blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

January 31, 2015

OneNote – My notebook offline and shared in SharePoint

Filed under: Digital Workplace,Office365 — Tags: — frederique @ 22:07

I have been working with OneNote for a while, and today it struck me again: this tool is really helping me a lot. To me, OneNote is a combined notebook and scrapbook: I can write down notes and paste interesting stuff that I found elsewhere. For myself, online and offline. But also shared with my colleagues. So let me tell you what I use and appreciate a lot.

Gathering information

  • Enter information like in Word, typing text and inserting things and structuring it with headings, lists etc. I can start typing anywhere on the page, just like I used to scribble additional notes on paper. OneNote has predefined tags for tasks, ideas et cetera, to help you visualize what is what.

    OneNote: Enter information

    Type information onto a page, insert images, structure it with headings and lists. And add tags to visualise tasks etc.

  • From Outlook: I often add important mails with my notes. In the olden days I used to gather all my paperwork in big physical dossiers. Now I send the mail to OneNote directly via the button in Outlook. You can select where you want to put the e-mail: as a separate page in a section of a notebook or on some existing page.
    Outlook: Send to OneNote

    Send information to OneNote from Outlook

    The entire e-mail message, with its header attachments and content, is put in your Notebook:

    Mail message sent to OneNote

    The mail message is included in the notebook, with its header, attachments and content

  • Screen clippings: I find a lot of information on the intranet or the internet, that I also want to include in my notebook. I can use any tool to grab a screenshot. But OneNote also has its own option for screenshots: Windows button + shift + S. The advantage of this option that it includes a reference to the page where I found it, so that I can click to the original page from your notebook.
    Note: In Windows 8.1 the key combination is Windows + shift + S. Earlier it was Windows + S. See this blog post and Microsoft’s page.

    OneNote screen clipping

    A screen clipping with a reference to the page where it was captured

Finding information

When I have gathered information, I want to be able to find it again quickly and easily. This can be challenging, as I work for a lot of clients, in a lot of projects and initiatives.

  • Browse: I browse through my notebooks by selecting a notebook, selecting a section tab and selecting a page. When I get busy on a subject that is hidden too far away, I drag that notebook, section tab or page and drop it at the front of the line. On a large screen, I pin the list of notebooks to the left hand side; on a smaller screen I unpin it to give me more space for taking notes.

    Browse my notebooks

    Browse my notebooks, the sections in the notebook and the pages in the section.

  • Search: By now I have many notebooks and some have many sections. So I am not always sure where the notes that I am looking for are stored and I cannot browse to every note easily. But I don’t have to: OneNote has a great search functionality.
    I enter the term in the search box and OneNote will search for it in all my notebooks – unless I specify that I only want to search this notebook or this page for example. And it will search for that term in the titles, anywhere on the page, and even in images like screen clippings! This makes OneNote far superior to my old paper notes…

    OneNote search

    Search anywhere in my collection of notebooks, including the text recorgnized within images

Working offline, storing online

I often commute to work by train, and most of those trains don’t have proper wifi. So I work offline on the train on either my own laptop or the laptop my client has provided me with. But I don’t want to lose my notes when the laptop dies – yes, that has happened to me once. And I do want to use my (non-confidential) notes on my other laptops as well.

  • Offline: OneNote is part of the office suite on my computer. The screenshots above were all grabbed from this OneNote on my computer. I can work offline with it. Just like I can work offline with Word, provided my Word file is available offline.

    OneNote is part of the Office suite installed on my computer.

    OneNote is part of the Office suite installed on my computer.

  • Online: I work offline on the notebook we’ve seen above. But it is actually stored online, in Office 365. So the information is not lost when an individual laptop breaks…
    I can also use the notebook in the online version of OneNote, within the context of the Office 365 site. Actually, I usually work in the OneNote on my computer, because it has more options than OneNote Online. That is why there is a button Open in OneNote in the online version.

    OneNote Online

    OneNote Online: the online version of my notebook, as I can use it in the browser.

    When I am connected to the network, it automatically synchronises the notebook on my computer with the online versio. For example when I have finished my train journey and arrive at the office. In case it doesn’t synchronise immediately, I can ask for it.

    Synchronise the version on this computer with the version stored online.

    Synchronise the version on this computer with the version stored online.

Sharing information

I almost always work with other people – colleagues, associates, friends. And I want them to see my notes too. And I want them to add their own contributions, so that I can see what they have thought of or jotted down. Fortunatey, I can share my notebook. I just have to make sure it is stored in a share location and not on my own c-drive.

  • Share the notebook: To share, click File. For the notebook you want to share click Invite people to this notebook, or Share on Web or network to move it from your c-drive to a shareable location first:
    OneNote share notebook

    Share a notebook by inviting other people to it. If the notebook is stored on your c-drive, share on web or network: put it online so that others can be invited to it.

    Then you can enter the people with whom you want to share, and select their permissions: can they edit or only view? You can see at the bottom of this page who already has what permission.

    Invite the people with whom you want to share the notebook.

    Invite the people with whom you want to share the notebook.

  • See what my colleagues did: If we are collaborating, I want to see what’s new since I last visited the notebook. OneNote marks the changed notebooks, sections and pages in bold. And on the page, the changed parts are highlighted.
    OneNote changed elements

    The notebooks, sections and pages that were changed since I last visited them, are marked in bold. The changed parts of the page are highlighed with a blue background.

    I can even see the older version of a page, via a rightclick on the page name. A rightclick on a version allows me to restore that old version, if the page was messed up.

    Versions of OneNote pages, accessible by a rightclick.

    Versions of OneNote pages, accessible by a rightclick.

  • Use the notebook that is included in standard SharePoint 2013 or Online teamsites. You can put a OneNote notebook on a SharePoint 2010 teamsite, by uploading the notebook file there directly or specifying that location when you share it. But when you use SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online, you automatically have a notebook for your team in that site. The members of the site are automatically members of the notebook as well.

    The standard Project Site already has a notebook

    The standard Project Site already has a notebook

  • E-mail a page to someone else: Sometimes I want to give specific notes to someone else, with whom I am not sharing the rest of the notebook.  I cannot give permission on a single page; only on an entire notebook. But I can send it by e-mail via the option Email page in the ribbon.

    E-mail this page of the notebook to someone else: the body of the page with all its content is put in the mailbody. The attachments are also attached to the mail.

    E-mail this page of the notebook to someone else: the body of the page with all its content is put in the mailbody. The attachments are also attached to the mail.

So OneNote helps me to work effectively and efficiently, both in solo efforts and in collaboration with others. It is not the only tool I use . For example, I love SharePoint lists for tracking things like tasks, because then you can slice and dice in different ways. But that is another story.

Today, I am savouring my favorite options of OneNote.

December 31, 2014

Happy New Year

Filed under: Digital Workplace — frederique @ 20:42

I wish you all the best for 2015, in your work and in your private life. May you all have interesting challenges, uninteresting bumps smoothed over seamlessly, and great fun with the people around you.

Not that my work life and my private life are all that separate these days. Yesterday I worked at the office but while waiting for my computer to process some work I could order the party food for tonight. And this afternoon I work from home, waiting for the shop people to deliver my party food. For Office 365, it does not matter where I am sitting.

This morning my digital workplace did not work as seamlessly as I had hoped. I have to migrate a lot of Gigabytes of files. I can move them into SharePoint Online from home just fine. But I did not have the source files. So I had to go physically to another city to pick up the external hard drive. Bummer.

Fortunately some colleagues were there at the office as well, so I could also do what is for me often the main reason to work at an office in real life: brainstorm and socialize face to face with colleagues, partners and clients. And wish them happy holidays and a great new year in person, in addition to all the digital good wishes…

For the rest of you, I will keep it digital: Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!

April 30, 2014

Ways to send standard messages with Outlook

Filed under: Digital Workplace,Office365 — Tags: — frederique @ 23:36

As a consultant, I sometimes make people happy by pointing out the standard functionality of Office in their digital workplace, in this case: Office 365 and the Outlook 2013 that comes with it today. And also in this case, these are people who often send the same or almost the same message at different times or to different recipients. They don’t want to rewrite those messages every time. They want to re-use a standard message, quickly and easily. Outlook can help you do that in different ways, depending on your needs.

I’ve been giving a series of training sessions on Office 365, including Outlook (not my regular day job, but these sessions are given in English, Dutch and French, so they ended up on my plate…) Many of the participants asked me if their Lotus Notes stationery would migrate into Outlook. It turned out they use Lotus Notes stationery to create and send standard messages. And they wanted to know how they should do that after the migration to Office 365.

Well, there are different options. Copying the same text manually into each new message is of course always possible. But let’s look at some more sophisticated options: including it in a signature, resending a previous message, doing a mail merge in Word, or using stationary in Outlook. Which option suits you best, depends on what you are trying to do.

1. Include standard text in a signature

You can define different signatures in Outlook and pick the one you want to be displayed at the bottom of your e-mail. In such a signature, you can provide text, paste pictures, insert links etc.. No sophisticated layout, but you can for example get a numbered list by copying it from Word.

So you can just put your standard text with its trimmings in a signature, and select that signature when you want to send the standard message.

Signature including a standard text.

Signature including a standard text.

So when I received a lot of e-mails asking how to handle the same problem, I created a signature including the instructions and then replied all of these people by simply selecting that signature. I also created a signature for a standard notification that I sent to many people over the course of the years.

When a particular person needed to get a slightly different message, I simply modified the message before sending it. And when the instructions or notification changed, I could easily edit the signature, so that it would be updated for all future messages.

  • Pro: Very easy to use. Easy to create and modify the standard content. Can be used in new messages or replies.
  • Con: Does not include the mail address and subject heading. No attachments (but you can include a link to information on a team site). No sophisticated layout.
  • Use it for: Regularly sending simple standard messages or replies to different people, as is or after a slight tweak.

2. Resend a message

Outlook offers the option to resend a mail message. The previously sent message stays sent; it does not get canceled or retracted. You merely make a copy of the message you sent before, including its content, addressees, subject heading and attachments, which you can then send.

Before you hit ‘Send’ on the copied message, you can make some changes: tweak the content, add or remove addressees, add an attachment, whatever is needed.

Resending screenshot

Resending a reusable message

You do have to find that previously sent message first. Of course you can use the search to find it every time you need it. But if you resend such standard messages often, you may consider putting them in a folder in your sent items, where you can pick them up easily.

This is a great solution for the participants in my training sessions who have to send very similar e-mails, with the same attachments, to different people at different times. And also for the participants who are sending only slightly tweaked reminders to the exact same people every month. I also use this option to send a message that is almost the same, after a tweak, to other people on an ad hoc basis: no need to set anything up, not even a signature.

  • Pro: Includes mail body and its layout, mail address, subject heading and attachments. Very easy to use once you have located the message and have found the option under ‘Actions’. No set-up needed at all.
  • Con: You need to locate the message in your sent items (solution: put it in a folder)
  • Use it for: Sending the (almost) same message to the same people or different people again, especially if it has attachments. Just once, or over and over again.

3. Mail merge from Word

Take advantage of the Office integration to write your message in MS Word and send it via Outlook using the mail merge functionality.

You set it up in Word, in the Mailings tab. Start with the button Start Mail Merge, and it triggers you to select your recipients: people from your Outlook contacts list, or from a separate file (e.g. Excel) listing the recipients.

Then we get to the interesting part: you can insert variable fields from the selected recipients list. For example, a greeting line that gets filled with the name of the recipient from the list, a mention of the city where he or she is based, the phone number that you have in your list and that you may want to check. You can also use rules to display text depending on some criteria. For example, if no phone number is listed, display a message “Can you please give us your phone number?”.

Mail merge screenshot

Mail merge set up in Word (where I toggled field codes, so that you can see where the dynamic data are coming from) and its result in an e-mail.

This allows you to create and send beautifully customized messages to large groups of people, which can of course also be written and laid out as you wish using the regular Word options. Don’t forget to send it as HTML, because your lovely layout won’t work as plain text probably.

When you send the message, from the button Finish and merge, you can decide to send the mail in batches, if you have a large list of thousands of recipients. The recipients will get only their own personalized mail anyway; they do not see that a similar mail is sent to hundreds of others… When you save your Word document, you can send another mailing later. Read more about mail merge.

This mail merge option is very useful to, for example, sales people who send offers and suggestions based on the products and services that the recipient has bought, according to the sales lists. Another example is an intranet team that uses mail merge to send e-mails to a large list of site owners, specifying which sites they are managing according to the team’s inventory and asking them to confirm their ownership and take some action.

  • Pro: Message automatically customized based on the contact data.
  • Con: To much hassle for simple messages to small groups. No attachments, or cc/bcc recipients.
  • Use it for: Elaborate, personalized mailings to large groups of people.

4. Stationery

Stationery originally is about the paper that your write or print letters on: paper of the specified weight and color, with the logo, address information and “context” like that. In Outlook, stationery is mostly about fonts, colours, backgrounds and similar look & feel aspects.

At my client however, people used stationery in Lotus Notes to create standard messages that they could easily send and resend. So they ask me, where they can find the stationery in Outlook. And yes, you can also use stationery in Outlook. You can even create a standard message in stationery and send that at will.

E-mail using a custom stationery screenshot

Create a new e-mail using the previously saved stationery with a standard text.

The problem is that stationery was not meant for creating standard messages.
First of all, it is difficult to save a message and use it as stationery. Starting from the message that you want to save, click File > Save as > HTML > C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Stationery. Then you can use it to create a new message via New Items > E-mail Message Using > More Stationary > your stationery name. The next time, your stationery will be in the short list, so you don’t have to dive into ‘More stationery’ anymore. Read more about stationery in Outlook.

And secondly, the result is not all that practical: the addressees, subject and attachments names are displayed in the body of the message. Not like in Lotus Notes, where these fields stayed in their fields…

  • Pro: Easy to use after the first time
  • Con: Difficult to set up. Does not include mail address, subject heading or attachments.
  • Use it for: Styling messages. Basically, use it a stationery and not as standard message.

So I value the options of including a simple standard message in a signature, resending messages and using mail merge to send sophisticated, personalized messages. And of course the good old copy & paste of content that I have included in my wiki process descriptions and elsewhere…

March 30, 2014

Roads are blocked? We can still work in our digital workplace!

Filed under: Digital Workplace,New world of work — frederique @ 17:06

The Netherlands hosted the Nuclear Security Summit this week. To safely accommodate and transport 58 world leaders and associate crowds of delegates, a lot of roads were blocked. We were all advised not to commute in this area. So could we all please work from home or anywhere except the offices in the NSS area? Yes, we can, in our digital workplace in the New World of Work!

This is not just a theoretical answer, but an empirical one. As it turned out, a lot of people did work from home during the summit. As a result, there were actually less traffic jams on the roads and the trains were less full than during a normal rush hour…

A lot of people concluded on Twitter and other social media that now we have proven that working from home in the New World of Word does work and we saw a lot of “workplace selfies” of people working from home in a very professional home office, or for example

Digital workplace on a train

…on a train….

Digital Workplace outdoors

… outdoors, grabbing some fresh air (it’s spring time!)…

So how about the messages we get from companies like Yahoo, who are asking their employees to stop working from home and get back to the office? Well, nobody said that the New World of Work implied working from home all the time. We can work anytime and anywhere and we should pick the time and place that suits the job at hand. For me, working from home is often more efficient and productive, while working at our own offices or a client’s offices may be more effective and innovative, depending on the day’s tasks. For example:

  • I work from home when I need to focus on writing documentation, configuring a lot of sites, performing administrative tasks, or something else for which I don’t want to be distracted or waste time on traveling.
  • I go to our office when I want to be inspired by my colleagues and inspire them to be innovative: serendipity works better if you can simply join a discussion at the coffee machine or ask colleagues sitting near you if they have an idea when you are stuck.
  • For working or training sessions with a group of clients, I prefer to be at the client’s location, to make sure we communicate seamlessly. We can look each other in the eye and pick up non-verbal clues, for example, when we are putting together the requirements for a solution, or when we start building and we think that some requirements needs to be discussed on the spot.
  • But when my clients are dispersed over a wide geographical area, then we do our session online and use the video conferencing options to look each other in the eye. It would simply be impractical to gather in real life for more than an initial kick-off or at most a once-a-year joint session with the key people, if even that can be managed given the budget and everybody’s agenda.
  • Usually I start from home and commute a bit later, to avoid the rush hour.
  • And when I go and see a client at their location in the afternoon, I work from home in the morning, to save traveling time.
  • En route to a presentation or meeting elsewhere, I do the last minute preparations on the train, so that I make productive use of my traveling time and have everything at my fingertips when I arrive.
  • And while I am waiting for my train or anywhere else, I can deal with my e-mail, check my to do list, manage my calendar, join in on discussion forums and of course talk to people on my smartphone.
  • Plus of course: I can keep working when something happens on the roads or rail roads, like a Nuclear Security Summit or a bad snowstorm. I work from home, so I don’t get trapped in traffic.

The thing is, that I am and feel responsible for my own work, so I can decide for myself where and how I can perform it optimally. My managers and colleagues trust me to do my job; they don’t have to see me in person do it. And they support me by placing an open and powerful digital workplace at my disposal.

In a way, my main workplace is digital, regardless of where I am physically. At our company and at clients, we use Office 365 in the cloud or SharePoint and Office on-premises versions, from laptops and other devices. Jasper Oosterveld has recently published a series of blogs on Office 365 from mobile devices. Tools in my digital workplace that I use a lot include:

  • SharePoint team sites for projects and ongoing department work, where we share information systematically: one version of the truth. We collaborate on documents with versioning and, for example, assign tasks and issues and track their status using lists. We can always get to these sites, wherever we have an internet connection. When I am traveling light with my iPad, I can still do the basics in my team sites. The screen is big enough to read and work comfortably. Site management and heavy-duty contributions can be a tricky on non-Microsoft devices.
  • Classic Office software like Word, PowerPoint and Excel integrate with these team sites: I can open a document from a team site, edit it, and save it back to the team site as the latest version. The options keep improving: the 2013 version allows for multiple authors to work in the same document at the same time in the browser, so you don’t even need Office on the device you are working on.
  • OneDrive and the sync option in SharePoint 2013 sites allow me to take documents offline (to work on while I am traveling by train for example) and synchronise them back to the site as soon as I am back online. I have some issues with this synchronization, maybe because I have connected too many different clouds to my laptop. But I hope this sync option gets more stable, as it can be very useful to me.
  • Outlook is a very powerful tool to manage my e-mail, calendar, tasks and address book. I have customized it with views, rules, short cuts and other options to suit my needs, and the search allows me find any item. When I am working on a client’s computer, inside their firewall, I can still access the online version. And I when I am away from any “big” computer, I can do all of this on my smartphone.
  • Lync enables me to chat with colleagues and clients who are also on Lync: see if they are available, ask a quick question, and then share my screen with them if I want to show them what I am talking about. A lot of my meetings take place in Lync, because for those meetings it is not worth the travel time and we can work more efficiently in the digital workplace. I don’t have to go to the Instant Messaging client separately, because it is integrated with the rest: it’s one integrated platform.
  • OneNote is getting more and more interesting as a tool to take notes and gather information as a team and share them in a team site: offline and online are integrated seamlessly. And the Office integration allows me also to, for example, add relevant mail messages or contacts to the notes in two clicks.
  • Yammer is becoming the discussion forum of choice for informal announcements, Q&A and brainstorming within the company. So far, it is only partly integrated with SharePoint, but as we move forward, it is getting better.
My digital workplace

My digital workplace: Office 365

Actually, I’ve been doing this for years and not just because of the Nuclear Security Summit that blocked the roads. We talk about the New World of Work or the New Way of Working, but it is not all that new.  But it is getting more and more relevant: easier because our digital workplace is getting better and better, and more and more widespread. We can work any time, any place and on any device and get the job done….

So when people ask if the Digital Workplace in the New World of Work actually works, we can answer with a resounding YES, we have seen it work!

February 28, 2014

Build it and they will come? Not if they do not adopt it

Filed under: Adoption,Digital Workplace,Governance — Tags: — frederique @ 22:24

Even if you have built a brilliant intranet or digital workplace, the people will not come and use it if they do not know about it, if they do not understand it, or if they do not feel that it is for them. They are all busy doing their jobs and do not want to be bothered by change, especially when they feel it is being forced on them as the latest fad from the IT department.

In a previous blog post I discussed five questions you need to address to get a Sharepoint environment that meets the users’ needs and can be really useful. In this article I focus on the other aspect: given a great tool, what can you do to get people to actually use it? You can start small with low hanging fruit, embed it in your organization and get leadership on board, communicate, involve the employees and find champions, and arrange for support like training and help where needed.

But before I go into details, let me first emphasize that you cannot simply force employees to adopt your system by making it mandatory without making it palatable. If your system does not meet their needs and they don’t feel comfortable with it, they will just find tools elsewhere (like dropbox when they don’t like your SharePoint). Or at some point quit and find an employer that does provide them with a workplace they like…

1. Start small, with low hanging fruit

You don’t have to launch everything that SharePoint has to offer to everybody all at once. People will just feel overwhelmed by all the options thrown at them. Concentrating on what’s in it for the employees:

  • Focus on simple functionality that can help a lot of people. For example, sharing documents and collaborating on them in a team site instead of e-mailing them back and forth and getting lost in the different versions.
  • Focus on eager users who can really benefit and may even be asking for a tool to help them, for example, to share documents with partners or process requests via a simple workflow. When a small team has used the new tool successfully to achieve their goals, you can show that to the others, their enthusiasm can spread and get the vibe going.
  • Focus on key content that many users need or find interesting. For example, HR information and today’s cafeteria menu (in many organization quite popular…). Make sure that content is in place when you go live and make sure that it is maintained afterwards.

2. Embed in the organization: get leadership on board

If the organization’s leadership is not on board, you firstly may run into trouble over funding. And secondly, employees may sit on the fence and wait it out.

This is especially true for the more social aspects of your environment, like discussion groups: some employees hesitate to share their ideas and give feedback in a public forum if they fear that management will disapprove. They need to know their manager will respond with kudos instead of complaints when they write up their discoveries in a blog post on the intranet.

When senior management participates enthusiastically and visibly, especially when they respond constructively to ideas and warnings, the employees will be more likely to stick out their necks and participate too.

3. Communicate, communicate, communicate

If the employees don’t know it’s there, they won’t come and take advantage of the brilliant digital workplace you’ve built. So tell them what you are going to build, what you are building and what you have built, what so cool about it and especially: what’s in it for them. This is not about the technology (although that may be of interest to some technical groups or technical organizations), but about the solutions that will make their jobs easier.

Make a communication plan and determine:

  • What you should communicate to which groups of people. For example, the basic benefits to all employees, productivity gain to managers, ease of site management to site owners.
  • Which channels to use for what: formal news articles on the homepage of your intranet, video, a series of informal blog posts, e-mail to people with special roles like site owners about the changes that will impact them, a few (very few!) e-mails to all employees about what they can expect (linking to intranet articles for more details), paper leaflets and quick reference cards explaining the steps they have to take, posters on the walls showing the benefits, …
  • What you should communicate when. For example, in the beginning tell about the results of the benchmark survey you did on the old environment, before launch explain what they can expect, after launch tell success stories of benefits gained by specific teams and share tips and best practices.

4. Involve the employees and find champions

Communication should not just be you broadcasting your information towards a silent crowd of employees. You also want to hear from them. You will need the input and feedback of the users to get an environment that really meets their needs. And you should make it clear that you are involving the employees, so that they don’t feel like you are trying to force your tool down their throats.

Tools that can help involve the employees include:

  • Serious surveys and quick polls
  • Focus groups
  • Social options in your existing intranet, like comment fields, discussion lists, yammer groups.
  • Just talking to them at the water cooler, coffee machine, or whatever you have…

When you are involving the employees, try to find and engage “champions”: people who can stimulate and help their colleagues to take full advantage to the new tools. These champions do not have to be the management sponsors or “officials” like the HR person or IT person for that part of the organization. It can be anybody who is enthusiastic and savvy about the new tools and willing to share.

So when a user is asking you smart questions about the new intranet, or often contributing to a discussion forum or blog, or contacting you about a team site that they manage and want to improve, or referring others to you for a specific solution, pay attention. These people are very valuable to you as representatives of and pioneers for their community.

5. Arrange for support: training and help where needed

The users may need help to understand the new tools and how to use them to their full potential. Usually, you hope your environment is so user-friendly that innocent end-users do not need training in order to use the basics. But, you’ll still want to arrange for:

  • Training for site owners and other people who need to play a more complex role.
    For instance, site owners who are expected to manage their sites and configure them to meet their users’ needs will probably need some training: how to create and modify lists and views, how to add elements to the homepage of their site, how to give people the right permissions to the right elements.
    Organize classroom training sessions at locations that can be reached, live online training sessions for people who cannot come to such a location, and recordings or other self-paced e-learning materials for people to follow at a later time.
  • A forum where users can share knowledge about the new tool
    For instance, site owners can ask questions and share tips in a Yammer group or community site.
  • Help content for all users, with a ‘Getting started’ page that offers a quick overview of the most interesting functionality and short cuts to, for example, my profile where I can upload my picture and enter my details. For users who want to know more, provide detailed help content.
  • Demo sites with some demo content that show a team site, a project site or a community site, where users can click around to see what such sites could look like
  • Playground sites where everybody can contribute, to see how it works.
  • Intranet team or at least an intranet guy/gel who the users can contact if the need assistance. Guide them to the best solution for the needs of their team, help them fix their site when it is broken, and simply hold their hand until they feel comfortable enough to take charge.

So…

So there are things you can do to help your users adopt the new tools and take advantage of them in their daily work.

  • Don’t wait until you have built everything and then start thinking about adoption. Involve your leadership and your users from the beginning, think about the low hanging fruit so that you are sure that works perfectly, train content owners at an early stage so that the key content is in place before you launch.
  • And then again, don’t stop after you have launched your intranet or digital workplace. Adoption is part of your ongoing governance: you keep monitoring what is needed, aligning with the organization, offering quick wins, communicating, involving the employees and proving support.

Your intranet or digital workplace is a living environment. You’ll need to keep an eye on it, using analytics tools and user feedback, to know how it is performing. You’ll need to feed it with good quality content and improvements, or it will starve. And you and the users need to adopt it and love it, or it will pine away…

June 30, 2013

Digital Holiday Place

Filed under: Digital Workplace — frederique @ 22:58

I have just got back from my summer holiday, which definitely took place offline, in real life fresh air. But I enjoyed some great digital support. That is what the digital workplace is about, helping you to do what you need to do effectively and efficiently.

No, I did not keep working via e-mail and the SharePoint team sites that I could have accessed from abroad. I just used digital tools to facilitate and enrich my holiday. Ok, and kept an occasional eye on my mailbox for serious crises.

We went island hopping on Orkney, the islands in the north of Scotland, and we wanted to see a lot of its nature and culture. No leaning back on an all-inclusive beach: our holiday entailed a lot of planning and research beforehand, tweaking and deciding on the spot, and more research afterwards – all part of the fun.
We started at home, with our full range of online machines. And we brought a tablet and a couple of smart phones with us, taking advantage of the wifi facilities that many of the accommodations offered.

Browsing and booking online

People we met during our travels said the same thing: “how did we manage to arrange a trip like this before the internet was available?” Now we could find out online where to go and what to see. And we could find and book the ferries that would get us there and the B&B and hotels where we could stay. In some cases we had to revert to a telephone – one of the smaller islands had had issues with their internet connection, so they had not received our request. But even so, we found all the timetables and addresses and everything easily on the internet.

Preparing in a shared workspace

There were four of us, living in different cities. So we kept track of our options, bookings, reference numbers, contact info, actions, packing checklist and all of that online. Google docs was our friend here, plus the Google drive app that we used to pull it all offline went we hit the road.

Google Drive to take our google docs offline

Consulting information offline

To keep our car from exploding, we did not bring too many paper books and guides. And to keep our phone costs from exploding, we only went online via wifi. So we took a lot of information offline, mostly on the tablet for ease of use.

  • Downloadable leaflets and books that were only available electronically. For example, the organisation Historic Scotland no longer publishes a paper version of its Members Handbook: it now is a nicely searchable pdf file. We even took the tablet on a walk, because we had found an interesting leaflet with a map and description. It was worth lugging around the additional weight, because there was no paper version to be found, and it was easier to read on the tablet screen than on the smaller phone screen.
  • E-books that would take too much space in print: Wikipedia books, a copy of a detective novel that is set in an area we visit, the poems of Robert Burns who is mentioned all the time, our portable library of reference books and entertainment basically.
  • Multimedia apps, such as the RSPB app of British birds have value with respect to the paper version in that is also offers sounds: bird calls.

Checking up-to-date info

We were in Scotland, so we wanted to check the weather forecast, to decide whether we should take that long walk today or tomorrow. We actually looked at the Met Office’s (mobile) site and two different weather apps for a second and third opinion, which served us well.

The sea is everywhere on these islands and several sites we wanted to visit are only accessible during low tide, so we checked the tide tables. And the opening hours of the heritage centers and tombs that were not simple accessible via a gate in a field.

What we also kept an eye on, were the announcements of the inter-island ferry service. It turned out some of our ferries departed at a different time and one did not run at all on our planned date, due to mechanical troubles and industrial action…

Checking the weather

Researching new leads

It was great that we could go online in most of our accommodations, because that allowed us to research the questions that we came up with during our walks and visits. What were those egg shells that we saw? Do guillemots stick close to their nest or do they fly far to forage? Is ‘voe’ a viking word and what does it mean? Any new findings in the dig of the Ness of Brodgar? What is that rock turbot that’s on the menu? Google and wikipedia helped us find many answers.

Digital holiday after the fact

We went offline in the real world to see the scenery, inhale the fresh air, watch the birds and the flowers, feel the rocks and the sand beneath our feet, pick up interesting pebbles and shells, savour the fish and shellfish, crawl through the archaeological remains and inspect the artefacts. But I also took over 3500 digital pictures of everything. So I’ll spend a lot of time on my computer, reliving our holiday digitally when I select my photos and publish the interesting ones on Flickr.

Puffin greeting at Castle o' Burrian, Westray

May 31, 2013

Twenty-four hours of digital workplaces

Filed under: Digital Workplace,Usability — frederique @ 22:31

DW24, twenty-four hours immersed in the world of Digital Workplaces. Guided tours, discussions, inspiration, lessons learned. Granted, I had to sacrifice most of my night’s sleep, but it was worth it.

This used to be the IBF24 marathon about intranets. But intranets have expanded so far into platforms for collaboration and social interaction that it makes more sense to talk about digital workplaces.

These are the things that struck me most:

  • A lot of participants emphasized that is it about meeting the business needs rather than the technology
  • Gamification can stimulate, but be careful how you use it, or it will just be “pointification” (Accenture has years of experience with this kind of motivational design)
  • Story-telling can work to engage: user tell their stories
  • Complete, integrated digital workplace is much appreciated (Virgin has a Cisco based platform for internal collaboration that includes voice messages and everything)
  • Organisations with customers or departments in Asia or Africa go for a “light” homepage (e.g. IBM: search and three boxes with a couple of headlines)
  • Homepages can be unusual (big personal picture and important links; XL, AMP) or -well- ugly (Weston) but if you can get to key content and functionality from there, it works…
  • Homepages usually contain: links to my tools and sites, news, social/culture elements. Some directly on the page, some behind a button.
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