How to combine Workspace 365 with your social intranet

The traditional intranet we all know and loath turned into a dumping ground for information. The rise of the social intranet was a great development. Instead of pushing information top-down, the social intranet allows interaction between people and makes it a better platform for collaboration and information sharing. But there’s more to get out of your modern intranet: by integrating it within your digital workspace, you can take it to the next level and boost your productivity. Here’s how.

Why should you integrate your social intranet within a digital workspace?

The biggest difference between a social intranet and a digital workspace is that a digital workspace integrates everything you need, to work anywhere, on any device. This includes all your documents, applications, telephony, and all the parts of your social intranet. Furthermore, if you integrate the social intranet within the digital workspace, which people use on a daily basis to access their applications with a single click, you increase the adoption of your social intranet.

Integrate your RSS feeds in the digital workspace

The RSS feeds within Workspace 365 give you a great range of possibilities to integrate social intranet elements into your digital workspace. Sharing company news, for instance. With the RSS live tiles, you can show both external news, such as blog posts from your website and mailings, and internal news from SharePoint on the dashboard. With this, you can keep employees up-to-date on both internal news and developments and the company’s external communication.

The RSS feed and SharePoint are also a great combination to push important documents and links with SharePoint list feeds. This can be helpful to give employees easy access to for example policies and procedures.

A text document or manual can be very helpful, but some things are just better explained when visualised – in video form. Important videos, such as instruction videos, can be placed in a playlist, which you can show in an RSS live tile. Besides these, there are many more things you could do with the RSS tile. That is why we wrote an article on twelve things you can do with RSS feeds.

Embed your videos, maps and anything else with iFrames

While RSS tiles allow you to see a playlist which directs you to the video, iFrames will allow you to watch the video directly from your workspace dashboard. This allows you to push videos to individuals or groups within your organisation. And iFrames can do so much more: it allows you to integrate almost any and all web content, such as information from your business applications, Google Maps, Google Calendar, etc. Discover more about the endless possibilities of iFrames in our update 2.59 blog.

Increase the adoption of your (enterprise) social media

Now when you’re talking social intranet, naturally you’re going to need some type of communication element. That is why Workspace 365 enables you to integrate and use Yammer in your digital workspace, so you can communicate, share and collaborate straight from your dashboard. By integrating Yammer within the digital workspace, you bring it to the dashboard which people access on a daily basis to reach all their documents and applications. That is why it will also increase the visibility and adoption of your social intranet.

Yammer is a form of enterprise social media, which increases collaboration between teams, departments and locations by giving them one platform to utilise their collective knowledge and share news, tips, best practices and to gather feedback. In our Yammer blog you can read everything you need to know about the benefits of using Yammer in your organisation.

Make your contacts easily accessible

The contacts sidebar in Workspace 365 allows you to quickly find personal information, and enables you to instantly use it. By displaying your Office 365 and Exchange contacts, you can click on a contact to view all their personal information, such as e-mail address, company, job position, and (office) location. Besides viewing this information, you’re able to instantly put it to good use. When you click on their e-mail address, a new tab will instantly open with a new e-mail concept. When you click on their phone number, your phone application (on your desktop your VoIP application, on your mobile your phone) will instantly start calling them. You can also click on their location to instantly view it in Google Maps.

Share and work in documents throughout the company

You can integrate SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and your file server within the Workspace 365 document app. This gives you the possibility to safely access and work on these files wherever you are.

An intranet allows you to display documents without allowing people to edit them. You can do this with the digital workspace as well. If you want to share documents which are only viewable, you can create shared company folders. By integrating SharePoint, you can place the files in a folder for individuals, groups or everyone in the company to view, but not to edit. These folders are easy to update, maintain and to manage who can or cannot view them, which means: no more outdated or irrelevant information (take that, traditional intranet).

Simplify your business processes with Business Apps

Of course, with Workspace 365 you’re already able to easily share and edit documents, even at the same time, but sometimes you need other tools than Office. Processes like keeping up with leads, projects and activities, are better done with special apps and tools, like the Business Apps.

With the Business Apps you can integrate HR-workflows. Important HR documents can be stored and displayed in ways we’ve already discussed, but what about the HR systems and processes, such as requesting vacation days, registering sick days or requesting work clothing? These processes can also be integrated in the digital workspace, making it accessible on any device.

Workspace 365, your digital workspace that integrates your social intranet

One of the powers of Workspace 365 is that it is role-based. So you can specifically indicate which individuals or groups you want to see which information, applications, documents, etc. Subsequently, people no longer have to waste their time on heaps of irrelevant information.

You also don’t have to worry about giving access to sensitive company information through the digital workspace. By setting up conditional access, you have complete control over which applications work from a specific IP range, device or browser. This means that you can disable an application which contains sensitive data from being used outside of the office, or that you can help people by letting them know when an application doesn’t work on the device they use.

Workspace 365 already allows you to collaborate effortlessly, however, by integrating a few social elements, you can bring your social intranet into the workspace and increase the adoption of both the social intranet and the workspace. You transform your digital workspace from a place where you can work productively and efficiently, to a place where you can collaborate and elaborate. You’ll end up with one complete workspace with everything you need.