscovery, In place Records Management and approval workflow can be used and

customized to create publishing sites, and to manage the content that gets published to those

sites. This can be done by non IT staff and does not require any SharePoint knowledge.

Site Variations can be leveraged to support publishing in multiple languages.

Cross site publishing can be leveraged to create and maintain content in one or more

authoring site collections, and publish this content across one or more publishing site

collections, using Search Web Parts.

Social Collaboration

Most of the organizations which deal with a lot of information face challenges capturing and

preserving tacit knowledge of their experience resources that take away all the knowledge

with them on retirement. SharePoint Social features help enabling any organization to

convert their tacit knowledge in to explicit knowledge base. .

Blogs, wikis, communities can be leveraged for fulfilling social collaboration needs.

Social capabilities provided by SharePoint can be augmented with tools like Newsgator,

Yammer for providing advanced features.

Real Time Analytics

and Relevance

based Search

SharePoint Server 2013 comes with lot of advanced analytics which can be leveraged. If more

advanced analytics are required, WebTrends or any other appropriate third party tool to

capture data and generate reports as per success metrics identified can be used.



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6. The Cloud Option Past few years have seen a gradual increase in adoption of Cloud services with on premise solutions still being

the predominant choice for organizations. To choose the right platform for implementation, we will have to

understand what is offered on cloud and what is offered on premise, weigh the options and then make a

knowledgeable choice. There are four options to choose from:

1. SharePoint on Office 365 2. Hybrid with Office 365 3. Windows Azure 4. Complete On Premise

Below are few considerations to choose the right option:

Overview Best Used when

SharePoint in Office 365 Subscription based model with SharePoint features on-line to achieve Software as a Service

Not much customisations (There is a dedicated SharePoint online version where some level of full trust is allowed based on Microsoft Approval)

External Content Sharing and Collaboration

Can have basic public facing site

Hybrid with Office 365 Combining Benefits of Both worlds.

To integrate on-premise SAP with Duet Enterprise Online

External sharing and collaboration instead of setting a dedicated extranet environment

Search and BCS services to integrate with both Online and On-Premise

Windows Azure You can take advantage of Cloud and also maintain full control on the platform and features

You need full control on the SharePoint platform and need to be on cloud

Focus on applications than infrastructure and datacentre

SharePoint for internet facing sites

Quick disaster recovery

On Premise You want to own everything When Data is required within a jurisdiction

Private cloud solutions

Highly customised solutions

Organizations that desire control of the entire platform and solution

Can leverage third party components and tools.

SharePoint 2013 for on premise option ships with three editions,



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SharePoint Foundation

SharePoint Server 2013 Standard Edition

SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise Edition

SharePoint Online comes with

Office 365 Small Business

Office 365 Small Business Premium

Office 365 Midsize Business

Office 365 Enterprise E1; Office 365 Education A2; Office 365 Government G1



Office 365 Enterprise K1; Office 365 Government K1

SharePoint Online Enterprise External Users

Standalone Plans

SharePoint Online Plan 1

SharePoint Online Plan 2

All these plans offer features which can be enabled based on the requirement and budget. Based on the

organisation requirements and the features available, one can select the right platform.



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7. Conclusion We strongly recommend customers to leverage SharePoint to develop cost effective, agile digital workplace

solutions. With enterprise level capabilities available at low cost, enterprises should have a relook at their

portal strategy.

8. Authors and Acknowledgements Authors

Rekha Kodali is a Senior Architect with more than 17 years of experience in Microsoft Technologies.

Her focus areas include .Net, ASP.NET, BizTalk Server, Web Services, SharePoint, SQL Server, ESB and

SOA.

Harish Mukundappa is a Solutions consultant with more than 10 years of experience in Microsoft

Technologies. His expertise includes SharePoint, ASP.net and Web Services.

Acknowledgements

We wish to gratefully acknowledge Venkata Guru Prasad Kandarpi, Lead Consultant from Wipro, for

painstakingly going through the paper and giving us the right guidance to refine the content.

We wish to acknowledge the help of Bhanu Singh in providing inputs on Apps and User/Task

Framework.

References:

http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/an-overview-of-sharepoint-2013-app-development-model/

MSDN-SharePoint 2013 TechNet Presentations, Videos

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219758.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142374.aspx

http://intranet-matters.de/resources/intranet-maturity-models/

http://blog.blksthl.com/2013/01/14/sharepoint-2013-feature-comparison-chart-all-editions/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx

http://www.ibforum.com/wp-content/downloads/free/IBF-Intranet-to-DW-Evolution.pdf

http://www.slideshare.net/Earley/sharepoint-jumpstart-1-creating-a-sharepoint-strategy

http://www.softnetdata.com/Content-Management-System

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263356.aspx

Workplace of the Future: How Technology Will Change the Way We Work, Channel Insider, November 16, 2011, www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Careers/How-Technology-Will-Change-the-Workplace-of-Tomorrow-333122/.

http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/an-overview-of-sharepoint-2013-app-development-model/http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219758.aspxhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142374.aspxhttp://intranet-matters.de/resources/intranet-maturity-models/http://blog.blksthl.com/2013/01/14/sharepoint-2013-feature-comparison-chart-all-editions/#DEVhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspxhttp://www.ibforum.com/wp-content/downloads/free/IBF-Intranet-to-DW-Evolution.pdfhttp://www.slideshare.net/Earley/sharepoint-jumpstart-1-creating-a-sharepoint-strategyhttp://www.softnetdata.com/Content-Management-Systemhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263356.aspx



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Digital Workplace with Microsoft Technoloigies

Documents

concept of digital workplace

point of view

day activities

social collaboration

engaging experience

single point of entry

unified social intranet

intranet portals