It’s one thing to watch a software demo and hear about all the great new functionality and tools, but until you sit in front of a touchscreen laptop and experience it yourself, it’s difficult to fully understand how a new solution impacts your work life.
At Portal Solutions’ Digital Workplace Experience Center (DWXC), you’re able to walk through this process of discovery with tools that are not yet available in your organization.
Typically, when customers visit the DWXC at our facility in Maryland, they have a lot of questions about how to use collaboration solutions. About 90 percent of people’s business communication is through email, so that’s what they’re accustomed to, and many have also been using instant messaging for a while. But linking and sharing documents in this context is relatively new territory. Part of the DWXC’s purpose is to provide exposure for and education about additional possibilities.
Our approach at the DWXC is to start with a familiar application, such as Outlook, and use that as the foundation for introducing new tools and concepts. Then people start to gradually discover the way that everything is integrated together.
For example, a person opens the new version of Outlook and sees familiar elements, alongside some new features. We encourage them to discover new features on their own. They might move the mouse over a person’s picture, bringing up options to video chat, IM or call the person, and even share their desktop from one click. Then they might notice a folder with several documents in it. Those documents are sitting in SharePoint, which means you’re able to access SharePoint without having to leave Outlook.
Like most people, you probably start your workday in email, but ultimately you need to find ways to get your work done while collaborating with the rest of your team. What are the easiest, most efficient ways to get questions answered and issues resolved? That’s where we introduce all of the communication and collaboration capabilities offered with Lync.
At the DWXC, people tend to love the Lync training. They all have headsets on and video conferencing capabilities, so they invite each other to videoconferences and start experimenting with online whiteboards, sharing their desktops and documents. That’s when people truly start to see that collaboration solutions go well beyond talking over the phone or videoconferencing. When they begin exploring the concept of co-authoring by inviting two or more people to a document, another light bulb goes off.
After the Lync training session, we move on to the capabilities of SharePoint 2013. And that takes two paths. First, we talk about the customer’s experiences with using their corporate intranet, which are often negative. Then we guide them through an overview of how a well-designed corporate intranet works, talking about the variety of communication capabilities (CEO blog, wikis and team sites for different teams, for example), sites for HR policies and forms. People start to see what’s possible from a broader corporate communication perspective.
Next, we move on to sharing documents within teams. At many companies, this means storing documents in a shared drive, with 10 versions of every single document and long, confusing file names. We start looking at the benefits of using a SharePoint site or document library instead. Rather than sending documents in emails, for example, now you’re able to send SharePoint links. Then we’ll explore document libraries and newsfeeds within the team sites, which starts to connect content management and social tools.
People begin to see the value of having a newsfeed specific to a team site or project in the digital workplace, moving communications out of jumbled emails into contextual, threaded conversations that are specific to a project. For many people visiting the DWXC, it’s their first real exposure to social business communication tools, so we take extra time to go over how social works as a collaboration platform.
Then, we introduce the concept of a Personal Site. Think about a Personal Site as a personal dashboard, offering a tailored view of your organization’s information and your communications. We walk people through customizing their own Personal Site, and they begin to understand how it allows them to narrow down a potentially overwhelming amount of information and optimize their digital workplace for what matters to them on a day-to-day basis.
At the end of a DWXC session, we have a brief mobile demo. Up to this point, people have been exploring the digital workplace tools on touchscreen laptops. But what about using an iPad? So we bring out an iPad and quickly show people that everything we looked at on the laptops is available for mobile devices.
Overall, a DWXC session lasts about three hours. This offers enough time to let people discover new features and functions on their own. It’s one thing to just observe a software demo, but we focus on active learning; our role is to guide the process of discovery, while encouraging people to play around with productivity tools for the first time.
Learn more about Portal Solutions’ Digital Workplace Experience Center and schedule your session today.
