Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange, SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration, employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most organizations that used Lotus Notes.  Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and becoming more nimble and connected. 

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365. iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest, AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

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SharePoint Intranet

Employee Productivity and Social Engagement using SharePoint Based Intranet

Intranets are becoming increasingly important in enterprises not only as a mean of proving information to employees but as platforms for promoting collaboration, employee engagement and enabling two-way communications between employees and management, thus, improving organization productivity and competitiveness.

As organization grow in size with multiple departments and divisions that are spread geographically, employees tend to operate in silos of department or geography as it becomes challenging to discover and manage enterprise information, engage with the global organization and collaborate on projects. Business leaders and CIO’s have started recognizing Intranets or Enterprise portals as a solution to this challenge

Simple Intranet websites have a limited use as a means of providing information, news, and articles. Using SharePoint as an Intranet platform offers some unique advantages:

• Enterprise Content Management: Organizations are continuously creating large quantities of content, which if not maintained properly could lead to multiple versions of the same content, as well as a large amount of unused content. A SharePoint based intranet provides an Enterprise Content Management system that helps maintain a single version of the documents and avoid redundancy and duplication of content.
• Social Engagement: SharePoint with its My Sites, Team Sites provides features such as Newsfeeds, Blogs etc. for social collaboration. Intranet built on SharePoint can leverage these social features and include a nice User Interface that allows users to easily interact, engage and collaborate with other employees in the organization
• Document Management: SharePoint based Intranets can serve as  Document Management systems, which enables good governance thus enabling collaborative working
• Business Processes and Workflows: SharePoint based Intranets can be integrated with SharePoint workflows, Line of Business applications as well as external applications such as SAP, remedy etc. Thus, the SharePoint intranet can serve as a single place from which the employees can access other applications or data from other applications.

iLink has developed a SharePoint Intranet Product HUB which along with leveraging the key benefits of SharePoint outlined above also provides an engaging User Interface. The Intranet product is completely customizable such that the Intranet managers, usually from marketing or internal communication department, do not need to have any prior knowledge of SharePoint and can customize the Intranet to the specific needs of the organization.

For more details on HUB Intranet please see http://www.ilink-systems.com/Services/hub-intranet

Intranets are very much on the minds of business and government leaders. According to Gartner, enterprise portals are on CIO's lists of top ten technology focus areas and Forrester Research reports strong growth in intranet development and usage.

As enterprises grow in size and sophistication, their need to manage information internally grows exponentially. Organizational departments and business units can typically span geographic locations, quite often continents, and information is constantly being produced and consumed. To retain competitiveness and drive efficiency it is vital these information silos are opened up, allowing rapid and intuitive information discovery, better decision-making and increased productivity. A well implemented SharePoint 2013 intranet can be the solution to your organizational needs

       Encourages innovation.

       Increases productivity.

       Improving the performance of the company.

Intranets are very much on the minds of business and government leaders. According to Gartner, enterprise portals are on CIO's lists of top ten technology focus areas and Forrester Research reports strong growth in intranet development and usage.

As enterprises grow in size and sophistication, their need to manage information internally grows exponentially. Organizational departments and business units can typically span geographic locations, quite often continents, and information is constantly being produced and consumed. To retain competitiveness and drive efficiency it is vital these information silos are opened up, allowing rapid and intuitive information discovery, better decision-making and increased productivity.

How do you get SharePoint to improve our competitiveness?

Regardless of the location of users, SharePoint facilitates efficient management of enterprise knowledge and simplifies how people collaborate, find and share information, enabling innovation, make better decisions and yet, retain the knowledge of the company.

Therefore, in this way, helps to increase business productivity, save costs and even improve customer service, resulting in a direct impact on the success of the company.

How do I identify if my company needs an intranet with SharePoint?

• Waste of time to locate information
• Knowledge is lost dispersed among employees and former employees
• Excessive use of email
• Lack of business process automation
• Difficulty easily works from anywhere
• Duplication of files and lack of control

SharePoint vs Yammer. What’s the difference?

How does Yammer compare to SharePoint? Does it fit into an organization that is using SharePoint 2013?

SharePoint 2010’s social features were pretty rudimentary. Organizations that really embraced social had to turn to third-party vendors or Yammer. SharePoint 2013’s social features are miles ahead of what was available in SharePoint 2010.

Personally, I don’t understand why an organization would adopt both SharePoint 2013 and Yammer. I would leverage the social tools within SharePoint 2013 as they are fully integrated within an organization’s employee portal. The mobile apps for SharePoint (both Windows Phone and iOS) will also help complete the social story. That said, if a client wanted to stay on SharePoint 2010, Yammer might be a good fit.

While Yammer and SharePoint 2013 share similar social capabilities (discussions, feeds, ratings, individual profiles, etc.), the difference is that Yammer’s social features have been utilized for years and the Yammer team appears to be evolving the social experience more rapidly than the SharePoint team. It is much easier to setup and use Yammer, so fostering collaboration can happen much more quickly. Yammer employees may also tell you that the service was built around people, whereas SharePoint was built around documents.

Yammer spoke about their intended SharePoint integration scenarios at the SharePoint Conference and highlighted concepts such as a Yammer Web Part, embeddable feeds, document and list integration, profile synchronization, and federated search. At this point, I’m only seeing talk about Yammer integrating with SharePoint Online, not the on-premise version, but that could be coming. I could see organizations using both SharePoint and Yammer when the business case or appetite for social is not yet clear and there would be benefits in piloting Yammer. Agreed though, it would be weird to have a Yammer and SharePoint 2013 mixed social experience.

SharePoint 2013 has expanded social features allowing you to create community sites, post micro-blogs, use hash tags, and mention colleagues and communities; but it’s still a light social feature set compared to Yammer, and a host of other social products on the market. SharePoint is still the extensible platform that is playing catch-up in the social computing space. That said, I think a lot of organizations will find SharePoint 2013’s out-of-the-box social features sufficient, at least as a first step into this space.

Yammer is completely about conversations in the open. It’s for sharing, collecting company knowledge (especially tacit knowledge), and creating opportunities for connections around work, interests or specializations. Yammer is a social web community experience. We heard over and over again, it exposes the opportunity for serendipitous discovery, and it does this a lot better than SharePoint 2013.

Right now, there isn’t a clear story about an integrated Yammer and SharePoint 2013 experience. For organizations just looking to dip their toes into social, SharePoint 2013 will probably suffice. For organizations looking for rich, social computing capabilities, they will need to look at other options. As for running Yammer and SharePoint 2013 simultaneously, it could be hairy to sync these two experiences for users. It will require a lot of work on the community/portal management side to do the manual integration that is required at this point. With the future of Yammer and SharePoint being so unclear at this point, I think it is going to make any decision regarding which social computing product to purchase very difficult.

I’m really impressed with the improvements Microsoft has made to the social story in SharePoint 2013, there was nowhere to go but up from SharePoint 2010. I would agree that Yammer has a more polished social experience, but SharePoint 2013 is definitely closing the gap.

One of the biggest things I was hoping to get out this year was a better understanding of how Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer into SharePoint and what that unification will actually look like for users, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. It feels like a question that Microsoft doesn’t yet know the answer to, or they just aren’t ready to share it yet, but either way we’re left wondering. Until we have more clarity it will be hard to develop an enterprise social strategy around these technologies, which is disappointing for organizations who have already invested in SharePoint and Yammer, or had been considering them for the future. In the meantime, I think the new social features in SharePoint 2013 are a great starting point for organizations that are looking to introduce social functionality into their portal environment.

Why did Microsoft buy Yammer?

In my opinion, Microsoft acquired Yammer for three main reasons:

1. Leapfrog perceived social capabilities: Regardless of how good SharePoint 2013’s social capabilities are (and I think they are great), Microsoft would constantly be battling a perception of being one step behind in the enterprise social space (as they have been). Acquiring Yammer gives Microsoft the instant perception of being a serious contender in the enterprise social space and signifies to the market that they are willing to take bold steps to get there.
2. If you can’t beat them, buy them: By buying Yammer, Microsoft takes out a key competitor and arguably the most established brand in enterprise social. This turns them from a threat to strength.
3. Shake things up and accelerate innovation culture: It’s clearly not business as usual for the social team in Redmond. The acquisition of some relative rock stars in the enterprise social space means that the thought leadership and opinions for SharePoint social are now coming from entirely different directions. That includes a shift in focus to rapid innovation development cycles (90 days or less) and a Silicon Valley start-up culture.

I suspect Microsoft sees Yammer as a core pillar of their cloud strategy to help customers move to the cloud and break down barriers IT may present. The Free-mium model of Yammer reminds me of Windows SharePoint Service (WSS), where collaboration was given away for free in SharePoint, and as a result was lit up like crazy in North America. Based on the valuation, you have to imagine that a big part of Yammer’s value proposition was modeled around the future potential of cloud-based subscription revenue in the current Microsoft Enterprise Agreements.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer was a smart move. Yammer has been adopted in many organizations and brings a wealth of experience around enterprise social. Social functionality was almost non-existent in SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft bringing Yammer into the fold will boost their impact and presence in a space where they desperately needed to make big advances. With over five million corporate users, Yammer is an invaluable addition to Microsoft’s portfolio.

I think the acquisition was similar to that of Skype. Microsoft saw a best-of-breed technology for an area that was strategically important (and they were under-performing in) and decided to acquire.

It’s interesting because both of these tools don’t look or feel Microsoft-y. I wonder if that will change over time or if they will keep their own identity. It will be an interesting time over the next few years for organizations that are standardized on the Microsoft stack as Microsoft determines how these social tools will all work together (or won’t).

What is the future of social with respect to SharePoint vs. Yammer?

This is the million dollar question! Right now, I think it’s anyone’s guess. The Yammer group and the SharePoint team were adamant at the conference that Yammer will never be an on-premise solution; it will always exist in the cloud. Microsoft and SharePoint are pushing hard for the cloud, but there are many clients that will be on premise for the foreseeable future.

Given this reality, I can see Yammer, Office 365, and SharePoint Online integrating really well and becoming a dynamic collaborative, social online environment. For clients using on-premise installations of SharePoint, they will either end up with some half-baked Yammer integration paired with out-of-the-box (OOTB) SharePoint social features, or OOTB SharePoint social features on their own. For organizations that have yet to dip into any significant enterprise social technologies, SharePoint 2013 OOTB will likely be sufficient as they wade into the social enterprise space.

There’s no way Microsoft can continue to offer such vastly different and competing social directions going forward — they need to communicate a clear and cohesive integration story soon. Microsoft took a fair bit of criticism post conference for not presenting a well thought out vision of integration and left customers in a fairly awkward position when approaching enterprise social on the Microsoft platform. With no explicit integration road map, the vibe at the conference was one of a shift in direction to following Yammer’s new way of doing things. Therefore I would suspect future changes to SharePoint social will be heavily dominated by Yammer capabilities, with the bulk of the thought leadership and influence coming directly from that team.

At the end of the day, I want to see a highly usable set of social features and capabilities that are tightly integrated into SharePoint. The big issues right now with SharePoint and Yammer are the confusion between where one ends and the other begins, and why an organization might use one over the other (or how they could use both). I’m not sure how this will play out for on-premise installations vs. organizations who are leveraging Microsoft’s cloud offerings, but my hope for the future is a seamless and exceptional social experience in SharePoint.

Where would Yammer be a good fit? Are there risks to be aware of or things to consider?

I think the answer is easy. If an organization has an older version of SharePoint (such as SharePoint 2007) or a similar legacy platform and is interested in exploring the benefits of social collaboration in a low-cost, efficient way I’d suggest Yammer! If the organization is on SharePoint 2010 and has already developed a very strong collaboration model or perhaps has had success with some of the social concepts, I’d recommend SharePoint and not complicate the user experience. Setting up an Office 365 trial would be the fastest and easiest way to test-drive the new social capabilities in SharePoint.

Biggest risk point to consider? If your current employee portal has a rich set of social capabilities, I would be careful extending an isolated Yammer solution. The risk is that employees could become confused about what the organizational standard is for managing information, collaborating, and communicating across teams. For years, organizations have tried to simplify the personal information management strategies that employees have to deal with, and adding Yammer without the right change management and communication could make matters worse!

If an organization were likely to move to SharePoint 2013 in the near term, I would recommend adopting the native SharePoint social features, as they are excellent and likely capable enough for most organizations. SharePoint’s social capabilities have finally been extended beyond the My Site and have been blended throughout the platform in a fairly seamless fashion.

If clients were running SharePoint 2010 or a prior version with no immediate plans to upgrade and have a limited enterprise social footprint, then I would certainly take a good look at what Yammer has to offer. While the story has changed recently, earlier versions of SharePoint including 2010 can’t really claim to have competitive enterprise social features with Yammer.

Intranet Solutions

Today’s Intranet teams are streamlining processes and are working faster. A trend we saw last year that repeated this year is for teams to go live with iterative changes rather than wait to launch one new, huge intranet design. Agile or Agile-like approaches were used effectively in a development and contributed to the lower average time required to create the Intranet. The operative word here is effectively, as employing Agile is not a silver bullet; if done well, however, it can certainly streamline a project. (If done without proper design integration, Agile coding will create a disjointed, substandard user experience).

The noted trend toward an iterative process has changed the way we’ve been measuring intranet-project completion in the last two years. Prior to that, we only looked at one single release of the “full” intranet. But now, for some designs, we’re looking at iterations of the design, or even at just the functional elements that were most recently changed.

This way of working is potentially more practical for an organization producing an up-to-date and useful design. The development challenges may seem less daunting with an iterative approach, and the ability to see working results sooner may be more gratifying too. As improvements occur incrementally, employees are generally happier too, which can help with employee retention.

A possible setback of an iterative approach, of course, is if the way employees do a task is changed out from under them (as it happens too often),  and leaves them less productive and likely disgruntled. Thus, as designs iterate, it’s important that employees be able to still accomplish tasks without difficulty. No employee should wonder what mystery version of the intranet will appear each day when logging in. Their top tasks, global navigation, and core content sections should be designed early and stay static. This will help provide the concrete foundation that users need.

Feature Trends

As for the user interface, intranets often take a cue from web design, but in some areas intranets lead the way. Strong trends in intranet features this year include:

Responsive Design. Like last year, responsive intranet design is significant again, Organizations overcame the usual concerns around intranet security and offer employees access to expected content in varying ways.

Search Filters. The most common new trend on intranets, this year is faceted search. Search technology and planned content management with descriptive keywords make this feature work for the users.

Hover effects for immediate information about search. Intranet designers today focus on getting employees more information faster with less user effort. Content on pages is more thorough, yet concise. Rather than clutter pages, designs make use of hover effects to display more information before a user makes a commitment to click and follow through. Most commonly, pausing the cursor over a search result displays more information about that result item.

Federated Search. This is just a borderline trend as only a few organizations are doing this, offering search capabilities that effectively query multiple knowledge repositories, thus removing invisible awareness barriers often found on intranets. A word of advice: make the searches in the various areas good before attempting to federate.

Flat Design. Bevels, shadows, and elaborate framing effects seem to have become about as necessary as the human appendix, at least for this year.

Carousels. As in recent years, carousels have a prominent presence on the intranet homepage. In Design Annual fashion, the way these organizations present the navigation and content further progresses carousel design for intranets.

Company Performance on Homepage. To inform and motivate employees,

Megamenus. Also seen in years past, megamenus are helping employees discover layers deep in the hierarchy with a simple waive of the mouse.

Clever Use of Video. Today’s intranet designers recognize the potential and power of video. And they are moving away from the idea of limiting how or when video can be used on intranets.

Fat Footers. Display of large footers at the bottom of intranet pages, giving employees one more chance to find what they need when down there. These oversized footers, separated from the main content area with a different background colour and containing distinctly headed sections, are an expected and obliging anchor on intranets.

Some Intranet Examples from the Middle East:

1.    ARAMEX launches global Intranet

Based on Microsoft platform, intranet forms part of ARAMEX world-wide advanced technology strategy: forms basis for new customer service roll out

Amman, the international express and freight forwarding company specializing in the Middle East and Indian Sub-Continent regions announced it has launched its globally available intranet based on advanced technologies from world leading software company Microsoft Corporation. The global communications system will, in the future, form the basis of the company's extranet, a service that will give ARAMEX customers and suppliers access to the company's globally held information resources.

The new intranet system will operate as the single communications medium that gives ARAMEX staff all over the world immediate access on all of the company's operational, administrative, and customer related information.  It also provides information about the industries and markets that the company services. The development comes about as a

2.    Atlantis the Palm's intranet system

Atlantis The Palm, Dubai launched its intranet system, Aquarius, in February last year to streamline communication across the resort’s various departments, which employ more than 3000 people. With phase one now well and truly under way, the team is concentrating on building and launching phase two, which will feature a more interactive platform that will also foster independence among team members.

Rationale and Objective: The concept of an exclusive Atlantis intranet system was initially introduced to Atlantis team members in 2011. After receiving feedback on the ‘communications’ section of the hotel’s employee engagement index, the management team began working on improving communication within and among departments and diversifying the feedback channels at Atlantis. Comments received as part of the survey also indicated that shared drives were no longer the solution for communication across a large team, which led to the IT and employee marketing teams working together towards building the concept of internal system, Aquarius.

Another goal was to provide up to date content –to make sure that all the information that we’re giving out is current because this is the main concept of the intranet. Then of course, the third was to be Atlantis branded, to create the same look and feel that the main website of Atlantis has, so that people can relate to it.

3.    Saudi Food and Drug Authority

“Bawabaty” ( بوابتي ) which means my portal in Arabic, is highly customizable; giving employees powerful tools they need to do their work, and the freedom to do it in their own way.