Discover the DWS 2019 presentation
Why integrate Office 365 with JPlatform?
According to a study by Club Décision DSI in 2017, 37% of small and medium-sized businesses had Office 365. This figure is even greater if we take data from Microsoft France, where 80% of CAC 40 companies held this solution in 2016.
These figures come as no surprise: the Microsoft office suite is traditionally known and present in our businesses and in our homes as individuals. Created in 2017, the Office 365 collaborative solution has designed a new work environment within organizations thanks to the :
- Cloud for mobile working and online storage,
- Instant online multi-user co-editing with the office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint),
- Various collaborative bricks, such as Teams and Yammer, to optimize individual and collective productivity.
Even so, Office 365 has a number of major drawbacks. The O365 work environment is fragmented, allowing little integration of business applications and forcing users to navigate between tools.
The user’s digital environment becomes more optimized with the integration of Office 365 with JPlatform and enables :
- Enhance the platform with collaborative features,
- Unify the user experience at a single point,
- Maintain employee work habits using Microsoft tools.
Presentation of the Inwego project, the Indigo Group’s worldwide intranet
An international context with a desire to unite
A French group and world leader in parking and individual mobility, the Indigo Group employs 20,000 people in 11 countries and over 750 cities. With over 60% of its staff in the field, and therefore on the move, it was essential for the Indigo Group to bring together all the group’s tools in a single interface accessible from all equipment, and to centralize news. The “Inwego” intranet was born to meet these challenges of unification and internationalization.
Objective: pool existing tools
To meet performance and cohesion needs, the Inwego platform has been designed in synergy with Office 365 tools (already used by the Group) by integrating key tools (Outlook mail/agenda and Teams).
All this is achieved by moving from a fragmented, local ecosystem to a unified tool, as shown in the diagram below:
A unified digital environment with an international dimension
In an international context, we chose the AWS (Amazon Web Service) platform to host the JPlatform solution. The advantage of this platform is that it allows us to adjust operating capacity according to the number of users (use at different times depending on the activity schedules of different countries). The same server is connected both to the Microsoft directory, hosted on Azure, and to Office 365 to run its various services.
It is thanks to this architecture that all the servers communicate with each other, enabling data from the various Office 365 bricks to be uploaded to the JPlatform interface (reading Outlook emails and calendars, displaying Teams, etc.).
Thanks to this infrastructure, the directory acts as a pivot point between the Jalios session and Office 365, enabling users to connect seamlessly once (SSO).
Focus on the Office 365 interface on JPlatform
Quick access from the home page
From the home page, we immediately find the various Office tools in quick access on the topbar and the different portlets.
Different interactions and interfaces are proposed depending on the tools (case of Inwego):
- mails: on topbar, display of the number of unread mails (and preview and deletion of unread mails displayed on a drop-down list by clicking on the icon). On the side, view of the last 10 unread e-mails,
- Agenda: a preview of the day’s agenda (or a preview of the week’s agenda by clicking on “See my agenda”),
- Teams” spaces: Teams can be viewed from the homepage and from the “spaces directory”.
These interfaces can be implemented once the Jalios Office 365 module has been installed, along with the JMail (e-mail) and JCalendar (calendar) modules.
Of course, interfaces and interactions can be customized according to the customer’s needs and context.
Our suggestions for improvement
However, despite clear progress on the integration of Office 365 modules and the improvement of the user experience, we would like to suggest a few areas for improvement:
- Unify the wording of collaborative spaces. Jalios calls these spaces “My collaborative spaces”, while Office 365 calls them “Teams”,
- Optimize ergonomics by enriching the functionalities of Office 365 tools in JPlatform,
- Categorize and filter “Teams” spaces by theme, as Jalios JPlatform does for its “collaborative spaces”.
Theseimprovements can only be made on the Microsoft side. Since Jalios can only retrieve services provided by Microsoft, the publisher is limited in its ability to offer the full range of functionalities covered by Office 365.
In short: a great step forward in the world of intranets!
Despite a few areas for improvement identified above, the user has a true Digital Workplace with a centralized, unified digital ecosystem. News, documentation, project management areas and office tools are all centralized in a single point.
Integrating new functionalities into a unified approach requires defining which tool will meet a given use. This precaution avoids duplicating certain functionalities from JCMS / JPlatform and Office 365, thus avoiding confusion for the user. All that’s needed is to activate and/or deactivate certain functionalities offered by the solutions, and to communicate best practices for optimizing the use of the tool.
In conclusion, the Office 365 integration project is a fine example of a collaborative project, with the very design of a highly collaborative, unified tool. The result is a true Digital Workplace that covers all the elements required by the user.
The centralization of news and corporate information, business needs and office tools in a single point becomes a major asset for the life of an employee and the efficiency of his or her organization! All the more reason to adopt the platform!
