Many companies are orientating on transitioning to Office 365 as a digital workspace. The biggest reasons for this are centralizing documents, allowing employees to work anywhere in a safe way and to make every application and all news centrally available. Also, Office 365 brings handy communicational tools like Teams or Skype. Despite the ease Office 365 can bring, for many organisations it is still not sufficient as a digital workspace. Here I will describe how you get more out of Office 365 by integrating it within the digital workspace Workspace 365.
Offer role-based applications
At the moment, it is not possible to offer applications based on roles within the Office 365-launcher. This has been one of the most requested features within Office 365 for years. Therefore, it is possible with Workspace 365 to create groups and offer applications or information based on these groups or individuals. This way, you provide access to the right newsfeed, information, applications or statistics for every individual in the organisation.
Single Sign-On to web- and hosted applications
When the digital workspace is set-up based on the individual needs of the user, it is nice to be able to log in to every application only once. That is why Workspace 365 offers Single Sign-On, so you can safely access all of your applications from your dashboard with just one click. For web applications Workspace 365 uses the powerful technology of Azure, and our own Single Sign-On tool for the web applications that are not supported by Azure. Additionally, you can use Citrix XenApp or our Clientless RDP to provide one login to hosted desktop applications. This allows you to start a single application with one click, instead of a complete remote desktop.
All documents in one place
Although Office 365 makes all of your documents available online, for some people the difference between OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams-documents and group documents is unclear. And even though they’re all very useful systems, combined they can be confusing and complicated for users. Also, not all organisations are ready to step away from their current file server and can’t integrate with Office 365.
To solve this challenge, Workspace 365 offers a simple document solution based on OneDrive, SharePoint and the file server. We bring al document solutions together within one single document folder, so people can easily learn how to work with documents online. This way you use all systems, without having to get used to anything as it is an intuitive document app.
More insight in information
A big advantage of a complete digital workspace, compared to Office 365, is that immediately after opening it, you have an overview of all of your most important information, like new e-mails, your calendar, recently edited documents, news from the intranet and statistics of for example revenue or website visitors. What information you would like to see is completely customizable. The admin or individual users can simply add live tiles with information that is relevant to them.
Integration with and similarity to old systems
The transition to Office 365 seems too big for some organisations, because – as mentioned before – it takes too much getting used to. Furthermore, they are held back by the fact that it is required that they have links to their current IT-systems. Therefore, Workspace 365 integrates with new (Office 365 and cloud services) and old systems (user management, file servers, remote desktops, on-premises environments and more). Workspace 365 brings together the new and the old, so users always have access to the applications they need and the transition goes easily and smoothly, for both admin and user. The technology behind the workspace can be replaced, without the user ever being bothered by it.
Independent digital workspace
There are many companies that notice their dependence on Microsoft services, documents in SharePoint, user management in Azure, email through Exchange, CRM in Dynamics and so on and so forth. Not all IT-managers like the thought of this, and search for a ‘technology independent’ platform. With the Workspace 365, we continually search for new collaborations to make the product stronger. For this we partially use solutions from Microsoft, but we also develop integrations that are separate from Microsoft, like the expansion of Single Sign-On or making sending personal information through email more secure. Do you have an idea on how Workspace 365 can make people’s work even easier? Let me know at [email protected] or vote for feature requests on our support portal.
Adoption and user convenience
Adoption and user convenience are two connected components. When you make a trial-version of Office 365, you will notice that there are standard Office applications available. However, it is not always clear to a user which applications are made for which purpose. For example, you have Tasks, Planner and To-Do for keeping up with activities. All three are great apps that are connected to each other, but for someone who doesn’t know IT, it’s difficult to decide which one they should use. The same goes for SharePoint and OneDrive. Both are great solutions for collaboration with documents, though the users need training just to keep apart the terms ‘SharePoint’ and ‘OneDrive’. Before, they would work with a shared drive and a “My Documents” folder. For this reason, you can integrate all these components and give them a clear name within Workspace 365. As a result, a user that logs in will immediately see all applications, documents and live information that is relevant to him or her.
Workspace 365 as ideal digital workspace
In the past year, we have experienced a huge growth in product development, partners and customers. The positive feedback we often hear about Workspace 365, is about the flexibility we provide. By supporting several underlying technologies, you can easily integrate other services within your organisation. The digital workspace is often used to build a bridge between the current and new IT-infrastructure, without bothering people with it or keeping them from their work. Besides working with applications and documents, people like that they can customize the digital workspace themselves and are able to open any application with just one login.
Mark Grasmayer
Product Evangelist
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