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2 Table of Contents POST # Why Use a SharePoint Content Management System? A Quick Guide for Executives & Managers [Downloadable Infographic]... 3 POST # Branding SharePoint 6 Ways to Brand Your SharePoint Site to Increase User Adoption and ROI... 5 POST # Helpful Features to Increase Your SharePoint User Adoption... 8 POST # Types of SharePoint Workflows: Make Your Life Easier with Automation! POST # Designing Your SharePoint Intranet Portal: The Top 6 Features to Consider POST # Keeping SharePoint Secure: What Executives Need to Know About SharePoint Security POST # SharePoint vs. OneDrive When to Use What... 21

3 POST #1. Why Use a SharePoint Content Management System? A Quick Guide for Executives & Managers [Downloadable Infographic] Your staff works remotely, moves from one client location to another, and uses various devices to get work done. Where does your content (contracts, proposals, sales collaterals, marketing brochures, etc.) that your staff needs throughout the day reside? Are they in a server? On shared drives? Can your staff easily access the content when and where they need it the most? If your answer is not 100% Yes! then you ll want to consider utilizing SharePoint. When using SharePoint, your content resides in the Cloud, meaning that it is stored in the Cloud which can be accessed via any device from anywhere with no restriction (as long as you have the authority to access the content). 3 All content that your team produces is stored in one safe and secure place that is updated live whenever a staff member makes changes to it. Best of all, multiple people can make changes to the same document at the same time. Think about that for a second can you see how much time that would save your staff? The reduction in frustration for them? Here are three scenarios that will show you why you re going to love SharePoint: Scenario 1: Various members of your team are working on an important proposal for one of your biggest clients. Each of them make changes to the proposal. By the time the document is finalized, you ve got 10 different versions. Is it clear to everyone which one is the final version? Is it easy to locate that final version? The last thing you want is a wrong version accidentally sent to your client. SharePoint Benefit #1: Not only does SharePoint always show the latest version of the document, but it also keeps a running version history, allowing you to see a comprehensive record of each document version. And, if needed, you can either open or fail back to a previous version of the document.

4 Scenario 2: Both your operations team and sales team need to put together a statement of work for a client. There is very little time to put this together. The client is expecting to see it as soon as possible. Wouldn t it be convenient and time-saving if both teams can work on the document at the same time? SharePoint Benefit #2: SharePoint encourages collaboration with co-authoring capabilities, so multiple authors can have the same document open at the same time and work on it simultaneously. They can see the changes being made by the other authors in real time. Scenario 3: You have many employees working remotely. Or you may have multiple offices around the globe. They all need to access the same, up-to-date content. SharePoint Benefit #3: SharePoint provides your organization with a central location for all types of content. No more shared drives. No more UBS sticks. With SharePoint, all your employees need is an Internet connection to stay connected to your content. Also, SharePoint is a highly customizable tool that you can customize it to fit your exact needs. The look (branding), the information architecture (groups, teams, (sub)folders, etc.) you get to design this. 4

5 POST #2. Branding SharePoint 6 Ways to Brand Your SharePoint Site to Increase User Adoption and ROI Within the SharePoint world, the word branding has a different meaning: it s not just about making it look like your branded site with your corporate colour scheme, your logo, etc., but it s also about customizing the look and feel of SharePoint so that your teams (end users) can easily adopt and utilize it to the fullest. When your organization starts to utilize SharePoint, branding your SharePoint site is as important as an accurate, secure migration, effectively designing your SharePoint intranet portal to meet your content management needs, and using the attractive functions such as workflows to really improve the productivity within your organization. Read along to learn why experts suggest you brand SharePoint, three key ways to brand your SharePoint site, and three ways to further customize your site to increase use adoption. 5 Reasons to Brand SharePoint There s no question that SharePoint certainly can be used as-is, out of the box. But there are several reasons for why branding SharePoint to your organization s specifications are a good idea, such as: Evoking an emotional connection from your end users, which increases employee adoption. Branding to increase custom functionality. Branding to support specific accessibility requirements that might be required by law. Presenting your corporate image to the outside world (if you ve got a public-facing SharePoint site, you ll need corporate branding). Branding SharePoint Site 3 Key Ways Whatever your reason for wanting to brand your SharePoint site, here are three key ways you can brand your site so that it s more user-friendly, and increases your users adoption.

6 UX The Issue: Making sure your SharePoint environment is user-friendly. Once your users disengage, it s very difficult to get them to reverse their thinking. The Solution: Before making any changes to your SharePoint environment, carefully consider your end users. Things to think about: how easy is it for your users to access the content they need? Is there anything in the design that s tedious for them to accomplish? Are they able to navigate through SharePoint without issues? Does the flow work? Why It s Important: Without a user-friendly SharePoint environment, adoption of the product is going to be almost impossible. Too hard to navigate, cumbersome to interact, not easy to find things these are some of the reasons your end-users will ultimately reject SharePoint. Responsive Design The Issue: You want your SharePoint site to work on any device that your employees/end users might use. The Solution: Responsive Design ensures that your SharePoint site is formatted to work on all devices, whether that be a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Why It s Important: Keep in mind that your end users are going to be visiting your SharePoint site from various devices. It s important to make sure that your site presents well on every device so that end user experience is consistent no matter what device they use. 6 Footers The Issue: You want to make certain information, like most frequently accessed phone numbers, office addresses, and other frequently used information, accessible to your employees. The Solution: Build in a Footer, just like many external websites you ve seen. Why It s Important: Footers keep information or links that your employees always go to at the bottom of the page. This will reduce the time that they spend on finding the necessary information, which will enhance their user experience with your SharePoint site. Further Customization When Branding Your SharePoint Site In addition to the three key ways to brand your SharePoint site that we mentioned above, here are three other ways you can customize SharePoint. Cascading Style Sheets allow you to choose the fonts, styles and colours that you want to use. For example, you decide that all your internal pages should have Arial, point 12, black font, but headers on the page should be Arial, point 23, bold, and in blue font. These would be built into a Cascading Style Sheet.

7 Custom Layout allows you to select a layout (or type of layout) for a page. For example, you ve decided that you will have a news article layout, which will be different than your document view layout or your search layout. The Custom Master Page is the overall template for your site. This means that each page will have the same header, the same footer, and the same look and feel. 7

8 POST #3. 4 Helpful Features to Increase Your SharePoint User Adoption You ve considered SharePoint for your team, and you ve gone through the migration process. Now, you need to make sure your employees use the system you ve invested both time and money into! The easiest way to get people to adopt a new system is to have it allow them to do less work than they currently do. Here are four features that will help your organization encourage user adoption by making their jobs easier. ONE. Increase SharePoint User Adoption by Tagging Documents 8 Tagging documents allows your organization the opportunity to assign keywords (or tags) to your content. What It Can Do for Your Employees: Tagging makes content easier to search for, meaning that your employees don t waste as much time looking for the documents that they need. A Tip for Tagging: Although SharePoint doesn t have a set length for tags, it s best practice to use single words or short phrases. For example, instead of using Fiscal Year 2018 Budget as your tag, consider FY18 Budget. TWO. Increase SharePoint User Adoption with Audience Targeting Audience Targeting allows you the opportunity to target who in your organization is able to see what content. It is incredibly useful if you need to present information that s only relevant to a certain group of people within your organization, for example, your sales team, or your finance team.

9 What It Can Do for Your Employees: Targeting your content simplifies your employees experience (hence, increases SharePoint user adoption rate within your organization), because they will only see content that is relevant to them, rather than having to sort through all the content in your SharePoint environment. THREE. Increase SharePoint User Adoption by Creating Views Views is another way for you to organize your files in your SharePoint environment, and it s another way to make your content easier to find and increase SharePoint user adoption. What It Can Do for Your Employees: Instead of having to browse through a large document library each time, your employees can create and save a filtered view that leverages tagging. These views retrieve the various documents they use on a daily basis. Furthermore, your employees can create as many views as they need, so if they have multiple tasks within the organization, creating a view for each function allows them to easily and quickly find the different content they need by switching between views. 9 A Tip for Views: Instead of saving your documents in various folders, use views instead. This helps you hide or show what your users need to see.

10 FOUR. Increase SharePoint User Adoption with OneDrive Sync A relatively new development to SharePoint, OneDrive Sync will allow users from your organization to download a OneDrive client to your devices, and sync it to your SharePoint environment. What It Can Do for Your Employees: Instead of having to log in to the SharePoint environment, find the document they want to work on, and open the document in their browser, your employees can use the OneDrive client directly from their desktop to access their documents. They can drag and drop documents and save and open from windows, all through windows explorer. Whenever they re connected to the Internet, those changes that they ve made to any documents they ve worked on are automatically uploaded to SharePoint without the need for them to do anything further. If no Internet connection is available at the time they re working on the documents, OneDrive Sync will store the changes until an Internet connection is established, then automatically upload to SharePoint. 10

11 POST #4. 5 Types of SharePoint Workflows: Make Your Life Easier with Automation! Have you heard of SharePoint Workflows before, but not quite sure what they are or what they can do for you? Simply put, SharePoint Workflows make your life easier, save time, and increase efficiency by automating manual tasks. Read along to learn what SharePoint workflows are and the types of SharePoint workflows you might want to implement in your organization. We will also go into a bit more detail about how you can customize workflows to make it perfectly suited to your needs. What are SharePoint Workflows? 11 Think of SharePoint workflows as little mini-programs that run within your SharePoint environment. Ranging from collecting signatures to tracking statuses, workflows are designed to save you both time and effort, while also bringing consistency and efficiency to tasks that your organization performs on a regular basis. There are a number of different types of workflows, as we ll discuss in the next section of this blog, but ultimately, you can think of workflows as the chain of events that happens after you do something with a file or document that lives in your SharePoint environment. There are five commonly used Workflows that can be set up within SharePoint: Approval Workflows, Status Workflows, Notification Workflows, Automation Workflows, and Custom Workflows. Commonly Used SharePoint Workflow #1 Approval Workflows This is the most common type of workflow within SharePoint. It allows you to start an approval chain the moment a document is uploaded into SharePoint. How You Can Use It: Let s say your sales team sends out a proposal to their clients, but before they do, that the proposal needs to go through an approval process. For example, the sales associate prepares the proposal, then sends it to the project team (who will be doing the work) to approve, then it gets sent to their sales

12 manager to approve. From there, it s sent to the director to review and finally approve the document. Rather than having to keep track of all of this manually, Approval Workflows would be able to automate this approval chain all without leaving SharePoint. 12 Commonly Used SharePoint Workflow #2 Status Workflows Status Workflows allow you to automate the status of documents as they re uploaded to SharePoint, and, based on the conditions set, automatically changes the status based on what happens to that document. How You Can Use It: Using the sales team example above, let s say that the sales associate who s prepared the Statement of Work uploads the document to SharePoint. A Status Workflow would automatically tag that document as a draft. Then, after it s reviewed by the project team, the Status Workflow would automatically change that document to being reviewed. When the sales manager reviews the document, the tag gets automatically changed to read. Then, when the

13 sales director gets the document, they can either approve the document (in which case, the status could change to approved ), or they can decline the document (in which case, the status would get changed to declined ). Commonly Used SharePoint Workflow #3 Notification Workflows Once a condition has been met within your SharePoint environment, Notification Workflows will send a notification (for example, an ) to the assigned members of your organization, prompting them to take some sort of action. How You Can Use It: Your sales manager uploads their monthly sales report to SharePoint. Because of the Notification Workflow in place, this triggers a notification to be sent to the Sales Director informing her/him that the monthly sales report has been uploaded. 13 Commonly Used SharePoint Workflow #4 Automation Workflows Automation Workflows allow you to be able to automate certain actions based on what s happening within your SharePoint environment. It typically piggy-backs off the other workflows that have been described above. How You Can Use It: Let s go back to the example we used in the Status Workflow section. Sales associates upload a proposal into a folder called Proposal Drafts as it s going through the approval process. Once your sales director has looked at it and has decided to approve it, though, it needs to move into another folder called Statements of Work Published. Rather than having to manually move that document from the Draft to Published, an Automation Workflow could be set up to automatically move that document for you.

14 Commonly Used SharePoint Workflow #5 Custom Workflows: the Workflow Catch- All Of course, once you figure out what these types of Workflows can do for your organization, you re likely to want to do more than one of them maybe even a combination of all four! Custom Workflows allow you to create your own mini-program within SharePoint. How You Can Use It: You could create a custom workflow that looks something like this: Your sales associate uploads a document to SharePoint, which, because of the Status Workflow, sets the status to in approval. Then, as it goes through the Approval Workflow, SharePoint sends out the various notifications that have been set through the Notification Workflow. Once everything s done, the Automation Workflow automatically publishes the document to the appropriate document library for consumption by your organization s sales team. 14

15 POST #5. Designing Your SharePoint Intranet Portal: The Top 6 Features to Consider We ve got SharePoint for our organization, but people don t seem to be buying into it and using it like we wanted them to. Does this statement sound familiar? When you invest time and money into a product, you want to make sure that you re getting the most out of your investment, and having employees reluctant to engage with that product is not a way to get the ROI you re looking for. That s why it s so important to consider the design of your SharePoint intranet portal before and as you re designing it. Here are the top six features that you need to think about when you re designing your SharePoint Intranet Portal. 15 The Top 6 Features to Consider When Designing Your SharePoint Intranet Portal You need to take into consideration what features to include to make your SharePoint Intranet Portal more user-friendly, thus, easier for your employees to adopt. To maximize your investment, and ensure your employees adopt SharePoint, here are the top 6 features you need to think about when designing your SharePoint Intranet Portal.

16 #1. UX (User Experience): Make your SharePoint Intranet Portal easy to use. This is your user interface. Your SharePoint Intranet Portal must be easy to use. An important thing to consider is the number of clicks a user needs to go through to get to the content they want. You want to keep this number as low as possible. Also, think about how often the content is going to be accessed. For the content that your users will be accessing every single day, keep it anchored on the front page or in the navigation. 16 #2. Tagged Documents: Use right keywords and phrases When you upload a document to SharePoint, Tagged Documents allows you to tag various keywords and phrases to associate with that document. Tagging documents improves search functionality, and when documents are easier to search, employees are more likely to use your SharePoint Intranet Portal. You can also create custom views to have filtered views that leverage these tags. #3. Audience Targeting: Tag documents based on the audience This enables your organization to tag documents based on the audience that will be reading them. For example, let s say you want to target your sales team with a number of documents within your SharePoint Intranet Portal. Rather than build out a separate team site for your sales team, you could instead use the Audience Targeting feature and set the target of various pages and documents to Sales Team.

17 #4. Search Capabilities: Improve adoptability and productivity with search capabilities When you re designing your SharePoint Intranet Portal, make sure that it s easily searchable. This will greatly improve adoption within the organization. Plus, of course, you re increasing productivity by making it easier for your employees to find the files that they need to collaborate on. To improve your search capabilities, make sure you re taking advantage of the Tagged Documents feature and the Audience Targeting feature. 17 #5. People Directory: Have a better visibility with Microsoft Delve This is a customized option that s available through SharePoint using a product called Microsoft Delve. With Delve, not only can you leverage your organization s contact information from Active Directory and use it as an

18 employee database, but you can also have visibility into what your employees have been working on. If enabled, you can even see the specific documents that have been recently accessed by each contact. Furthermore, Delve allows you to tag your contacts according to their areas of expertise (for example, you could tag everyone who has a specialty in Microsoft Office), so that when you re running a project, you can look up which of your colleagues would be best able to assist. #6. Wiki Pages: Easily share knowledge internally with knowledge collaboration pages Wiki Pages are knowledge collaboration pages within SharePoint Intranet Portal that help keep your employees up to speed on commonly discussed topics/items within your organization. Instead of using a Word document or another type of document, you can build a Wiki Page right into SharePoint that acts like a regular Internet page (like Wikipedia), and can be edited by all who are given access to edit it. Using this feature reduces the number of clicks that employees need to go through to get to the information and makes it easier for your organization to share knowledge internally. 18 How These Features Increase Productivity Within Your Organization Could you benefit from being able to pinpoint the talent within your organization with just a few clicks of your mouse? Or tag your sales process documents so that you didn t have to spend extra time looking for them within your system? Or keep everyone within your organization informed of the new health & safety policy without requiring them to search through documents and figure out what s changed? The above-mentioned top six features within your SharePoint Intranet Portal are designed to reduce the amount of time that s spent on more menial tasks (like searching for information), which in turn contributes to an increase in employee productivity.

19 POST #6. Keeping SharePoint Secure: What Executives Need to Know About SharePoint Security We understand that, as an Executive, one of your key concerns is the security of your organization and your valuable data. When it comes to the security of your data/content, it is not only your IT department s responsibility but the responsibility of everyone in your organization. In order for your organization to implement a strategy that will secure your content, you need understanding and support from all members of your executive team. To secure your content, choosing the most secure Content Management System needs to be the first step. Microsoft SharePoint is the Content Management System that we recommend. In this blog, we ll introduce you the top five Microsoft SharePoint security features you can leverage. 19 Want to first learn more about SharePoint as a Content Management System? Here is a blog post that we put together for executives: The Top 5 SharePoint Security Features 1. Limit Who, Outside Your Organization, Gets to See Your Content External Sharing Settings SharePoint gives you the ability to share documents with people who are outside your organization. But, you can also limit who gets to see your content by setting up and using External Sharing Settings. Don t want someone with a Gmail account to have access to your documents? No problem External Sharing Settings can block anyone using a Gmail account from receiving or accessing your content. 2. Share Your Content with a Specific Group of People in Your Organization Permissions through Active Directory Security Groups Active Directory Security Groups (or AD Security Groups) allow you to share your content with a specific group of people from within your organization. Working on your organization s FY2018 budget with your accounting

20 team? Rather than granting access to everyone on your accounting team individually to work on these documents, you can leverage Azure Active Directory and set up an Accounting security group instead. 3. Allow or Block Certain User Behaviour Policies in Office 365 Admin Through the Administrative console of Office 365, you can create certain policies that will allow or block certain user behaviour. Don t want people within your organization sharing files that have sensitive information (i.e. people s credit card numbers)? Create a policy that blocks people from sharing that kind of information between one another. 4. Secure Your Mobile Devices Microsoft InTune Ever had that gut-wrenching feeling that you ve lost your mobile device? Your mind starts to race; what happens if the person who finds my phone finds those merger documents I ve been working on? Did I remember to log out of my SharePoint site before I lost the phone? Microsoft InTune is a product that can help to secure your phone: from locking your device, to doing a complete document wipe of all sensitive information, and everything in between. 5. Control Access to Your Content Based on your Users Locations IP Range Access Only Although it s not a very common security feature, IP Range Access Only gives you another way to control your content, although this time, from a where perspective. Don t want people to have access to some of your content when they go home at night? Setting the IP Range Access to match the specific IP address(es) used by your company means that, unless they re physically in your building, they can t get to your information. 20

21 POST #7. SharePoint vs. OneDrive When to Use What SharePoint and OneDrive are two incredible collaboration tools that are available as part of the Office 365 suite. But what exactly is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive? When do I know what product to use? This blog will provide you with details of what each product is and their similarities and differences. These will help you decide when to use which product. SharePoint vs OneDrive What are their similarities? OneDrive and SharePoint are both Cloud-based file storage and sharing applications that can help keep you organized. They both allow you to have secure access to your files from multiple devices, and with both products, you can co-author or update files from any device, or share files both within and without your organization. Also, both SharePoint and OneDrive give you options of tracking document version history, so you can fall back to an earlier version if needed. 21 In the next two sections, we ll take a look at a brief overview of both OneDrive and SharePoint. An Overview of OneDrive, Cloud Storage & File Sharing Tool By automatically saving documents to the Cloud, OneDrive provides a safe and reliable way to store and share your files. Available for both Personal and Business options, OneDrive makes it easy for your users to access, manage and/or share their documents from any device of their choice. Some of the Benefits of OneDrive Include: OneDrive does not require an Internet connection to access your documents, so you can stay productive, even if you re off the grid. OneDrive allows you to share links to your files with anyone, regardless of whether they re in your organization or not.

22 Since OneDrive saves your document to the Cloud, you don t need to worry if something happens to your device. An Overview of SharePoint, Content Management Platform 22 A highly customizable platform, SharePoint allows you to share files, collaboratively work on documents, track changes that are made, revert to earlier versions (if necessary), and create SharePoint apps and workflows that will help increase productivity and efficiency in your organization.

23 Some of the Benefits of SharePoint Include: The fact that you can customize SharePoint greatly increases your team s productivity levels. Your users can access their team s files from any device at any time all they need is an internet connection. SharePoint allows you to share documents both internally and externally. Cloud security and compliance requirements are met when using SharePoint. To learn more about SharePoint, our on-demand webinar is a great way to start. It is heavily focused on the demo of the product so that you can see how the tool actually looks and works. SharePoint vs OneDrive When Should I Use What? As mentioned, OneDrive and SharePoint are both Cloud-based file storage applications that can help keep you organized. So, when do you know which one to use? Simply put, although they are both file storage and sharing applications, OneDrive is geared more towards individual use typically, only one user has access to OneDrive, which is stored on one or more of their devices. Also, OneDrive is solely a document storage and sharing application. On the other hand, SharePoint, by virtue of what it offers, encourages team collaboration, and can be built out to be much more than just a vehicle for document storage/sharing. SharePoint offers additional resources and features, such as the ability to automate workflows, create customized apps using the SharePoint platform, and create external sites for your clients or customers to be able to access content specific to them. 23