How Jalios supports Office 365 users
For nearly 20 years, Jalios has been helping its customers with their digital transformation, offering a rich and modular solution that meets their communication, collaboration, productivity and capitalization challenges, but above all a customizable and scalable solution that allows them to move forward at their own pace and according to their priorities. Many of these Jalios customers are also Microsoft customers, and for these organizations, their roadmap today often includes the move to the cloud, with the migration to Office 365.
In this context, Jalios continues to be called upon to help these organizations meet this challenge. Regular exchanges with our customers and partners, particularly during JClub workshops, but also with Microsoft itself, have enabled us to clearly identify what the Jalios Digital Workplace is capable of providing to these Office 365 customers.
Users' expectations are on three levels:
- Firstly, they want easy access to Office 365 applications, with direct access and shortcuts to information provided by Office 365 (emails, calendar, documents, etc.).
- Secondly, they want smoother use of Office 365, by integrating it more finely with each other and with Jalios Digital Workplace functionalities.
- Finally, they want a richer user experience around Office 365, with the possibility of interacting with third party applications, especially their business applications.
The challenge is to support a corporate strategy with the adoption of Office 365 tools, while maintaining a user-centered approach positioned by the Digital Workplace. This challenge is perfectly in line with what the Jalios Digital Workplace offers, and its constant philosophy of being able to adapt to its customers' technical and strategic context.
Facilitating access to applications
To meet this expectation, the Jalios Digital Workplace directly retrieves the user's Outlook emails and calendar events. These are always accessible from anywhere in the Digital Workplace. The Spaces hub provides direct access to Teams and SharePoint sites. It is also possible to create an "Office 365 Dashboard" that will pull up emails, calendar, OneDrive and SharePoint documents, OneNotes, relevant content (Delve), Teams, Yammer feeds, etc. The editing of documents is done in one click from the Digital Workplace.
Another key feature for easy access is automatic user authentication and access to the company directory synchronized with Office 365. Finally, with the application launcher, all Office 365 applications remain within a click's reach at all times.
It should be noted, however, that one of the main difficulties encountered is that the move to the cloud makes it more difficult to understand the tools. While users were already familiar with Outlook, SharePoint and the office automation tools Word, Excel, Powerpoint, with Office 365, they now have access to many tools such as Teams, Planner, etc. that they may not yet have appropriated. Facilitating access to Office 365 applications certainly consists of providing direct access, but also of restricting access to useful applications used by users in the first instance, and thus giving users back control of their digital work environment.
Fluidify uses
To improve the fluidity of use, Jalios will enable users to process their emails directly from the Digital Workplace: reply to them or mark them as read and import them and attachments. Similarly, users can add events to their calendar directly from the Jalios Digital Workplace, attach documents from their OneDrive or the Digital Workplace or start conversations about an event via comments instead of exchanging by email.
Other examples: the ability to browse the company directory via a directory or an organization chart or to create tasks from an email or a document. By streamlining usage, you no longer have to constantly navigate between applications and create gateways between the various Office 365 tools and the Digital Workplace.
What are the benefits?
The user cares less about the underlying application and can concentrate more on his work.
Enriching the user experience
Finally, even though a lot of information passes through the Office 365 tools, the reality for employees is that they have to access many other tools on a daily basis. It is therefore essential to open up the employee's digital workspace beyond what is offered by Office 365 or Jalios. For example, the application launcher is not limited to Office 365 or Jalios applications: it can include business applications relevant to the profile of the connected user and thus provide access to a whole catalogue of applications.
The challenge is to offer a consistent user experience with an extended functional scope. For example, users will be able to find skills from an HR IS on their profile or work on Photoshop files with the same fluidity as Word documents: being able to classify them, comment on them, edit them in one click, etc. Another example: being able to encapsulate all types of content (documents, videos, guides, etc.) from Office 365, Jalios or other platforms (MOOC, Youtube, etc.) in knowledge and learning paths.
This enrichment of the user experience is also reflected in the composition of services: Outlook events displayed in my Digital Workplace are geolocated using Google Maps, Azure Maps or Géoportail. Content and comments are translated on the fly by JTranslate providers (DeepL, Google Translate, etc.). Invoices received as email attachments are imported and then analyzed by an OCR tool and can be electronically signed by a tool such as Universign for example.
To conclude
Each organization is unique and different. The uses are many and varied, especially when choosing a suite as rich as Office 365. The mission of Jalios is not to tell you how you should work and with which tools, but to enable the uses that emerge in your organization, in order to bring together and federate all your employees around the same Digital Workplace and enable them to work together effectively.
