Improving Digital Adoption

The user base of contextual help systems keeps expanding, rapidly. From the immense pool of feedback that has been gathered, companies have highlighted a number of benefits:

• Enabling ongoing user training effortlessly;
• Freeing IT teams from the workloads of providing support to end users;
• Increased usage of approved digital tools;
• Easier onboarding of new employees;
• Faster adoption of business workflows;
• Improved regulatory compliance;
• And, more importantly, successful digital adoption.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a timeline of 'adoption enhancing activities' to follow when rolling out a new SharePoint-based intranet (or relaunching an existing one)? I mean, let's get real and talk about concrete things instead of vague concepts.

As contextual help systems emerge in the market, a question is often asked: we are already running training programs, do we have to install a contextual help system as well? The answer to this question is yes. Training programs definitely help but contextual help systems ensure digital adoption.

Business need:

A governance document exists for the company which has guidance on how the intranet environment should be used and processes that need to be followed. The problem is that not many people know where the governance document resides.   Even among the people that know where it is, most don't make use of the document because it's too long and it's hard to find the exact policies you need to know when you need to know it. There needs to be a way to communicate governance information to people when they need it.

Business need:

When users visit new web interfaces, it's easy for them to get confused especially if there is a lot going on in those interfaces. We want to be able to provide automatic context sensitive guidance about those interfaces to the users so they are not confused. This information needs to be provided in the user's own workspace so they don't have to navigate somewhere else to get that information.

Microsoft announced some changes to self-service group and site creation in Office 365 a little while ago that has some interesting governance implications - especially if you're the tenant admin. The focus of these changes seems to be making self-service site creation more attractive for organizations who may have been wary of allowing it previously.

Business need:

Show a warning dialog to my users every time they come to a specific document library. This dialog should tell them that they cannot upload any document that has credit card or social security numbers in it. This is needed for compliance reasons for our company.

Many organizations are still hesitant about adopting Microsoft Teams. They are missing out; here is why. Collaborative work with emails is impractically limited. Working together on a simple PowerPoint document can result in several messy threads of lost emails.

Help your team move their collaborative tasks to Microsoft Teams as soon as possible; the resulting boost in productivity is worth the investment. Everyone will be able to contribute more and teamwork culture will develop organically.

We take feedback to heart at VisualSP because it helps drive the enhancements made to the Help System. A big thanks to our customers and partners for your thoughts and suggestions. With your feedback we are excited to announce the release of the following new features and capabilities:

I've been working with VisualSP a lot lately, now that my focus is on user adoption. One of my colleagues there recently collected a set of survey data about what organizations see as their biggest challenge. The clear winner was user adoption, and the next 4 were all topics related to that. I find this interesting, because it shows a growing awareness of the importance of user adoption.