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From the category archives: Customer and Employee Engagement Blog

Blog entries related to Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 solutions such as Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps and Microsoft Teams

Digital Leadership: 7 Tips for Better Internal Communication

The way we are communicating is changing. And organizational leaders are struggling to keep up.  Let’s take a look together at 7 simple tips, culled from business leaders that we have coached, for becoming a more digitally engaged executive in your organization.

Digital Leadership Engagement Tips


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Digital Transformation: Start With Why

Digital Transformation. It's a long journey.  And, for many companies, the journey doesn't end well.  Here's a simple exercise to help you make your digital journey more engaging ,and better adopted, for the entire team.

Bullseye - undetstanding why your digital workplace project matters

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Free Image Sites for SharePoint Intranet Articles and Blogs

It’s a fact: using images with your SharePoint blogs and articles improves readership. But finding just the right image can be tough – particularly if you don’t have a budget.  Here are some websites where you can download free images that are professional quality.

Free Photos for Intranet Articles Blog SharePoint Office 365


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Why Enterprise Social Networking? Connecting People to Purpose

Although it has been around for many years now, there are still a lot of misconceptions about what Enterprise Social is all about.  Leaders don't know if it is a valuable business tool, or something that might waste a lot of time.  So today, let's take a closer look at Enterprise Social Networking.

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5 Key Questions for Better SharePoint Adoption Metrics

Without SharePoint adoption metrics, you may as well be driving blind-folded, with no steering wheel, and on a winding foggy dirt road!  Under those conditions, it would be a miracle if you didn't drive off of a cliff!  In this article we take a look at how to quantify SharePoint adoption, satisfaction, and success.

5 Key Questions to Ask When Measuring SharePoint Adoption

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The 4 Pillar Digital Workplace Plan

Investing in digital workplace solutions, such as SharePoint, is the easy part of a digital transformation.  In this article, we will look at the 5 components – 4 pillars and a foundation – that make up any digital workplace plan, regardless of the technology.

Digital Workplace Strategy

 

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Lock-Down Self-Service for Creating Office 365 Groups

    blue padlock

    Self-service is for pumping gas or getting your own soft-serve ice cream at the ice cream shop…. not for creating new Office 365 Groups.

    This article explains how to disable the ability for “everyone” to create groups in all Office 365 services that use groups. 

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Transformation or Adaptation: Rate your Digital Workplace Project

Wondering how much impact your digital workplace project will have? Will it truly be a transformation of what you do, or just an adaptation of what you’re already doing? Those two words sound similar, but they lead to entirely different destinations. Bear with me while I draw a couple of analogies to make my point.

Digital Transformation Office 365 SharePoint Dynamics 365 CRM

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5 Great Ways to Stay Informed About Office 365 Updates

millennial-young-work-remote-mobileMany people have trouble keeping up with the latest trends and changes in technology, whether its computers, smartphones or TVs.  This is also true if we look at most of the big software companies like Apple, Google and of course Microsoft.  It’s even faster with certain Microsoft services like Power BI, Azure and of course their flagship collaboration service Office 365. 

Office 365 is constantly changing, and it can be difficult to know what’s going on.  I’ll show you 5 quick and easy ways to know what is happening in the Office 365 ecosystem. 

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Intranet Shark Tank: How a Better Intranet Could Have Helped Mark Cuban

Every time I read the news, it seems there is another organization rocked by scandal. And, like Mark Cuban, it is often a leader who may otherwise be ethical, but who is out of touch with what is really going on inside of their organization.  Read on to learn how building a better intranet could have helped the Shark Tank entrepreneur avoid a scandal.

Mark Cuban Needs a Better SharePoint Intranet

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Comparing Microsoft’s Social Options - Teams, Groups, Yammer and More

You're using Office 365, and you're wondering if you should use Outlook Groups, Yammer, Microsoft Teams - or all 3.  Join the crowd!  This article helps you to understand the differences between the options, and which option might be right for your team.

Enterprise Social Solutions Apps

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Quick Fix When You Can’t Edit SharePoint User Profile Properties

Has this ever happened to you?  You are minding your own business when you need to remote to your SharePoint server desktop to fix the User Profile Service (who hasn’t?).  You open Central Administration and go to the UPA and to your horror you can’t edit the profiles! 

Quick Fix When You Can’t Edit SharePoint User Profile Properties

Read on for the simple and easy fix!

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Social Governance Tips - Microsoft Teams Yammer Groups

Enterprise social communities have enormous potential for sharing knowledge, discovering new innovations, and boosting productivity.  But without proper governance, they can start strong and end in a confusing and overly-complex mess!  In this article I explore some practical tips for social community governance.


Enterprise Social Governance Template



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SharePoint Blogs, Discussion Boards and Announcements. What is the difference?

When working with SharePoint, what is the difference between blogs, discussion boards and announcements - and when do I use each of these to improve communication and collaboration

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What Is SharePoint for Non-SharePoint Users (Part 1)

As of today I’ve been consulting on SharePoint for almost 8 years, and I get asked a lot of questions.  A lot of our clients already have SharePoint and we’re either engaging on rescue projects, migrations or break/fix type support.  But then there are some clients we speak with who don’t use SharePoint at all, and are potentially looking to evaluate SharePoint or other collaboration platforms.  It’s in those times I get reminded that not all folks already know what SharePoint is! 

What Is SharePoint for Non-SharePoint Users (Part 1)

My aim with this 3-part series is to help answer this question and give some context of how SharePoint can benefit organizations.  In this initial post I will set the stage and give you some context for our discussions.

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The Incredibly Easy No-Code Solution to Simple Anchor Tags in SharePoint Navigation

SharePoint Bookmark Anchor tag

Have you ever thought to yourself “I need an anchor tag in my SharePoint navigation and that must be easy”.  But instead you're met with frustration!  I’m going to show you a little trick I stumbled across that is SUPER simple and it works with no code!  Did I mention this works in Office 365?

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Team Goals: 3 Things You Didn’t Know

Most goals are doomed to fail. Here’s why - and how you can transform struggles into successes.


Goal Fail CRM SharePoint Adoption

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Use PowerShell to Set Permissions on All SharePoint Libraries, Folders and Files

Use PowerShell to Set Permissions on All SharePoint Libraries, Folders and Files

When you work with SharePoint permissions, you quickly figure out that you want to touch them as little as possible.  With a lot of things in SharePoint, permissions inherit top down.  So this means that it’s a best practice to always use that inheritance as much as possible.  But in today's post, I'll show you how to use PowerShell to change those permissions for all libraries, folders and files in the site!

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Where To Download the Latest SharePoint Designer for 2013/2016

I’ve had this come up multiple times lately, and I thought I’d put up a post to help get the information all in one place.  Now that we’re moving away from SharePoint 2010 and dealing with SharePoint 2013/2016/Online more often, folks still want SharePoint Designer but are confused which version they need.  You want to be sure to get the latest and most patched version, which requires more than one download.

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3 Tips for Balanced Intranet Governance

3 Tips for Balanced Intranet GovernanceOne of the things that I think most companies struggle with is governance, specifically in context of an intranet.  If you read my blog you know I talk about mostly SharePoint, but good governance can and should apply to really to any platform. 

We actually devote a whole section of our Building a Better Intranet workshop to governance because it’s that important, and yet so many companies don’t even think about it.  In today’s post I wanted to pull out 3 tips that are important aspects of balanced governance. 

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Hide Root Node of the SharePoint Breadcrumb like a Pro with CSS!

Hide Root Node of the SharePoint Breadcrumb like a Pro with CSS!Instead of another blog about PowerShell, I wanted to share a quick trick with CSS.  It’s quite common in a SharePoint branding design to include a breadcrumb navigation.  In SharePoint 2007 there was a simple horizontal breadcrumb separated by arrows, and SharePoint 2010 incorporated a tree-style drop down breadcrumb.  The site to site breadcrumbs were removed starting in SharePoint 2013. 

There are many blogs on how to bring either the “up-folder” or simple horizontal breadcrumb back.  But sometimes, you want to hide the root node and the separator.  In today’s post I’ll show you how to do that with just CSS.

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Easily Add a Dark Sky Weather Widget on Your SharePoint Page

imageSooner or later it would likely be nice to have some weather in SharePoint.  There are many ways to do this, and the ideal solution would be something that is global above the page that detects where you are and changes the weather for you. 

That’s great, but it’s custom and certainly not free.  But sometimes you want something easy and free to embed something on your SharePoint page.  And if you’re favorite weather app is Dark Sky, you’re in luck!  I’ll show you the tiny amount of code you need.  It’s not a no-code solution, but low-code.

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Replace the Default SharePoint Media Player with a Friendly Minimized HTML5 Audio Player

Mminial html5 audio player in SharePointI was working with a client recently and they use a lot of audio files, like when they record customer service calls for quality assurance.  When things go great, they wanted to highlight these cases of awesome customer support in audio clips in blog posts. 

They found the default SharePoint audio player less than appealing and wanted something better.  In today’s post I’ll show you something maybe you didn’t know about your web browser, and how to use it to make this experience better. 

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Use SharePoint Workflow to Determine if a Field Changed Without Code

Use SharePoint Workflow to Determine if a Field Changed Without CodeOn a recent client project, we’re working to implement a task-based tracking solution in SharePoint 2010.  There is a parent Project, and that Project has a template set of tasks the workflow creates with due dates.  Then the requirement came up where if the Project due date changed, all of the task due dates needed to be updated to.  Read on to see how I show you an easy and simple no-code way using workflow to tell if a field changed. 

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4 Key Questions to Ensure You Create the Proper SharePoint Structure

ChecklistI've been working with SharePoint for over 8 years now, and worked with a lot of different clients and types of users. I've seen that there's one area that a lot of people either struggle with, or get flat out wrong. That is what they create in SharePoint to store content. 

In today's post I'm going to give four questions to answer that should help drive what kind of content needs to be created. Why is this so important?  Keep reading to find out ...

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Blog Topics

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CPR for CRM Study

The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.

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SharePoint Readiness Assessment

This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.

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CRM Self Assessment

Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.

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SharePoint Feedback Solution

This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.

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SharePoint Upgrade Checklist

Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.