Standardized Rules and Regulations

Data Governance Utilizing SharePoint provides a strong set of features to assist you in establishing standardized rules and regulations for data governance. These features can be leveraged to define and enforce data policies, ensuring consistency and compliance across your business organization.

Information Management Policies – SharePoint helps you create custom policies to control the lifecycle of your documents and data. These policies can be used to define auditing requirements, retention periods, and other rules related to data management.
• Site Columns and Content Types – By utilizing site columns and content types, you can standardize metadata across your organization. This ensures consistent classification of data and tagging, making it easier to search, retrieve, and analyze.
• Security and Permissions – SharePoint’s granular security and permission settings allow you to control access to sensitive data. You can define user roles and permissions to ensure that only authorized individuals have access to specific data and documents.
• Workflow Automation – SharePoint workflows can be used to automate data governance processes, such as approval, archiving, and review. This helps to enforce standardized rules and regulations consistently while reducing manual intervention as well as potential errors.

Data Stewardship

Data stewardship is a vital component of data governance, involving the management and oversight of an organization’s data assets. SharePoint can support data stewardship in a number of ways:

• Data Stewards and SharePoint Groups – Assign data stewards to specific SharePoint groups, granting them the necessary permissions and responsibilities for managing data within their domain. This ensures that there is clear accountability and oversight for data quality and compliance.
• Version Control and Auditing – SharePoint’s version control capabilities enable data stewards to track changes to documents and data, ensuring that modifications are traceable and auditable. This helps to maintain data integrity and compliance with both internal and external regulations.
• Reporting and Analytics – SharePoint has built-in reporting and analytics tools, allowing data stewards to monitor data quality and compliance. These tools can work to identify potential issues and trends, enabling data stewards to proactively address concerns as well as maintain data governance standards.

Data Governance Utilizing SharePoint – Conclusion

Implementing data governance through SharePoint requires a combination of standardized regulations, rules, and data stewardship. By leveraging SharePoint’s strong suite of features and functionality, you can create a comprehensive data governance framework that ensures data security, accuracy, and compliance. Establishing information management policies, site columns and content types, granular security settings, and automated workflows will help to enforce standardized rules and regulations. Empowering your data stewards with the appropriate tools and responsibilities will ensure effective oversight and management of your organization’s data assets. By combining these elements together, you can create a strong foundation for data governance utilizing SharePoint.

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Microsoft Viva – An Overview

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that is designed to improve collaboration, communication, learning, and well-being within an organization. It was launched in 2021 and Viva is integrated with Microsoft Teams. It is comprised of four main components: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics. Each of these modules addresses different elements of the employee experience, working to foster a more connected and engaged workforce.

An Overview of Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint, conversely, is a robust content management and collaboration platform that has been around for nearly two decades. It allows its users to create, store, and manage documents, collaborate on projects, and build intranet sites to share information within their organizations. Microsoft SharePoint integrates with other Microsoft products like Office 365 and can be tailored and customized to meet a significant range of business needs.

ROI Considerations for Implementing Microsoft Viva:

• • Enhanced Employee Engagement: Microsoft Viva’s focus on the employee experience translates to higher engagement and productivity, which can ultimately lead to increased revenue and reduced turnover costs.

• • Improved Knowledge Management: Viva Topics uses AI to automatically identify and organize valuable company knowledge, which reduces time spent searching for information and increasing overall efficiency.
  • Streamlined Learning: Viva Learning centralizes training resources, making it easier for employees to access and complete relevant training. This can lead to higher skills proficiency and better performance.
  • Employee Well-being: Viva Insights offers personalized recommendations for better work habits and well-being, leading to a healthier, more productive workforce in your organization.

ROI Considerations for Utilizing Microsoft SharePoint

• • Cost Savings: SharePoint is usually more cost-effective than Viva, particularly for smaller organizations with more limited budgets.
  • Customization: The flexibility of SharePoint allows for significant customization to match unique business processes, which can often result in improved workflow efficiency.
  • Document Management: SharePoint excels at document management and collaboration, with features like version control, co-authoring, and approval workflows that can save your organization time as well as reduce errors.

Conclusion – Microsoft Viva versus Microsoft SharePoint – Which to Choose?

When evaluating the ROI of investing in Microsoft Viva versus Microsoft SharePoint, it is critical to consider your organization’s specific needs and objectives. Microsoft Viva provides a comprehensive employee experience platform that is designed to improve engagement, collaboration, learning, and well-being, while Microsoft SharePoint is a powerful content management and collaboration tool that can be tailored and customized to fit various business processes.

If your organization wants to emphasize employee engagement, knowledge management, and well-being, Microsoft Viva may provide you with a higher ROI. If cost-effectiveness and customization for specific workflows are your main concerns, Microsoft SharePoint may be the better choice. Ultimately, understanding your company’s requirements and goals will allow you to make the most informed (and best) decision.

Curious about implementing Microsoft Viva or Microsoft SharePoint for your business?  Contact 6th Street Consulting today to schedule your free consultation.

The post What’s the ROI of investing in Microsoft Viva for my company versus Microsoft SharePoint? appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

While the end-of-support date doesn’t mean the product will stop working, it does mean that Microsoft will no longer support the platform.  Using an unsupported on-prem platform also poses a risk of data loss.

What are the dangers of not upgrading?

Security risks

Without Microsoft’s routine security updates and patches, you expose yourself to security breaches from hackers and cybercriminals. Also, Microsoft will not provide support to remediate an attack.

Compliance risks

Your organization’s reputation could come under serious scrutiny, and you could incur potential hefty legal, financial, and operational penalties as well.

Data loss risks

With an unsupported on-prem platform, you risk being unable to recover data in the event your database is corrupted.

Productivity and functionality costs

Newer versions of SharePoint offer features that aren’t available in SharePoint 2013. By not migrating, you are potentially costing your organization valuable time and resources that could be supported by new platform improvements.

What Action Should a Company Take?

Migrating to SharePoint Online, which is part of a Microsoft 365 subscription, can offer benefits such as reduced maintenance and a monthly subscription model based on license type and number of users. Perficient can assist with assessments of your current SharePoint environment, migration planning, and implementation services.

With over 20 years of experience in modern work solutions and business applications, our experts can guide your organization through the migration process. Contact 6th Street Consulting to learn more.

The post How will SharePoint 2013 End of Life Impact Your Business? appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

The new end of support date for SharePoint Server 2010 will not be April 13, 2021, a full six months from the original end of support date.  This includes the following versions of SharePoint and Project Server:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• Project Server 2010

What Does the Extension Mean for Businesses?

This extension will provide businesses the time and flexibility to manage their transition plans accordingly.  Microsoft does intend to keep the new April 2021 end of support date without offering another extension.  When support does end, Microsoft will no longer be providing support for problems that occur which includes bug fixes, usability concerns, and most importantly, vulnerabilities that are discovered which may result in security breaches.

At 6th Street Consulting, we strongly recommend that you begin your transition plans well before the end of support date.  Migrations to newer or cloud-based versions of SharePoint can take time, especially if the platform that been highly customized for a specific business, and we expect that there will be a large volume of companies that choose to delay migrations resulting in a flurry of activity prior to the end of support date.

Migrate SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365

It is our recommendation is most circumstances that companies migrate their legacy versions of SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365.  This provides a multitude of benefits, including going to a cloud-based subscription service that offers best-in-class tools for the modern workforce.

If your company is working with a legacy version of SharePoint 2010 and will need to migrate, contact our office to speak with one of our certified experts.  We can provide specific consulting and migration services that meet the needs of your specific use of SharePoint while ensuring that the migration process is handled quickly and seamlessly from start to finish.

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Calling in Microsoft Teams!

Work from anywhere

The single-office concept is becoming obsolete. Sixty-three percent of companies have remote workers, and 55 percent of hiring managers expect that number to grow.

Microsoft Teams puts you all face-to-face in one room with its seamless videoconferencing features. While email and other programs can keep you connected on the housekeeping side, the face-to-face — albeit virtual — interaction is key for morale, interpersonal workplace connectivity and productive discussions.

With multiple dial-in options, Microsoft Teams videoconferencing reduces communication and geographical barriers.

Enable multi-generational collaboration

Get this – by 2020, people from FIVE different generations will make up the workforce. While having each one represented within your own business can give you a competitive edge, it doesn’t come without challenges.

But Microsoft Teams can simultaneously cater to each generation, by providing a hub to let employees work the way they want. The biggest difference among generations is communication preference and expectations, so Teams makes it easy to foster all forms – phone, face-to-face, email, video conference, or collaborative document sharing.

Maximize mobile work

We don’t need to tell you the office space has transcended the desktop. But what’s happening now – is that mobile work is becoming much more of a priority, than something extra.

As this continues, employees will need a familiar, connected experience across their mobile devices. Microsoft Teams brings all that together by extending the collaboration and communication experiences from the office naturally to those mobile devices. So teams can still work together on-the-go, and while miles apart. The Teams mobile up lets you join calls and meetings, share content, control presentations, reply to chats and conversations and transfer calls and check remote voicemail.

Communicate effectively with outside partners/contractors

Another number for you. Freelancers are expected to make up the majority of the workforce within the next ten years.

So you’ll need Microsoft Teams to keep them active members of your own team.

But there’s an extra step with freelancers – while they are on your team, there’s still a boundary that needs to be set, for cyber security purposes. Teams takes care of that behind the scenes, though, with the guest access feature.  So working across corporate boundaries – both for the freelancer and your full-time employees – is easy and highly secure.
And if there’s a problem – IT can quickly remove guest access.

Engage with a larger team

High engagement = high productivity. BUT – 87 percent of employees are NOT engaged at work? That’s essentially an untapped market for potential growth.
Morale is huge. And yes, that’s something that needs to be fostered outside of the digital world, but Microsoft Teams can help remind you how important that is. Teams has features that keeps workers engaged, but also gives them the flexibility to collaborate the way they want.

As you can imagine, this gets trickier the bigger the company is. One-to-many communications are a breeze with Teams “Live Events.” It takes top-down communication out of the stiff and stale corporate video conference. There are engagement opportunities before, during, and after the event – so everyone is involved.

The post Why the modern workforce needs Microsoft Teams appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Set daily goals

We’re in the era of a constant to-do list. Long term. Short term. At work. At home. But staring at 87 bullet points of things you need to accomplish isn’t going to give you anything more than a headache. But if you prioritize those 87 things, you’ll be in much better shape.

Find out what can wait – but don’t be lazy about it! If you can get it done within 20 minutes, do it that day. Long term project? Find a PIECE that can get done today. Lots to do at home? Again – the 20 minute goal is a good one. Often times we don’t realize a lot of the things we have to do may only actually take 10 minutes.

If you map things out this way, you’ll actually be able to cross things off your list, instead of having them hang over your head.

Set deadlines and hold yourself accountable

This goes hand-in-hand with point one. This one focuses more on the execution of conquering your to-do list – and it’s a bit more solely work-related.

Microsoft has a tool to be your built-in-accountability holder:  Microsoft Project. It allows you to maintain a calendar with multiple moving parts. It also lets you assign deadlines to projects, meetings and tasks – so you’re notified when you’re getting off track.

View Microsoft Project

Take time to save time

Data entry. Standardized emails. Both essentially synonyms for “tedious” and “*groans*” for those who do this manually. But you can actually streamline this process. It’ll take time to set up initially – but it will save you time in the future.

If you’re entering data into multiple spreadsheets, set up macros that can do that work for you. Macros can also help automate email responses.

Create or Run Macros

Batch your small tasks

This one is great when it comes to making sure your day has a productive flow. Think about the things you do throughout your work day – i.e. sending emails, scheduling meeting, updating your website, etc. These things inherently don’t take a lot of time, but if you stretch them out while doing more long-winded products, they might. So instead, set aside a chunk of time to get them all done at once.

Separation of home and office

Nowadays, far easier said than done. But it’s essential. And it prevents burnout. According to multiple studies, you need some sort of down time every day to keep your mind right. Work will likely take up most of your day (especially for those of you reading this), and that’s OK. And it’s great that you’re so connected to what you do. But give that connectivity a time limit. When you’re home with your family, be with your family. Working out before work? Be present in your workout. On vacation? Put all your devices on “Do Not Disturb.” Giving your mind a clear break = more clarity when you get back into work mode.

Only say “yes” to meetings that matter

Aiii, what? Don’t all meetings matter? No. If it’s not organized well or does not have a clear purpose – you don’t have time for it! Make sure you know exactly why you’re included in a meeting before you attend, so you can ensure you’re not wasting your time.

Regarding meetings in general, best practices say make sure there’s a “hard” stop time, and ensure everyone is prepared with a specific agenda before you get started.

Take workout breaks

Physical activity = more productivity! It doesn’t have to be crazy, we know you don’t have time to go take a spin class/shower/change your clothes during your lunch break. But if your office is flexible enough and you have the resources, take a short run or get some cardio in during the day. Still unrealistic? A walk outside. Live somewhere to cold? Be sure to get up and walk around the office.

The post Productivity Hacks – brought to you by Microsoft appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

As businesses themselves evolve, so does the technology that keeps them going behind the scenes. We know there are a lot of options out there.

SharePoint and Google Drive currently control the market. Both file management platforms are similar at their cores. Users can manage Word, Outlook, Excel and other documents through both platforms. Both use the cloud. Both are user friendly.

Here’s why we think SharePoint goes the extra mile for you.

Functionality

One of the starkest difference between the two platforms is how much more convenient it is to group-edit a document in SharePoint. It allows users to edit documents right there within the program, whereas Google Drive requires you to upload the document to edit it and download it as a Microsoft document when it’s done. An extra step that can inhibit workflow.

Collaboration Simplicity

SharePoint offers automated workflows. That means all edits, feedback, thoughts and approval-granting can all happen on one organized interface. That’s a helpful tool inherently, and it also paves the way for the most experienced of users to manage more complex environments like building websites, managing training sessions and finalizing forms.

SharePoint’s Additional Features

And here’s where SharePoint takes its services to an even elevated level, content management: List. It’s a feature that’s not available on Google Drive. The List feature allows you to organize portions of your data by separating them out into their own section within an Excel file. This is helpful and primarily used for things like managing expenses and creating tax reports. Other benefits include the ability to manage contacts and clients, tracking project tasks and projecting data.

And, as always, 6^th Street Consulting can help you get started, so you can be a master of SharePoint – and, in turn, a master of your expedient workflow – in no time.

The post Breaking down the differences between SharePoint Online and Google Drive appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Mixed reality is one of the most important technological trends in the modern workplace, with the power to transform work for everyone, from the executive suite to the front line. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced two powerful mixed reality applications: Microsoft Remote Assist and Microsoft Layout.

SharePoint spaces allows for immersive, mixed reality experiences—which enable you to view and interact with content from every angle and visualize and manipulate data and product models in real-time. SharePoint mainstreams mixed reality, empowering everyone to create visually compelling spaces that are available to anyone, on any device.

Mixed reality experiences immerse you, focus your attention, engage your senses, and spark your curiosity and imagination to unlock new scenarios for communication, learning, and collaboration, including:

Recruiting and onboarding​—Recruits or new employees can learn about a company in a compelling, 360-degree virtual welcome and orientation, including a 360-degree video message from leadership. They can navigate the campus or building with 3D maps, learn the organizational structure with an interactive organization chart, or explore rich information about coworkers and the organization’s products.

Learning—With mixed reality, learning comes to life by captivating your focus and attention. Gain broad perspective with a panoramic view of a topic and learning objectives. Then explore personalized, relevant, and dynamic content. Ignite your curiosity by discovering new insights, and dive deep into topics that matter to you. Learn not just by reading or watching, but by experiencing, with your senses engaged.

Product development—Create an inspiring space for your team to spark innovation. Surround yourself with experts to look at data, content, and processes from every angle. Explore a prototype in 3D to identify new opportunities, attach annotations, and visualize improvements.

Until now, it has been prohibitively expensive and complex to develop customized mixed reality apps to address these and other business scenarios, and to make mixed reality apps broadly accessible in the workplace, because most require costly headsets.

SharePoint spaces empower creators to build immersive experiences with point-and-click simplicity. You can get started with smart templates to create a mixed reality environment complete with beautiful surroundings, ambient sounds, rich textures, and lighting. You then add content, which can include files you already have in SharePoint, allowing you to repurpose your existing data, documents, and images. Our customers already store over a petabyte of 3D content, including 360-degree videos created with mobile phones. SharePoint spaces are the most natural way to view and interact with 3D content, empowering people to interact with objects that might be too numerous, too large, or too dynamic to experience in the real world or in a two-dimensional environment.

Authors use familiar skills to add web parts to a SharePoint space.

Anyone can immerse themselves in a compelling virtual space to view and interact with content, information, and video on any device—in a browser, mobile browser, or headset. SharePoint spaces will be available in all Office 365 commercial plans, enabling new scenarios for information workers and Firstline Workers alike.

SharePoint spaces are infused with Microsoft AI, unlocking knowledge from Microsoft Graph and driving rich, personalized experiences that let you explore connections between people and content, gain insights from data, and find relevant information and expertise.

SharePoint spaces are integrated and extensible. You can augment a space with content from across Microsoft 365 and from other data sources and services. You can customize a space to reflect your brand. And you can build new capabilities for SharePoint spaces with the SharePoint Framework. We expect partners to embrace SharePoint spaces and to develop powerful web parts and experiences that will drive a new wave of innovation for customers.

SharePoint is the first unified content collaboration and services solution to span files, websites and, soon, mixed reality spaces. Customers and partners can apply to be part of an early, limited preview by visiting SharePoint spaces.

The post SharePoint Spaces Bring Immersive, Mixed Reality Experiences to Anyone, on Any Device appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Take your intranet with you to stay connected and informed about important content, news, sites and people while on the go – for those in-between moments. You can easily get back to what’s relevant to you, alongside powerful search capabilities to find what you need, plus provide feedback via comments and likes – all to keep work moving forward.

Microsoft released their latest round of mobile innovations – all driven by customer use and feedback. This is the most significant update they’ve ever done to SharePoint mobile apps. They’ve simplified the apps to help people focus on the tasks they’ve told us they engage daily. This improved information architecture to make it fast and easy to find and work with the people and content you are looking for.

• A new Find tab – What was three is now one, and it’s a super powerful, personal tab infused with AI. The new Find tab makes it the easiest way ever to connect with expertise and knowledge across your organization. It brings a best-in-class mobile search experience, with an intelligent understanding of what you work on, how you work, and how your colleagues’ work relates to you. The new Find tab collapses Sites, Links, People and Search into one, streamlined experience. It, too, is where you will find quick answers, notifications, sites, people and more – in an efficient, tailored flow of what you’re looking for, even before you go looking.

The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, uses AI to help you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go.

• Direct document library access – as you tap into a SharePoint document library, you will stay within the SharePoint mobile app experience (for viewing and navigating) more before taken through the integrated connection to the OneDrive app – where you can perform richer actions on files and folders.
• @mentions in comments – the same as mentioned above applies to @mentions in comments via the SharePoint mobile app; like Outlook, it is now possible to @mention someone within the comments of a SharePoint news article and that person will be notified and brought into the discussion.
• Notifications for page likes – you’ll receive a notification when someone clicks the Like button on a news article you published. How do you like that? If you do like it, you’ll be notified ?.

6th Street Consulting is a Microsoft technology firm specializing in user productivity and collaboration on SharePoint and Office365.  Our biggest differentiator is we put business before technology in creating solutions tailored fit to your organization.

For additional information please contact:

Michelle Hollis

michelle.hollis@CulverG.com

(310) 694-3844

The post Keeping Connected On the Go appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Hub sites and communication sites offer rich experiences across your intranet. As business goals and team structures evolve, so too must your sites and the content that lives within them. We continue to add functionality to make it easier to create and configure any sites intent and outcome that you need throughout your intranet.

• Add rich colors to the hub site header – you will now have choices beyond the color white. It’ll be easier and more flexible to adhere to your preferred company theme and brand colors across more aspects of the sites and pages.
• Approvals for hub site association – a flexible approval process further empowers hub site owners and site owners to make requests and programmatically adapt to changes within their growing, dynamic intranet.
• Site scripting during hub site association – once a site gets associated to a hub site, it not only inherits the theme of the hub site, it can now be further configured using powerful site scripting methods to enforce permissions, shared metadata, preferred content management, brand elements and policies.

Program site scripts to run automatically when a site is associated to a hub site to adhere to preferences for that family of sites.

• Communication sites on-premises in SharePoint Server 2019 – like the benefits of “going modern” on-premises with team sites, SharePoint communication sites can be created and configured within SharePoint Server 2019.

New and updated web parts. Sites pull in content from across Office 365. To do this dynamically, and with flexibility, SharePoint news articles and pages use powerful, data-rich web parts, which you can configure to your needs as you design the look, feel and content of the information you share.

• Weather – allow authors to configure showing the web part to show weather information provided by MSN Weather for a given location.

You can now add the weather of any city to a page, and text overlay for images on your pages and news.

• Image web part: text on image – enhance your images with hyperlinks and allow authors to overlay text on images.
• Document library and lists web parts updates – It’s even easier to engage with documents and lists on a modern page with tile view and drag and drop upload. Now with custom views, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting, and drag & drop upload.
• Stream updates – no matter where you view a news article or page, you can expect that videos playing from Stream will look and playback beautifully – even when you are viewing them within the SharePoint mobile app. There, too, are channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.
• Yammer updates – when you add a Yammer web part to a site home page or a news article, you can better able the preferred scoping of the groups that can be scoped to that site. We’ve also updated the interface to enhance how people can engage in the discussion – with richer feed with interactions like liking, @mentioning, adding content, and more.

We encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.

The post The Evolution of SharePoint Hub Sites and Communication Sites appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.