Leslie Anjan's blog

The outbreak and rapid spread of COVID-19, commonly known as coronavirus, has prompted many companies to implement emergency work-from-home protocols to avoid exposure in the workplace. Due to this many businesses now encouraging or even mandating that employees work from home amid this global health crisis over the coronavirus, millions of people can expect to have their daily routines and work styles impacted. But not everyone is accustomed to working from home and getting into work mode from a space that’s not your regular one can be a huge adjustment. The bright side of working from home is that you save time on a commute, spend more time with family, and maybe get a few more things done around the house. But the challenges, including loneliness, staying connected, and a heightened penchant for distraction, can have a significant effect on your psyche and productivity. If your company has never had a full-time remote workforce, this can be a challenging transition. However, t...

Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk. Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding the user and user experiences, and awareness of approaches and best practices in Microsoft SharePoint. An important best practice is providing a consistent experience for everyone. Many people complain that going from site to site across their organization’s intranet feels disjointed. Each site looks different from the other with similar types of information scattered in different places. While it’s great to allow site owners flexibility, without some basic des...

Microsoft announced the General Availability of its so-called ‘records management’ solution for Microsoft 365 on 30 April 2020. The announcement noted that organisation would be able to use the records management solution to: Classify, retain, review, dispose, and manage content without compromising productivity or data security. Leverage machine learning capabilities to identify and classify regulatory, legal, and business critical records at scale. Demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. Proposed licensing model Microsoft have published extensive information in its service description for the Security and Compliance elements of Microsoft 365. It is a good idea to discuss these options with a Microsoft licensing partner. At a general level, the difference between the ‘information governance’ (E3/E5) and ‘records management’ (E5 only) options are as follows:   Info Governance – ‘Broad policies...

I have heard from almost all customers during the initial discovery stage of the Intranet project highlighting their current Information Architecture issues. You would have heard these words – “Un Manageable, Grown exponentially, inconsistent, unusable”. Working for Prometix as consultant delivery IA in SharePoint and other Office 365 application, here are few pointers to consider & think about.  Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk. Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding of the customer inner workings, understanding the user an...

As a SharePoint consulting practice, we at Prometix had a chance to implement a Microsoft 365 Records Management service This is a fairly new service and Microsoft announced in May the commercial release of the Microsoft 365 Records Management service. This service, which lets organisations apply "labels" to documents, as well as machine learning to automatically apply those labels, is designed to address legal compliance tracking issues for organisations. Microsoft claims it'll help demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. This will assist in integrating with Business Intelligence such PowerBI, and artificial intelligence such as Azure services. The Records Management service is currently available through the  Microsoft 365 Compliance Center . Organisations need to have Microsoft 365 E5/A5 or Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management licenses to use the service, which gives them the rights to automatically apply ...

Planning for an enterprise SharePoint Migration can be challenging, painful, frustrating, and time consuming.  Define SharePoint Migration Goals The first step in SharePoint Migration planning, or in any technology migration, is to define the goals and objectives.  Simply put, this is defining: Why are we migrating? What must we have Day 1 on the new platform? What do we hope to get out of the new platform? What are the hopes/goals six months after launch?  A year?  3 years? These are small questions that can have some big answers.  Having defined goals and objectives before deep diving into planning activity will help inform your analysis and decisions.  Each stage of the planning process should be viewed through the lens of these goals and objectives.  If the “why” of the migration is part of a company-wide cloud initiative, then you know at the outset that the option to leave behind ...