Office 365 has fast become the global platform of choice for successful organisations to build out their own digital workplace.
Your digital workplace on Office 365
Recognised as the world’s leading cloud productivity platform, Office 365 brings together the very best tools that can be configured to meet your business needs. Employees can collaborate and communicate securely using their favourite devices, while you can be sure your vital business data is protected.
Moreover, your Office 365 digital workplace lets you use the applications you know and trust, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. Add to these cloud services like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and Yammer to replace Skype and shared drives, and you will enable your staff to communicate and collaborate more closely than ever.
Take things further with enterprise cloud tools like SharePoint and Power Platform, and you can construct a powerful, feature-rich and efficient digital workplace that will drive your business forward for many years to come.
To augment these tools and provide a gateway to the wider adoption of Office 365, CompanyNet has developed Kira, our ‘intranet-in-a-box’ product. Powered by the latest SharePoint Online technology, Kira brings your people and data together, reducing friction when searching for information, opening the door to the rest of the platform, and ultimately making the most of your business’s investment.
Benefits of an Office 365 Digital Workplace
Building your digital workplace on Office 365
You may already have Office 365, but aren’t sure how to make it work for your organistion. Or perhaps you are fed up with wasted time and half-hearted deployments.
CompanyNet can help you create a real-world strategy and plan for Office 365 deployment which puts your people and processes at its heart.
We provide flexible services that enable your migration to Office 365, ensure total adoption and support its ongoing development. Ultimately we want your organisation to experience digital transformation through the considered deployment, take-up and usage of Office 365.
Our expert team can even help transition your legacy apps and workflows to Power Platform, and review your licensing arrangements to ensure you’re not spending more than you need to (we’ve saved our customers huge sums simply through license optimisation).
That means going beyond the traditional ‘replication’ of the on-premises Exchange and SharePoint set-up. Once you have made the transition to the cloud, CompanyNet can help you embrace the full capabilities of newer developments like Microsoft Teams and Power Platform, including process automation, real-time reporting, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more.
In everything we do, CompanyNet seeks to augment your team and act as a trusted advisor. Knowledge sharing is at the heart of every customer engagement, and we aim to help you adopt best practices rather than create dependency on us. It’s our aim to get your team self-sufficient in the technology so that, togehter, we can move your business on to even bigger and better things.
How we can help with a digital workplace
Taking organisations like yours on a journey towards a true digital workplace is at the heart of what we do at CompanyNet. We have extensive experience at every stage of planning, implementing and supporting businesses in their move to an Office 365 digital workplace.
As a longstanding Microsoft Gold Partner, we are exceptionally well-placed to augment your team and act as a trusted advisor when it comes to all aspects of Office 365.
We can help you:
Office 365 Intranet
Kira, CompanyNet’s intranet platform, is built on SharePoint Online. As well as letting you communicate key business updates to your staff, Kira acts as a true employee portal, making your corporate information eminently findable.
No more searching for policies and procedures, hunting down forms or guessing who is best-placed to advise you on a particular subject. All your information is presented with a consistently-branded experience, with the ability to create sub-sites for each department or topic area within your business.
We have deployed Kira intranets on Office 365 for a number of major organisations.
People-first digital workplace
It’s tempting to believe that digital transformation can happen simply by investing in technology. But transferring outdated processes and broken business models to a new platform won’t make them work – it just makes them outdated and broken in new ways.
Smart business leaders recognise that technology is only part of successfully creating a true digital workplace. Innovative organisations consider the employee digital experience, and consistently putting their people and culture first.
Understanding early and late adopters
The ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ model predicts that the bulk of people and organisations fall into groups known as the early and late majorities. They are happy to carry on as before, doing things how they’ve always been done, until the weight of change is so great that they have to acknowledge it.
Whether that business change is resisted and rejected, or taken up and transforms the organisation, relies on the groundwork done by those leading the innovation. At CompanyNet, we are fortunate to work with a number of forward-thinking organisations who are making a success of this culture-first approach, blazing a trail of innovation for the majority to follow.
Foundational principles of a digital workplace
In their drive towards digital transformation, one of our customers chose to build their digital strategy on three foundational principles: That technology should provide employees with a holistic working platform, that their environment should encourage collaboration, and that their culture should support the adoption of a digital workplace.
By underpinning their digital strategy in this way, they are able to use user-centred service design and scaled, agile development to deliver new processes and tools. This has led to a better employee experience with improved efficiency across the organisation and overall increased user satisfaction.
User-centric digital workplace
We also work with Scotland’s national water body, Scottish Water, who have been practicing a user-centric approach in implementing their new Office 365 digital workplace. Workshops were conducted with a cross-section of staff, leading to the creation of an ‘Early Adopters’ group. This group helped build and iterate an intranet based on our Kira platform, and a new Yammer site.
These cornerstones of their new digital workplace were rolled out to the rest of the organisation. By working closely with staff, and bearing their needs in mind, Scottish Water enjoyed huge take-up of the platform. It is now creating deep business transformation across the organisation.
These organisations are proving that grounding their digital strategy in a user-first, culture-first approach is a clear path to wider, lasting transformation. It’s time more forward-thinking businesses joined them. If you’d like your organisation to be next, why not get in touch with CompanyNet and find out how we can help?
Get in touch
Get in touch with our friendly team now:
The CompanyNet team has more than 20 years’ experience of creating Microsoft digital workplaces that really work.
We’re a tight-knit team that delivers results for customers including Scottish Water, Mencap, the Student Loans Company, Walt Disney, Tesco Bank, the Scottish Housing Regulator and many more.
We’re always keen to discuss whether we can help you get more out of Office 365.