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.

Microsoft SharePoint Syntex is a powerful tool that businesses can use to improve workplace efficiency and streamline their operations. As a SharePoint Syntex consultant, I have seen firsthand the benefits that this tool can provide to organizations of all sizes.

Here are five of the top benefits of using SharePoint Syntex in your business:

1. Improved collaboration and communication: SharePoint Syntex allows teams to easily share and access documents, making it easier for employees to collaborate on projects and work together effectively.
2. Enhanced organization and management: SharePoint Syntex allows businesses to organize their files and documents in a central location, making it easier to find and manage important information.
3. Increased productivity: With SharePoint Syntex, employees can access the information and resources they need quickly and easily, which can help boost productivity and efficiency.
4. Enhanced security: SharePoint Syntex offers robust security features that protect sensitive information and ensure that only authorized users have access to important files and documents.
5. Scalability and flexibility: SharePoint Syntex is a highly scalable and flexible platform that can be customized to meet the specific needs of your business.

In addition to these benefits, SharePoint Syntex also offers a range of powerful features that can help businesses improve their operations. For example, the tool allows users to create custom workflows, automate processes, and integrate with other business applications.

The post The Top 5 Benefits of Why Businesses Should Be Using SharePoint Syntex appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

What is SharePoint Syntex?

What Are Some of the Benefits of Using SharePoint Syntex?

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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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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.

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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.

SharePoint powers your intranet to better promote and organize people, content and activities throughout your connected workplace. The sites that you create – of all types – are at the center. You create sites in seconds, and they are mobile ready from the get-go. They support various scenarios like internal cross-company campaigns, product launches, events and more. As you grow, your intranet evolves as an immersive, business-critical asset for the company.

Organizational news + team news. Open, transparent communication is critical to employee engagement. For nearly two decades, employee communications have centered on company-wide emails. Now, you can communicate your message with rich, compelling, and interactive content including documents, video, polls and surveys — dynamic data dashboards.

Today, we’re excited to share how news evolves to ensure your message lands with users—across devices, geographies, and time zones. You can engage your audience about important efforts in a more-targeted fashion.

• Select which site sources you want to pull content in from – news web parts filter news from a variety of source sites, filtering based on content you want to show, in the layout you find most conducive to your overall site vision.
• Hub site news web part update – the unique ‘hub layout’ in the news web part for SharePoint hub sites will provide additional capabilities like pinning news articles, a new compact layout, and carousel support. 

Choose from a new variety of news layouts to best promote your news on your pages.

• Save for later – you can now save news articles to catch up on later, right from the Web interface of your intranet – as you can today on mobile. Simply click Save for later from the bottom of the news article and it gets added to your saved list, accessible from the Me tab in the SharePoint mobile app. You will also be able to access your saved list from SharePoint home.

Now you will be able to save pages and news to read later, right from the Web interface. Click “Save for later” at the bottom of any page or news article.

• @mentions in news comments – similar to Outlook, it is now possible to @mention someone who has access to the news article within its comments and they will be notified and brought into the discussion. Did we @mention to you that there’s no easier way to loop someone in? ?
• Deem specific sites as “organizational news sources” – as news rolls up to people across their SharePoint home in Office 365, or via the news tab in their SharePoint mobile all, the news that comes from “organizational news source” sites will get special visual treatment bubbling up to the top of one’s view.

Page management updates. The balance of a modern intranet rests in between the dynamic display of information and the ability to better curate and target who can see what – all without customization and without page proliferation. With this coming innovation, communication sites are ready to tackle your most demanding portal scenarios.

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