You’re at the airport waiting for your connecting flight when a client’s email shows up on your smartphone: It’s feedback on your team’s most recent deliverable, and you want to share it with your team members as soon as possible.
While you could forward the client’s email to your team, the information would be more meaningful and less likely to get lost in the shuffle if you could connect the feedback to the actual document in a project site that includes a document library. You also want to open up a discussion with team regarding the feedback so you open your social mobile app and quickly post the feedback in the project site that contains the social newsfeed. Your post kicks off a discussion thread with the team within the newsfeed rather than in email.
Whether you’re in the office or on the road, you need to be able to communicate effectively with your team any time a new idea hits you or you receive some important news to share. If you’ve taken the time to integrate social enterprise capabilities with content management, that communication takes place in an actionable context.
But first, it’s important to understand what you need from these tools, and how they could be of best use to you. Here are three key steps to take before integrating Social with content management.
- Identify potential for communication breakdown: Social enterprise solutions are designed to solve communication problems, so it’s best to first determine where communication between team members tends to falter in the process of document authoring, collaboration and management. These are the points where integrating social and content management is likely to have the greatest impact.
- Build a use case for social enterprise solutions: If you take the time to compile examples of how this technology implementation could solve problems at your organization, you’re more likely to communicate its value to your end users. These might include instances when important information gets lost in long email threads between team members. Geographically-dispersed teams could also make up part of your use case if you’re finding it challenging to get these team members on the same page.If you’re hoping to use social enterprise tools to minimize email clutter they must be mobile accessible. People have been accessing work email via mobile devices for a number of years. So if you want to change their behavior and get conversations out of email and into social enterprise tools, the platform must be able to meet the minimum capabilities of email.
- Specify how social enterprise tools could improve a current process: Integrating social with content management might be a great way to generally improve communication, but users need specifics if you want to bring them on board. For example, perhaps you have an account team that follows a five-step process. Look for ways to show them how this integration would be used to streamline or eliminate some of those steps.
Perhaps you’re wondering why it’s important to integrate social and content management. Couldn’t you just use the tools as they are? One of the main reasons to strive for an integrated, seamless connection comes down to basic usability. Every additional step a person must take to accomplish a task is going to reduce how often they use the technology. And nothing frustrates people more than juggling multiple logins and passwords.
Whether you’re talking about mobile access to social enterprise tools or signing in to multiple cloud applications that aren’t integrated, a cumbersome process often has a devastating effect on user adoption. People already have too many passwords in their personal and professional lives, so the last thing you want to do is introduce yet another.
In the Microsoft environment, workarounds and third-party solutions have made it possible to alleviate this problem. The integration of Office 365/SharePoint Online with Yammer presents interesting opportunities and the recently published Office 365 roadmap indicated that they are serious about making this as seamless as possible.
Learn more about integrating social enterprise solutions with content management by contacting Portal Solutions.
