How Conditional Access contributes to your adaptive workspace

Offering ‘everything’ isn’t everything – it’s messy. Imagine getting all the applications of your organisation on any device. You’d have so many options to work with, you wouldn’t be able to find the right one. Would you want that? Hell no. You want to work and get the applications and information that are relevant to you at that moment. To truly give employees what they need in order to work efficiently and productively, their workspace needs to adapt to their necessities and activities. That is why Workspace 365 adapts to a person’s role, however it doesn’t stop there. The adaptive workspace automatically transforms itself based on a person’s role, location, device and browser. One of the features that makes this possible is Conditional Access. We explain how this works.

What is Conditional Access?

Most people mainly know Conditional Access for its security benefits; it helps you to prevent people from opening certain applications and information from certain devices, browsers or networks. With this feature, you can for instance prevent a care worker from opening a patient file on their mobile phone, prevent someone from trying to open a web app that only works in Chrome with Internet Explorer or you can prevent some from opening local Office apps when they’re outside of the company network.

However, Conditional Access is not just helpful for security reasons. It also, combined with other features, helps you to create the adaptive workspace.

Why is the adaptive workspace important?

Every day, people are dealing with an increasing amount of information they have to process, both in real life and on the internet – and sometimes, unfortunately, in the workplace.
News from the company, teams, departments and external news, apps you use, apps colleagues use and apps that no one seems to use at all, they all add up and clutter the workday, which decreases productivity and makes people miss the news that is actually relevant to them.

Workspace 365 offers several tools to filter these large amounts of information and offer every individual a personalised workspace with the information, news and applications that are important to them. With this, they don’t have to sift through heaps of information, trying to figure out which of it is meant for them or even remotely relevant, and they don’t waste time searching their applications between dozens or even hundreds they don’t even need. One of the tools Workspace 365 offers is Conditional Access.

Adaptive intranet components

In many companies, the intranet is an important aspect of the digital workspace. In Workspace 365, there are several options to integrate intranet components to improve the way people communicate and collaborate. However, not every team or department uses the same tools. If for instance the entire company uses Yammer (and the teams within it) to collaborate and share information and just a few teams need Microsoft Teams for more close-knit collaboration, it’s a bit excessive to give everyone in the company a Microsoft Teams live tile on their dashboard. Imagine if that’s the way it’s done with all apps and information, you’d never find anything you need ever again.

Again, it is important to personalise the information and filter out anything that a person doesn’t need, so they won’t be distracted by questions they don’t know the answers to anyways, get involved in discussions they don’t have anything to do with or get distracted by ideas on projects they’re not even working on.

How Workspace 365 uses Conditional Access to create an adaptive workspace

So how do you get a workspace to adapt to a person’s role, location, browser and device with Conditional Access? We will explain what Conditional Access can do for you to create personalised workspaces.

Cut out the clutter

First of all, when there are many apps that have conditions set on them, you can choose to make the applications invisible when they’re not available. By doing this, the workspace will be slightly different (or completely, depending on the amount of conditions) every time a user logs in from a different device, network or browser. When you for instance have the same application with two different ways to access it (such as a local application and a Remote Desktop App), you can make sure that the app is always opened the way you want it to. You can for example set the conditions in such a way that when working from a desktop, people can only reach and view the application as a locally installed application, while working from another device they can only reach and view the same application as a Remote Desktop Application. This helps people to work safely, without any clutter.

Make people aware

When you don’t have that many applications with conditions on them, it’s not really necessary to make them invisible. You do however want people to be aware of the fact that on their specific device, network or browser they won’t be able to reach the application. That is why we also have the option to grey out a tile when it’s not available. That way, people are aware that at that moment, they can’t use that specific application. When they click on the greyed-out tile, they get more information on the conditions on that tile (in other words: why they can’t reach it). By doing this, you can show a care worker that it is not safe to open patient data in a public network.

Information and applications based on roles

Besides Conditional Access, the workspace will also adapts based on Permissions. As mentioned before, you don’t want people having to sift through large amounts of applications and information to find what they need. Therefore, you can use permissions to determine which individuals or user groups can see what information, applications or tile groups. With this, you can offer each user group only relevant data and tools. To determine these user groups, you can create personas, which you can find more information on in this blog.

Do you want to get started with Conditional Access? These articles will help you:

• Get example personas for the digital workspace
• More information on setting up Conditional Access
• Learn more about the adaptive workspace