It seems like an understatement to say that there has been a lot of change over the last year and a half, particularly with how we work and how we communicate.
This unprecedented disruption to our working lives has had an impact on the importance employees are now placing on their daily working life, and their digital experience. This in turn, has led to intranets and digital workplaces becoming key to that experience.
More people than ever are using Microsoft Teams, and it seems they are also waiting for updates to Teams. We’ve witnessed the launch of Viva, and we have seen how employees are relying on their company’s intranet and internal social channels for news and information, more than ever before. So it’s no surprise that at Fresh, we’ve seen a 500% increase in user feedback, custom feature requests, and queries about native SharePoint and Fresh, from our customers.
And we are delighted to say, that because of this, we have been working very hard on our most important change to Fresh yet.
We’re just finished putting the final touches to our new release – “Fresh Everest” – and we’ll be rolling it in the next few weeks.
It’s not often that an intranet, or any app for that matter, gets such an overhaul. So we ask the question: “If you have one, is your intranet still fit for purpose in the new world of hybrid work?”
Experience + Expertise = Awesome Intranet
Do you ever find yourself taking a step back from your company intranet and thinking, “I wish it could be just a little easier to use/run!” Well, you’re not alone.
In our experience of working with hundreds of intranet managers, we so often hear from those who feel the same. Your platform, which was once shiny and new, becomes hard to manage and maintain, often suffering from sprawl, misuse and good dollop of eye-rolling whenever the word intranet is mentioned.
But keeping our intranet solution ‘Fresh’ … well fresh … is an on-going challenge that we absolutely relish. But how do we go about making sure that we keep everything fresh and up to date? There are three main components to our change and update process:
- Customers. Our client success team meets regularly with all Fresh users to talk about their on-going needs, trends they are seeing and want in on, and most importantly any challenges they have with using Fresh. Distilling this input and balancing it against Microsoft’s app road map is incredibly valuable.
- Microsoft. Our team are constantly monitoring and evaluating any upcoming changes to SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and other services relevant to our product and the digital workplace arena at large. Our role is to absorb, understand, speculate, direct and gently nudge Fresh users to make optimal use of our out-of-the-box functionality, balanced by their context of need.
- Industry trends. In addition to Microsoft, there are some amazing vendors in our shared and similar space of digital transformation. Inspiration is everywhere and ensuring Fresh users get maximum value, from as wide a source of inputs as possible, is a great way to ensure they get the most out of having a tool like Fresh.
At Content+Cloud, we’ve been designing, building and delivering intranets based on Microsoft technology since 2001. In that time, we’ve seen the enormous expansion of intranets in the modern workplace and we’ve seen how much they’ve changed.
From basic home pages showing the company lunch menu and pictures from the 1998 Christmas party, up to today’s interactive, collaborative, cloud-based digital workspaces, the pace of change has been blistering. And we’ve seen the impact that a bad intranet can have too; so often we’ve redesigned or replaced systems that were simply failing employees and holding companies back.
Our team consistently draws on our close relationship with Microsoft themselves, and we believe we’ve built a tool that will give you all the best bits of an intranet, quickly, simply and at a great price. So, why do we think Fresh is so special?
When you invest in Fresh, you invest in much more than a simple intranet. Besides being a powerful, flexible and evergreen environment, you also access Content+Cloud’s combined knowledge and experience.
Fresh really does climb new heights for the employee experience.
Let the Fresh team help you begin your intranet journey
If you’d like us to help you kickstart your digital workplace strategy, you can sign up to a personal workshop to identify your organisation’s current state and plan the path you’ll take to deploy a successful intranet.