forward 20141 March Autumn

THE WORLD OF MODERN BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Edition 1

It's alive, alive!Bringing your intranet to lifeInnovation: Shorter deployment times, mobility keyIndustry: What's hot right now

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We are excited to present this publication to you, and hope it will become a source you can rely on for insights into modern business solutions and innovations.

For readers who aren’t familiar with us, we are the co-founders of an IT professional services firm which opened doors in 2002. Since then our company, nSynergy, has been building its reputation as a global Microsoft partner and we operate in several markets around the world. Our people are Office 365 and SharePoint experts, who design smart, modern business platforms with a distinct collaboration and user experience (UX) edge. That’s who we are, in a basic nutshell, but you can learn more by flipping to the back page.

Enough about us. Forward is about you. The CEO, CTO, Project Manager, decision maker, everyday user of business technology. In publishing Forward we simply want to share insights, news and best practices with you from inside our industry. And, in doing so, arm you with the knowledge to seek better solutions and the confidence to embrace emerging technologies.

It's alive - Bring your intranet to life

Microsoft update

What's hot

Innovation & Strategy

How retail is doing it better

Social buzz - Yammer

The wonderful world of OSC LiveTiles

OSC LiveTiles DNA

Project & People spotlight

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Hello and welcome to the first edition of"In publishing Forward we simply want to share insights, news and best practices with you from inside our industry. And, in doing so, arm you with the knowledge to seek better solutions and the confidence to embrace emerging technologies."

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Let’s get started by looking at the current state-of-play. IT is an industry that is always undergoing some form of change. But now, more than ever, there’s a feeling of perpetual evolution - which is exciting if you are willing to embrace it. If you haven’t already, it’s time to take a deep breath and challenge some of the statements you’ve been hearing (or saying) in recent years, like ‘We’re not ready for cloud’, ‘We’ll think about mobile next year’ or ‘Social won’t work in our business.’

The ways in which people collaborate, share knowledge and conduct business has been permanently transformed by cloud and mobile technology. Businesses who are propelling themselves forward are those prepared to leverage this demand to their advantage. To have more meaningful, multi-channel interactions with employees and customers, and elevate organisational productivity into a different stratosphere. The good news is we’re seeing plenty of both new and enhancements to existing technologies to support this.

Positively, these evolving technologies appear to be helping our industry form a new mindset. The days of huge IT projects, buried in layers of complexity, appear to be numbered. Simpler projects, deployed within shorter timeframes are now being favoured - enabling service providers to be more agile. We’ve actually used this as a catalyst to evolve our own approach. Projects are now set up to mature naturally through an ongoing development and performance management cycle.

To wrap up, it would be remiss of us not to mention the recent appointment of Satya Nadella as the third CEO of Microsoft. Appointing an insider to the post indicates that the Devices and Services focus initiated under Steve Ballmer will continue - a positive for our primary strategic partnership.

The technology required by the world today is one that seamlessly bridges the device a person uses with the software and data they need. Microsoft is in a very strong position to take this seamless experience to a new level across multiple device channels. When you sit back and think about the assets Microsoft has at its disposal: Office 365, Server and datacentre platform, client software, Skype, Xbox, Kinect etc., it’s quite mind-boggling to imagine the kinds of things they will be doing in the future. Nadella himself has reportedly said Microsoft needs to start thinking like a start-up again. Not an easy task in a company as large as Microsoft! But if this happens it’s going to be a really exciting time to be a Microsoft customer or partner.

Taking all this into consideration - we can expect another eventful year! So we look forward to teasing out some of the best innovations and ideas for you. We welcome you to contact us via info@onlinesc.com with any content requests or questions.

All the best,

Karl Redenbach & Peter Nguyen-Brown

Forward.

It’s alive... ALIVE

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Bring your intranet to lifeWeb design has come a long way in the past two decades. In fact it has probably come a long way in the past two days. The sky's the limit for web designers with real creative freedom, as they’re restricted only by the size of their imaginations – and their clients' wallets.

If we sat a website from 2014 alongside one from 2006, the contrast would be dramatic. The newer site would be cleaner, with less navigation bars and links, with greater interaction between site and the user, and it would most likely incorporate modern principles like flat or responsive design. Today’s websites are also better at hiding technical complexities and pre-empting what information their visitors want.

However, if we performed the same comparison with intranets, we haven't come very far at all. Aside from incorporating a few nicer visuals, it seems we haven't significantly changed our mindset in terms of what makes a good intranet design.

Technology has certainly evolved to support advances in design. Just look at the capability differences between the last three SharePoint installments across 2003, 2007 and 2013. The world has of course changed rapidly, along with user needs and expectations. So why are intranets of the past still being touted as modern solutions?

If you are out there innovating in this space, or challenging your company to innovate, we commend you. But it appears the broader IT community needs to start challenging their mindset.

Here are six techniques you can employ to bring your intranet into the present, while keeping an eye on future needs:

1. Design for your users

The term ‘intranet’ has become synonymous with a single point within an organisation. But this is not a true definition - it never was. We have created a belief that there's only one intranet and that it will work for every user in an organisation, no matter who they are or what they do.

When it comes to large intranet projects with a lot of technical requirements, project teams tend to generalise and compartmentalise user needs. The guiding theory being that you can’t please everyone, so go with what the dominant users want and not be too concerned about the remainder of the population. What happens then? Ninety nine times out of 100 the latter will stray from SharePoint and use their own tools or work arounds.

Only by investing time in activities like Persona Profiling (identifying several core user types and determining how they work and what’s important to them) can you begin to understand who your users are and use this to inform your choices.

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"Using storytelling and real world scenarios to understand how different users interact with information.. is a very effective technique"

2. Design for need and context

Identifying who your users are is the logical place to start, but you then need to understand the context of their needs.

As an example, a retail company might say they need SharePoint to distribute information to store workers and to act as ‘the single source of truth’ for all policies, training materials and news.

On the surface, this appears a fairly straight-forward requirement, which can be solved with a traditional, almost out-of-the-box SharePoint site. But after speaking to users, you determine they are largely shift workers who have just a few short minutes each shift to access and consume company information on a tablet. These new insights immediately tell you the users need a simple, efficient, touch-friendly solution.  Using storytelling and real world scenarios to understand how different users interact with information, ie. building Use Cases, is a very effective technique in helping to determine user needs and context.

3. Design for touch

Tablet usage has grown so rapidly in the past 18 months that it's virtually omnipresent. As a result, most users are now comfortable with all kinds of touch interactions, opening up the idea of anytime, anywhere interaction with any kind of technology. And yet take up from companies willing to accommodate touch within their intranet scope remains low.

There are naturally a range of interesting implications for how we can deliver touch in SharePoint. For example, consider a SharePoint solution in engineering, manufacturing, or a factory-based operation where workers need to access information on touch devices. Predominantly male workers. Now

think about the number of fat fingers that would struggle to touch on a small icon! The reality is any touch solution would need to be ‘fat finger friendly,’ and, don’t forget that 12% of these users will potentially be color blind as well.

4. Design for any device This point should probably come with an asterisk, because we don't strictly believe you need to design for every device. But you do need to understand what devices are being used and to accept that people work under a range of conditions e.g. a desk-bound worker consumes information differently to a more mobile field worker. Device usage also changes throughout the course of each day.

What are you going to deliver for them? Everything? Probably not. But you do need to understand what they do on each device. E.g. users probably won’t need to access company news on their phone, but might want to submit a leave form. Or, if news was of interest, maybe you need to consider designing a page that works more like a consumer news app.

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Back in the 1950s the Swiss conceived a graphic design style known, quite simply, as Swiss Style. The principles, which were all around simple, clean lines and readability, are still widely used by designers today. In a computing context, we began seeing what was dubbed Metro Style in the mid-nineties. This was essentially Microsoft’s version of a typography-based design language, based on those classic Swiss principles.

Modern user interface (UI) has progressed from the clean lines of Swiss Style to the boxy graphics and bold typography we see today. Modern UI design offers a sleek, familiar experience across different channels, incorporating elements like touch or swiping on tablets and a range of device-driven applications.

Introducing Modern UI can transform the quality of your site’s UX as it enables you to deliver personalised, familiar interactions to groups of users in a convenient format.

5. Design to excite

Have you ever rolled out ideas for a new intranet design? How did people react? Was it ‘Wow’? If not, you might have missed out on an opportunity to capture engaged users early on. The best ways to excite people are by bringing them on a journey and offering them something visual – even if it’s only a lo-fi wireframe. We are a visual species, and according to research undertaken by 3M Corporation, our brains processes images around 60,000 times faster than text.

Don’t lead by showing users a whizz bang piece of functionality or try to wow them with a workflow. (Zzzzzzz…). Bowl them over with something that looks cool or familiar..

6. Design to evolve

SharePoint solutions are people solutions. And the one thing we know about people is that they change. Constantly. Which means business solutions must be open to change too. A Senior Consultant recently had a customer say "You need to understand, I will tell you what I need now, and you will deliver it, but in three months I'm going to need something different." Funnily enough it was refreshing to have a customer openly admit to this! And that’s precisely what your users will do. Once you meet their needs with an initial solution, and it’s no longer a pain point, they will move on to another pain point, which will be just as vital for you to solve.

Build some longevity into your intranet design by making it flexible and scalable. It can even be a good idea to adopt a staged release of different features or functionality. Drip feeding users over a period of time allows them to understand SharePoint’s evolving nature and how it will meet their needs over time, therefore keeping them engaged and wanting to use it.

The evolution of Modern UI

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Power BI on general release

In early February, Microsoft made Power BI available on general release. For those who haven’t experienced the product yet, Power BI is a robust, cloud-based set of tools which enable you to create, share and review BI (from public or corporate data sources) in a dynamic way.

If you have people working across multiple sites, Power BI makes it easy for them to collaborate using standard tools - Office 365 and Excel 2013. Another plus is it requires minimal customisation.

For further information on Power BI access and licensing, feel free to get in touch with us (see back page).

SharePoint forms enter next phase

Another announcement from the Microsoft camp in early 2014 was some positive news about the evolution of SharePoint forms. InfoPath is being retired, with Microsoft looking to develop a more integrated, agile forms experience on different devices. The new forms technology is being scoped across SharePoint, Access and Word.

Microsoft has assured InfoPath customers that a migration roadmap is currently in development and InfoPath will continue to operate as normal, and be supported by Microsoft, until such time as the new technology is ready for release.

This announcements means InfoPath 2013 will be the final release of the desktop client, with InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 the last release of InfoPath Forms Services.

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What’s Hot?

Microsoft Update

YammerEighteen months into the Yammer-Microsoft social journey and several positive developments, including smoother integration between Yammer and Office 365, have taken place. The enterprise social movement is now in full swing, delivering a stack of benefits including better two-way communication, knowledge sharing and protection of IP. (Turn to page 16 for a more in depth look).

Personal cloudAs the lines between business and home become more and more blurred, any tool which offers flexibility and anywhere access is going to win hearts. Microsoft has re-launched the former SkyDrive as OneDrive, giving users 7GB in which to store photos, videos and documents. It comes loaded with new features including improved video sharing and updated Windows Phone, Android, iOS and Xbox apps.

Flat design The bold, boxy graphical elements indicative of flat design have started to become more mainstream and are still in high demand. In flat design the use of icons over text is preferred, as this enables users to navigate sites much faster and gives a cleaner overall impression.

Carousels Carousels are a great way to increase the amount of information distributed on a homepage and keep users engaged with dynamic content. The most popular applications of carousels is for news and image galleries.

I love this time of year when the digital airwaves become flooded with the ‘best of’ this and the ‘top 10’ that from the previous year. Certainly there are several research outfits I favour as fairly respectable barometers in terms of what’s happening in our industry.

The Nielson Group’s 10 Best Intranets of 2014 published on 5 January this year is one I did enjoy sitting back and reading. Although I don’t always agree with their take on top designs, their research does highlight several trends we ourselves have seen reflected in projects of late.

Faster deployment times According to the report, the average time it took to deploy the best intranets dropped from 2.2 years in 2013 (and 4 years in 2012) to 1.4 years – a 13-year low. Our experience certainly supports this proposition, as more and more customers are looking to get started quickly and with a reasonably straight-forward project i.e. introducing a new process or platform, and focusing on doing it well. This gives them a foundation upon which to build capability and add improvements over time. It also enables us, as a provider, to be more responsive and efficient.

A more Agile approachSeveral winning intranet teams embraced Agile methodology throughout their project lifecycle, which no doubt helped to reduce deployment times. It’s wonderful to see this approach being more widely

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Shorter deployment times, mobility key - Nielson

adopted as I believe it’s less risky - and more realistic - than the previous project format (when intranet projects were bigger than Ben Hur and extremely tough to deliver). It certainly helps that cloud technology such as Office 365 has removed many barriers to deployment.

As a business we have been using Agile techniques to streamline project communications for four years and consider it to be paramount to success.

Mobile, mobile, mobileThis is an interesting one as Nielson have prefaced an increase in mobile optimisation with a headline about responsive design. Three of the winning intranets were built using this technique, which involves coding a single site so it adapts to multiple devices. What we are seeing more of, is clients wanting purpose built mobile solutions that solve a particular pain point for a group of users, while leveraging the same fact form as their global intranet.

The reality is you have to design for mobile, but responsive web design is difficult to do within a truly collaborative environment. Having come from the world of consumer web design, it differs greatly to the features and functions within SharePoint, so executing components like document management, BI and collaboration processes is quite complicated. It will be interesting to see how responsive web design evolves within the SharePoint landscape and whether Microsoft plan to support it natively in future.

Simon Tyrrell is Chief Strategy Officer for OSC/nSynergy. He is passionate about innovation and ideas, and a keen IT industry commentator. Simon's focus is to define and implement strategies that keep our solutions measuring up against the best in the global market. If you have a question for Simon, email us at info@onlinesc.com.

Innovation & Strategy with Simon Tyrrell

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How retail is doing it betterAt this moment, global retail is one of the most dynamic industries on the planet. Quantum leaps in technology and consumer behaviour have transformed the shopping landscape forever, opening up a world of opportunity to retailers willing to get creative with digital engagement.

In this competitive landscape, where bricks and mortar stores battle online shopping sites for the consumer dollar, it's becoming clear that the ones who are thriving are those who communicate better, faster and offer the most memorable experience to customers.

But when it comes to retail employees, the real-world brand and sales custodians, the right productivity tools are no longer a ‘nice to have’, but a must for survival.

Power to the people

Retail employees are at their most profitable when informed and empowered, because they have the confidence to enhance the customer experience and

the knowledge to close any sale. But the challenge has always been how to connect with this increasingly agile population, and give them the information they need without making a large, risky technology investment. In the past, this has seen store-based workers largely supported by heavily administrative, manual solutions that decrease productivity and push up costs.

Now that our world is so mobile, it’s constantly evolving. Digital interactions are often personalised to our needs and designed for convenience. So for retailers, the answer lies in delivering this modern, familiar user experience (UX) to employees within the fast-paced environs of a store. To achieve this savvy retailers are investing in

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solutions that promote genuine collaboration and give each person access to information that is relevant to them. Connecting with store-based employees in this way has multiple advantages, the most obvious being the streamlining of communications between head office and geographically dispersed workforce.

Arm them with information

Modern retail portals are being in-built with dynamic news and corporate announcement feeds, and can issue live alerts to a select or global audience in the event of an urgent event e.g. a product recall. They are also hosting rich media content in the form of videos, storemaps and images, allowing retailers to distribute important information in creative ways.

For example, when it came to advising on festive or seasonal in-store decorations, a client of ours had traditionally sent detailed instructional kits to every location. Now, they record a simple video demonstration, save it to their employee portal and alert the appropriate store managers. This process has saved our client weeks and several thousand dollars each time as well as helping them to build a future knowledge base.

Another exciting feature is the presentation of reporting and business data in a dynamic way. Modern retail solutions can link with external systems to arm store managers with live business intelligence, empowering them to make more informed decisions at the point of need.

Make it personal

Making day-to-day tasks easier and minimising time away from customer-facing activities is another key thrust in retail. Communicating user-specific information within one to two clicks or touches, such as personalised task lists, schedules and shift handover notes, eliminates the need for an employee to sift through information, making them more reliable and efficient in their duties.

Automating common forms like shift change and leave requests also removes a heavy administrative burden across an organisation, by keeping online requests moving through a pre-defined approval hierarchy – one that can be easily monitored by the employee.

Get them talking, sharing

Social collaboration in retail is proving to be one of the most effective ways to deepen engagement and interaction with employees, as it supports meaningful collaboration between people, stores and head office. Creative use of hashtags, groups and communities is being used to solicit feedback and gather potent IP from a broad employee base, with all conversations stored for future reference.

Another client example comes from a supermarket chain who needed to encourage sales of an over-stocked item. They quickly devised a competition asking stores to design a point of sale stand and post a picture to their social newsfeed with the winning store to receive a prize. This simple act resulted in high engagement across their store network, and had the added bonus of selling out the respective product in almost every store.

Keep them moving

The average working day of a retail employee is extremely fluid, with different duties being undertaken at various stages. Employees are also likely to be highly mobile outside of work hours. Designing solutions that can be adopted on multiple devices and browsers is therefore playing a key role in seamlessly linking retailers to their employees.

Designing for mobile also gives retailers the flexibility to filter the kind of information people receive on the move. For example, an employee could feasibly need to submit a shift change request on their mobile phone, in the event they were unwell, but watching a training video would be less likely.

The lessons to be learned from these retail solutions are that you need to understand how your users work and give them the tools to do so more efficiently. Challenging the status quo and being committed to finding faster, better ways to do things is going to give your business greater value in the long run.

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"Creative use of hashtags, groups and communities is being used to solicit feedback and gather potent IP from a broad employee base."

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Talk, Share, YammerSocial Buzz

While it might be a stretch to suggest that the days of justifying enterprise social are over, the voice of social resistance is gradually being drowned out by a chorus of glowing enterprise customers.

Having been involved in enterprise social technology for over four years, we now expect that customers will want to incorporate social into their site in some way, shape or form. And as a Microsoft partner we have obviously been watching the relationship between Microsoft and Yammer develop since the latter was acquired by Microsoft in mid-2012.

According to the latest figures published by Yammer, their user base has grown by 55 percent (to around 8 million seats) during this time, with paid networks having grown by 200 percent. It’s incredibly exciting to see this genuine momentum start to take hold, doubtlessly spurred along by the improved integration between Microsoft and Yammer. In March 2013 Yammer was incorporated into enterprise agreements for Office 365 and SharePoint Online, and June 2013 Yammer replaced the Office 365 newsfeed as the default social collaboration tool. Cross-platform development across Windows, Android and iOS has also been an ongoing focus for the development teams.

This means exciting things for businesses willing to adopt and experiment with enterprise social in their own backyard. However it’s unwise to believe you can simply slap this technology into the middle of a business platform and hope for the best. To harness its real power, and foster deeper engagement and more fruitful two-way communications with employees, you need to align social to simple ‘use cases’ (examples of different user needs) and ensure the technology is seamlessly integrated into your business.

But don’t be discouraged, Yammer can certainly be used to refocus an existing SharePoint experience or drive adoption in a new site. Adding Yammer is actually a very effective way to brings users back to an existing system, as it rapidly demonstrates its own value by answering people’s questions and allowing them to experience real-time collaboration.

This can all be achieved with the right planning and testing – such as running a carefully-monitored pilot project. It’s also a good idea to put in place a Community Manager of some description to monitor social activity, governance and metrics.

If you would like to hear how social collaboration transformed communications in our own business, drop us a line at info@onlinesc.com and we’ll send you a copy of our recent EBook, Leveraging social tools to drive culture and adios emails, within 24 hours.

Yammer helps people to be more productive and feel more connected by enabling them to:

> Find answers quicker and get help when they need it

> Share best practices

> Reuse intel from successful projects or activities

> Enjoy team, departmental and global collaboration across multiple locations

> Learn faster as a new starter and access training materials easily

The wonderful world of

In early December 2013 a new emergency response portal built in OSC LiveTiles was launched to the Tasmanian public. This was a completed in partnership with ourselves, the Department of Premier & Cabinet and Microsoft.

TASAlert is the first site of its kind to publish updates and advice from a range of emergency services in regards to any occurrences across the state – such as national disasters, public health issues, biosecurity, terrorist threats and even in the (somewhat unlikely) event of a zombie attack. This information is aggregated through one interface that can be easily accessed on a range of devices.

The TasALERT Project Manager, Simon Hiscock, said: " The technology behind TasALERT, especially OSC LiveTiles, has enabled us to provide the Tasmanian community with greater access to emergency information from across government.”Microsoft State Manager, Michael Bennett, said OSC LiveTiles interface was perfectly suited to the TASAlert portal. "We recognised early on that the LiveTiles interface was a perfect fit for the project and are proud to have you with us as strategic technology partner."

Within the first 90 days, AlertTAS has achieved:

• 375,390 site impressions• 102,785 on them on mobile devices

Your questions answered

What is it?OSC LiveTiles is a product that enables you to have a better design and user experience in SharePoint. It reduces the time it takes to build SharePoint sites from months to hours – or even minutes. If you are experienced with SharePoint you will understand what a significant advancement this is.

Is it in the cloud or on premise?Both. While OSC LiveTiles is browser-based, it can be deployed to SharePoint on-premise or to the cloud (SharePoint Online) with Office 365.

How does it make SharePoint easier?OSC LiveTiles is a very simple, modern

To learn more and see a demonstration, scan this QR code and listen to a recent free webinar -Discover LiveTiles.

“I just can’t stop thinking about LiveTiles. It’s like falling in love with Jessica Alba – you can’t think about anything else!”

– GM of Technology, OSC LiveTiles client

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interface that doesn’t require a high degree of technical proficiency to operate. It has easy ‘drag and drop’ functionality and a broad range of pre-configured apps, icons and tiles which can easily display content from within SharePoint, as well as applications like Yammer, Dynamics CRM and many third party business systems.

How can it save us money?OSC LiveTiles shortens the amount of time it takes to see value in their Office 365 or SharePoint investment. It also helps reduce the risk around technology implementation, while driving sustained adoption.

There are also savings resultant of increased productivity, although these are harder to measure. E.g. If each person in a company spends one hour submitting and tracking a leave form, the time and money wasted escalates very quickly. Using an OSC LiveTiles workflow to automate leave requests dissolves this administrative burden.

Another example is the use of rich media to train employees in different locations. OSC LiveTiles can host training modules online, reducing the need for facilities, materials and personnel, and employee down-time.

How does it interact with SharePoint?OSC LiveTiles comes with a stack pre-configured apps, icons and tiles which can connect either to SharePoint or an external data source. This is achieved by installing the package to SharePoint Solution Gallery.

Once the instalation is complete, OSC LiveTiles enables you to create aggregated content pages within SharePoint by offering a range of page templates with pre-populated, pre-configured content, retrieved from SharePoint lists and libraries.

Image: A recent OSC LiveTiles demonstrator built for the Communications industry.

OSC LiveTiles DNA

emailmysiteSwitchEmployee Search

Social & CommunicationTasks & Schedule Compliance & Training

TraditionalView

My TasksUpdate sales data

Replenish stock

Employee Reviews

My Schedule9:00 – 9:30: Team Meeting

10:00 – 11:00: Interview

9:00 – 9:30: Team Meeting

Top 5 Policiesthe top 5 most recent policies ...

the top 5 most recent policies ...

the top 5 most recent policies ...

the top 5 most recent policies ...

the top 5 most recent policies ..

Top 5 Documentsrecent training documents...

recent training documents...

recent training documents...

recent training documents...

recent training documents...

What do you want to say?

Training VideoTask Alert Request Time Off Upload a new policy

Knowledge Wiki

Request Schedule ChangeAdd new task

Time Off ListScheduleManagementRecall Notice

Create Recall Notice

http://catm365.sharepoint.com

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Search

DashboardSocial & Communication

Post

What do you want to say?

about 6 hours ago Like

Aaron Lambeasked a question: @[Powershell] @Fadi.Sarawan Fadi, remember #release12345 ? Can you please send the new process guide for this ?

Mark Smith: I had heard of these guys.

about 6 hours ago Like Answer Follow–up More

about 6 hours ago Like

Peter Brownasked a question: @[Powershell] @Fadi.Sarawan Fadi, remember #release12345 ? Can you please send the new process guide for this ?

Mark Smith: I had heard of these guys.

about 6 hours ago Like Answer Follow–up More

about 6 hours ago Like Answer Follow–up More

Breakdown by Store

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The news title the news titleSeptember 20th,2011

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The founder of Currency Press the celebrates.The founder of Currency Press celebrates.The founder...

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Damien RobinsonUploaded file ProcessGuide-Release12345.docx in @[Powershell] Documents:

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Project

What was the business need or problem you came to us with?Like many businesses, we had reached a point where our intranet was no longer meeting our needs. We wanted to reinvigorate our users by upgrading from SharePoint 2003 and refreshing our content and branding.

As we work in a heavily regulated industry, we also needed to create an Operational Controls Framework to act as a central knowledge base for policies and legislation. From a compliance perspective this was a critical piece of work, as these policies form the basis of many internal practices.

How did our Consulting team go about creating your solution?Your project team took us through the features of SharePoint 2013, and were able to demonstrate several pieces of functionality which would further enhance our solution. This gave us confidence that 2013 was the right tool and has also helped inform our future technology decisions. When we reached the Solution Design stage the project team held workshops to flesh out architectural and design components, which was really useful.

We found your Project Approach to be very agile, and appreciated having different experts called in on certain aspects e.g. UX, technical, governance.

Did you face any challenges?Projects like this always involve a few challenges, and in this case it was mostly around us managing expectations internally. Your project team were very supportive in helping us to navigate this, and took suggestions from our side onboard. Ultimately they helped us find a place where everyone was happy, which was fantastic.

Has there been a positive impact since the solution was rolled out?SharePoint 2013 is obviously much more user friendly and, as it’s a stable environment, it has been easy for us to support from an internal perspective. The new intranet as a whole has been a real stepping stone for our business and created a smoother connection between people and information.

Also, piloting the Operational Control Framework in one department has been really successful, as it allowed us to demonstrate the value to the rest of our community. We now have a queue of departments lining up for similar solutions and are talking to your team about further work. This is a result of the success of the first project.

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Phing Lee, Senior Manager of Technology Services for Equity Trustees, gives us a brief overview of their recent SharePoint 2013 upgrade.

People

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South Australia born and bred, Damien Robinson joined us in early 2009 and has evolved into a highly popular leader in our business. Robbo, as well like to call him, has a Master’s Degree in Business System Design & Management and a professional pedigree which includes roles with Bank of Scotland, Phillip Morris and six years with the Royal Australian Air Force – a role he credits with igniting his real passion - collaboration.

An expert at designing world-class information management and process improvement solutions, Robbo is also part of the team who dreamed up OSC LiveTiles on a whiteboard in early 2013. Currently on secondment to our New York office, Robbo is renowned for his ‘outside the box’ approach to resolving business challenges and is well respected by colleagues and clients alike.

Meet DamienVice President - Consulting Services, New York

Paul Apos came onboard 12 months ago and rapidly became an invaluable part of the Solutions team. Paul is extremely well-credentialed with an Executive Management background in IT, on both vendor and client sides. As a relationship and values-driven Consultant, Paul is excited by innovation and takes delight in guiding his customers through a journey of innovation and change within their own businesses.

When he’s not engaging with clients Paul simply enjoys being with his wife and kids, and especially loves coaching his daughter’s soccer team and breakdancing with his 5-year-old son. A self-confessed foodie, Paul is also quite ambitious with DIY and has just finished building his very own wood fired pizza oven.

Meet PaulSolutions Consultant, Melbourne

AUTUMN 2014

We empower businesses by building modern solutions which help to advance organisational productivity and collaboration and promote new opportunities for revenue growth.

As one of a select group of global Microsoft partners we are able to leverage our network of 10 offices to operate under a unique 24/7 operations model. This puts us in a position to offer more efficient project delivery, and solutions that are

benchmarked against the competitive international market.

We build teams of experts led by business people, with the skills to ensure the long term sustainability of your investment, and we prioritise people throughout the course of every project.

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Hobart | New York | San Francisco | Chicago | Mexico City | London | Shanghai

Collaborationand ContentPartner of the Year

Public CloudPartner of the YearEnterprise Customer

Web: www.nsynergy.com Email: marketing@nsynergy.com Phone: +61 3 9326 0000