Partner Exclusive: The Workspace 365 Movement (event recap)

On Thursday March 25th, we organised our biggest partner event yet: The Movement. In this exclusive event for partners, six different experts from Workspace 365 talked about the role partners play in Workspace 365’s mission of conquering complexity for people who do important work, and how Workspace 365 in our turn helps partners to be successful.

In this article, we’ll go over all sessions of the event and highlight the most important pieces of information. Missed the event and prefer the online event experience? Don’t worry! You can watch the event on-demand here!

Session 1: Conquer Complexity with CEO Erik Nicolai

The event started with a kick-off by our CEO Erik Nicolai. He explained in short what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years, what we’re doing now and where we believe we are going, of course with the help of our partners.

From access to apps to one interface for all

When we started developing the adaptive workspace, our main goal was to bring all applications together, because a lot of the complexity people experience during their work comes from the access to different applications.

Now, the application portal part is complete, although we will always take steps to improve it. Our next step is about far more than just integrating applications. Our goal is to further implement information and tasks into the workspace, providing one interface for everything people need during their workday.

Build with partner input

In order to get where we are, and to go where we want to go, we heavily rely on our partners. Throughout the years, you have provided us with insight into the technology we needed to integrate in order to simplify access to applications. And we continue to trust in your input to improve our platform.

Finding our ideal customer: Deskless and remote workers

The input of our partners has for example really helped us to understand what our key verticals are and who can benefit most from the adaptive workspace: our ideal customer. Look for instance at deskless workers, the mobile workforce, and markets where employees only spend 20 to 30% behind a PC or tablet.

Focusing on this ideal customer, we saw a tremendous growth in users: from 20,000 to 200,000 users. To get to our goal of 1,000,000 users, we need more input and insight from both our partners and customers.

Developing true partnerships

It’s not just the adaptive workspace we want to improve. We also don’t just want a partner network that can resell the workspace.

We want to build a movement, in which Workspace 365 develops true partnerships. Where we work together on catering to customers world-wide. Therefore, we’re continuously working on improving our support and onboarding for our partners. Some of these initiatives can be seen below.

A big thanks to all our partners

Erik concluded his session with a thank you to all Workspace 365 partners. For the effort, for the input, and for joining us on our mission to conquer complexity for the workforce.

Session 2: Unlock the power of partners with Partner Success Maker Tjibbe Vissers

We want to help partners to unlock their potential when it comes to contributing to a happier work-life. In order to do so, we’ve been working hard for the last few months on creating our brand new Partner Portal, which Tjibbe proudly introduced during this session and which is now globally available. Here we bring vital information, marketing material and training courses together. Let’s go on a tour through the most important elements.

Learning tracks

From adoption and onboarding, to commercial and technical: with our new learning tracks, you can become a Workspace 365 certified expert! Learn how to offer the platform combined with your own services, or how to ensure the platform is embraced in your customer’s organisation.

Playbooks

We have lots of marketing materials available for you: whitepapers, best practices, blogs, and so on. In playbooks, we have sorted all of this information by vertical, customer type or audience. This way, you can easily find the content that’s relevant to you and find the right sources for the right customer.

You can also make these materials your own, since we’ve made it very easy to co-brand most sources. Customise documents, handouts and more, with just the click of a button.

Deal registration

Within the Partner Portal, we’ve made it easier to register deals with us. On your new deal registration page, you can claim a deal with the click of a button.

Personalised landing pages

Create your own personalised landing page, on which you can unite materials from Workspace 365 and your own products and services, and easily share it with your customer.

Discover the Partner Portal!

This is not all the Partner Portal has to offer. Think for instance pricing information, or an event calendar. Discover the power of the portal in the Partner Portal itself!

Session 3: Fast innovations with Technical Success Lead Laurens Holtkamp

Every day, we see more possibilities and advantages of moving to the cloud. Many organisations are taking their first step by moving from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online, and even more are already taking next steps by migrating files.

But what if your customer still needs their file server? Or if your line of business applications are still using terminal servers, or virtualization?

Our Technical Success team helps partners and customers to implement a new way of working, and to make sure that all implementations are successful. With our help, you can learn how to create a hybrid workspace in which everything a customer needs is united.

In any implementation, the most important thing is to research the needs within the customer’s organisation, and to communicate with both IT and the end-users. We’re happy to help. Creating a roadmap to the customer’s ideal workspace usually happens in these four steps:

1. Simplifying access to applications
2. Combining information
3. Simplifying processes
4. Creating a personalised workspace with Conditional Access 

With this process, we have helped over 3,000 customers with a hybrid or cloud workspace. And of course, we’re happy to share with you what we’ve learned along the way. Do you want to discuss a customer with us? Get in touch!

Session 4: Bring it on with Head of Growth Rick van Diermen

The world of IT is changing rapidly. Where a few years ago organisations were dependant on on-premise applications, now more and more is moving to the cloud. But moving to the cloud is not a stand-alone goal: it’s a means to an end. The end being creating the best working environment for people and making working easier. This required many MSPs to review their proposition, and it still does. Workspace 365 helps partners with this.

Identifying the ideal Workspace 365 customer

Workspace 365 does not only help partners with shaping this proposition, but to offer this to their customers as well. For instance, we often help partners with which kind of customer fits Workspace 365 best. We’re often asked by our partners which vertical really fits Workspace 365. However, we prefer to look at the individual organisation and the associated employees. We do this with a set of predefined steps.

Step 1: Prequalification

To see if Workspace 365 is a good fit for a specific organisation, we prequalify with a set of questions:

• Are they using Office 365?
• Are they still using Citrix or RDS?
• Do they want to move away from their Remote Desktop?
• Do they use a fileserver?

Step 2: Discovery meeting

The goal of the discovery meeting is to look, together with the customer, at their challenges and ambitions. We share our vision and see if this fits the organisation’s ambitions, so we can determine if Workspace 365 can be of added value to them.

Support and guidance with large customers

You know your customer best. And we know Workspace 365 best. Which means that we both have a learning opportunity here.

Workspace 365 always aims to be involved in customer cases that involve an organisation with over 200 employees. This gives us a chance to understand the customer better, and you, as our partner, to ensure a smooth onboarding for the customer with our support.

Session 5: Future of work with Head of Product Wesley de Graaf

In this session, Head of Product Wesley discussed what we’re working on now, and our goals for the future to improve our platform to boost people’s workday.

Now: Unite apps with information, tasks and processes

People spend a large part of their day switching between applications, and often don’t remember the passwords of most of them. We already simplified this by bringing all these apps together and offering one-click access with Single Sign-On.

Now, we’re working on reducing the time people spend on switching between different applications. We do this in several ways.

For one, we bring information from Microsoft 365 to the adaptive workspace with the use of, for instance, live tiles. Also, we develop Micro Apps to integrate tasks and processes. This enables you to bring for example processes from your HR system to the workspace, and display information as tasks.

Additionally, the Activity Feed plays a big part in uniting apps with information, tasks and processes. You can connect the Activity Feed to other systems, and use our API to retrieve tasks. This allows you to for instance instantly join online meetings, straight from the Activity Feed. It also is a great place within the workspace to include and connect additional services offered by you, our partner.

The future: DEX, the intelligent workspace & optimised analytics

What we’re planning for the future of the adaptive workspace, can be divided into three major areas.

The digital employee experience

In the market, we see an increasing focus on the Digital Employee Experience. That’s not surprising, as digital transformation is of record-high importance, people work with technological tools more and more, and organisations are increasingly paying attention to the wellbeing and satisfaction of their employees.

That’s why our team is focusing on researching the needs and wishes of different types of employees within multiple industries. We monitor how they work throughout the day and which processes they deal with. This way, we get better insight into what they need and what we need to simplify.

The intelligent workspace

With features such as Conditional Access, we already enable you to show applications based on certain conditions, so that people only see what’s relevant to them in that specific moment. Additionally, we are working on developing an integrated App Request flow that will provide people the right applications and increases the self-service capabilities.

In the future, we want to make our Micro Apps and Activity Feed more intelligent. Consider the ability to recognise repetitive tasks, so that the workspace can automatically help people by showing the right tasks and notifications, at the right moment.

Optimising workspace analytics

Last, but certainly not least, we’ll be working on improving the workspace analytics. This will help us, as well as you and the customer, to understand how people interact with the workspace and which integrations they use (and would need). With this information IT managers and adoption experts can improve the (usage of) the workspace, as well as evaluate software applications.

Developing together with our partners

Everything we do, we do with the help of our partners. If they notice a need from their customer, we can develop accordingly. This way partners can offer their customers exactly what they need, and we are able to continuously improve the workspace.

The process to achieve this can look like this:

• Prioritise features: from all feature requests we receive, we first determine which ones are most requested and most urgent.
• Speak with customers: in order to develop something that suits the customers’ needs, we first talk to customers to uncover the need behind their feature request.
• Testing with mock-ups: based on our conversations with customers, our UX and UI designers create first mock-ups.
• Feedback & improvement: these mock-ups are subsequently reviewed by the customer. This feedback is used to improve the design.
• Development & release: when we have the optimal design, it can be developed and released to all our customers!

Do you want to develop with us? Request a feature on our Support Portal! 

Session 6: Start the movement! With Head of Partner Success Gijs van Hees

In the last session, product Evangelist Mark Grasmayer interviewed Gijs, who helped to onboard and train over a hundred partners. They explained how we can help you to help customers, and how to sell additional services on top of Workspace 365, based on several success stories.

Case 1: Launching and installing Local apps – feature development by insign.it

The first case really demonstrates the power of a vendor agnostic platform for our partners. Though the majority of the IT landscape is transitioning to the cloud, sometimes people still rely on local applications. Naturally, we want to simplify access to these applications as well. That’s why Workspace 365 released the Local App Launcher.

Based on this Local App Launcher, insign.it developed a feature that allows employees to deploy local applications with one single click. Users simply click on a local application, and if the user has permissions for that app, the tool will detect if the app is installed. If it is, it will use the App Launcher to open it. If it’s not, the app will automatically be installed. Additionally, insign.it takes care of the app management life cycle. This way, the user can focus on their core tasks.

A great benefit for insign.it here, is that they can offer a workspace to their customers with all their services in one place. It also helps them to bring other additional services to their customers, as well as the fact that this gives them a unique Workspace 365 proposition in their areas.

Develop your own solutions?

Do you want to develop your own solution based on Workspace 365 functionalities, just like insign.it? Visit our Support Portal for APIs that can help you with this.

Case 2: Moving to a browser-based workspace – Exite ICT & Timing

This case shows the impact of Workspace 365 for both a partner and a customer.

Timing, an employee agency with over 1,000 employees and spread over 180 locations, was working with a traditional Remote Desktop environment and a separate intranet solution. They experienced challenges with working with Microsoft Teams and different types of multimedia through their remote desktop environment.

That is why Exite ICT offered them a combination of managed devices with Workspace 365 and their own additional services. This created the flexible foundation Timing wanted for the future. As they will move to a browser-based workspace and managed devices this allows them to switch off 124 remote desktop servers. Additionally, they can integrate (parts of) their intranet solution within the workspace. This provides the employees with one entry point for everything, on any device and at any location, and simplified their line of business processes.

Exite ICT was able to give the customer a modern environment with greater flexibility and functionality, which is vital in that customer’s field.

Case 3: Communication and Collaboration – Previder & Energiewacht

Energiewacht, a company that helps business and private owners with their energy transitions, consisted of three different companies due to mergers, and had over 1,000 employees. The teams from these previously three different companies needed to collaborate across multiple locations and needed a consistent environment across the organisation.

Our partner Previder joined forces with our Customer Success Team and were able to realise a new workspace environment in less than five months, supporting Energiewacht’s communication and collaboration needs. Below you will discover how the customer Success Team operates.

Workspace 365 partners & the Customer Success Team

Workspace 365 is a partner-driven company. To support our partners with customer onboarding, we started offering adoption guides two years ago. However, we noticed that sometimes partners could use additional support; especially with large customers with more than 500 employees. That is why we started the Customer Success team: to help partners deliver the value the customer expects.

The Customer Success support process looks different for every customer, though every customer pretty much goes through these five steps:

1. Kick-off: why does the customer want to change, and why now? In this step, we confirm the value the customer wants to derive.
2. Inspiration session: all stakeholders are informed of the opportunities and functionalities of Workspace 365. This is a great moment for the partner to offer your own additional services.
3. Functional design: we help to create the best possible workspace for each persona, and ask for feedback.
4. Launching stage: Workspace 365 is launched. This may include a communication plan.
5. Review and evaluation: this is an ongoing stage; an infinite loop. Workspace 365 keeps evolving, and customers and partners can share their voice to help develop more relevant and useful functionalities.

The most important thing in this process is a good project team, in which all the right departments are involved. Think for example of people from IT, but also from different business units, HR and a good project manager.

Workspace 365: supporting and supported by our partners

You, our partner, are key to the success of the adaptive workspace and the movement we’re creating in the market. That’s why we gladly go the extra mile to help to make you successful. We help you with your first five customers, we support you in closing deals, we participate in events.

Now, we also have the Workspace 365 Partner Portal, in which you can find countless of resources, especially curated for you. Do you want to know more about how we help our partners, would you like to make a request or would you like to take advantages of one of the many ways we can support you? Contact our Partner Success team or our Customer Success team!

Are you not a Workspace 365 partner yet? Let’s talk! Contact us or find out more on becoming a Workspace 365 partner.