Updated May 6th 2019

2019 will be the year of the Modern Workplace. At Microsoft Ignite 2018 Ron Markezich showed new powerful tools for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace. Our clients ask us to fulfill this promise with technologies of the Modern Workplace. But what is it and how good do we meet their expectations?

As a business consultant in the field of social intranet and workplace solutions, I find myself demonstrating features from across Microsoft's solutions (Office 365, Teams, Windows, Azure).

Organizations need an integrated Digital Workplace and not just a new front door. Ron Markezich

In this blog I review 10 features of the Modern Digital Workplace delivered by Synigo Pulse and Office 365. These 10 features are based on Bynghall’s report “DWG Digital Workplace integration”. He concludes that companies need an integrated Digital Workplace and not just a new front door. 

1 Intranet homepage

The intranet homepage is the entry point into the intranet through links and events.

2 Classic dashboard

The classic dashboard shows key data and statistics from multiple systems. Synigo Pulse for Office 365 integrates Microsoft PowerBI KPI's and business systems using notifications.

  

3 Search

Search is very important in organizations. Synigo Pulse for Office 365 brings together multiple systems. Clients can expand these search sources. 

4 Navigation

Synigo Pulse and Office 365 offer user friendly navigation across applications. Users navigate using the Office 365 top menu or rely on the menu a specific application offers. Below you see the navigation through the Knowledge Base, offering users a choice to click on sections, use the A-Z index or search for specific item. 

5 Notifications and workflow

People work with an increasing number of ICT-systems that strive for their attention. Synigo Pulse offers you a central place to bring together these attention triggers, such as notifications from different systems to email, universal inboxes, activity streams, feeds or task lists. Office 365 offers you smart ways to create notifications that matter to you and enhance your productivity.

Below you see an example of a notification to the Marketing Team after someone added a new article in the group Content Editors (Microsoft Flows, Microsoft Teams). 

See it in action:

 

6 Chatbots

Chatbots are capable of helping you and offer a conversational interface for updates and interaction from different systems. Below you see the powerful conversational interface that Microsoft Teams offers, a simple chatbot regarding who is who in your organization.

 

7 Desktops and devices

People use a mix of devices to access your social intranet & digital workplace, making it an important choice for your organization. The beauty of Synigo Pulse and Office 365 is the smooth integration with any device, be it a PC, MAC, iPhone, Android. Each have interfaces devices configured to access different applications. Add features such as Microsoft Enterprise Management Suite and Windows and you have complete corporate workplace.

8 App stores

Enterprise app stores help you discover and download applications for mobile and desktop. Of special interest is Microsoft's Appsource offering productivity features to the Modern Workplace. 

 

9 Applications

Integration with specific applications or within suits such as Office 365. Your business applications are an essential part of your Modern Workplace. Synigo Pulse supports integration with Citrix and RDS in case you want to provision legacy applications. 

An example of an RDS application:

An example of a cloud hosted application (powered by FRAME)

 

10 Reporting

The ability to bring reporting and analytics from a number of different systems which can often ben presented in different ways. Below an example of a dashboard that shows you data from Google Analytics.

Show data from different systems, such as Google analytics

Conclusion

Synigo Pulse and Microsoft offer a strong solution for anybody who is looking for an integrated Modern Workplace. We observe that our clients are really happy with it. Why? On the one hand they benefit from the powerful tools that Microsoft delivers from the cloud without any hassle. On the other hand they experience peace of mind on their digital workplace for office 365. From a changemanagement perspective Synigo Pulse enables each organization to act and adopt at its own pace.

This leads us to a compelling thought about the Modern Workplace. A good workplace should seduce users to get more out of their work. In other words, a good workplace should be an adoptable workplace. Adoption should be part of the design from the start. 

To set the stage I made a short clip about Synigo Pulse, featuring legacy applications (frame, citrix, rds), PowerBI and Microsoft outlook tasks, To-Do and Planner: