Improving Digital Adoption

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.

If you oversee document management, compliance policies, and collaboration channels, you know the level of productivity that can be achieved using workflows.

In addition to the out-of-the-box workflows, SharePoint and Office 365 enable the creation of custom business workflows and a variety of no-code automation solutions.

Many companies build these computing processes to help employees easily and duly perform repetitive tasks. But, many of these solutions are often either ignored or abandoned.

There is a better approach to these initiatives.

During the keynote at #SPC18 last week, the MS team re-assured the attendees that SharePoint is seen as a 'foundational service' for Office 365, along with OneDrive and Exchange. Microsoft has seen a 200% growth in SharePoint storage used in O365. Out of all active SharePoint seats – 70% of them are for SharePoint Online (as opposed to on-prem). Their strategy has 4 pillars that are defining the dev work they are doing day in and day out. Here's a summary of those pillars and what features we're seeing happen for each of them.

Whew... what a busy couple of weeks. The SharePoint NA conference on May 21-23 was packed with interesting sessions and opportunities to connect. I'm just now getting past the obligatory catch-up cycle that follows one of these events, and I'm starting to look back through my notes. I thought I'd share a few highlights over the next few days to help me process the things I want to remember and perhaps help someone else who didn't get to go. Today, I'm looking back at the keynote from Bill Baer, Jeff Teper, Seth Patton, and a cast of 1,000's on day 1.

The MS team identified and highlighted six trends that are defining the digital workplace, and I thought some of them were helpful in analyzing our own personal and organizational goals from a big-picture / strategic perspective. For now, I'll let you read everyone else's posts about the numerous announcements made there, and I'll focus on the strategic trends the MS team presented, as well as my own thought processes that wandered off from there...

In this instance, "training" means "transferring knowledge to an end-user"; and, “helping" means "guiding an end-user through steps while completing a task".

Helping works better than training because mastery is attained at work, not in classrooms. In other words, learning on the job is the superior way.