The evolving digital workplace

Mobile-enabling the digital workplace

The modern digital workplace is, of course, increasingly mobile. So digital workplace managers are asking, what's the best way to "mobilize" my colleagues' digital experience? One convenient answer is to make it your vendors' problem. Deploy the mobile apps or mobile Web experience that ships with their product, and let them manage the experience. That is practical, but also risky. Your colleagues can experience the same chaos on the mobile device that they allow on their intranet: multiple freestanding applications that behave differently and don't talk to each other.

Moreover, oftentimes the mobile experience that your incumbent intranet technology vendors deliver may not be very satisfying. That is particularly a challenge for most portal and Web content management solutions, which tend to display chunks of information and services via some sort of "theming" mechanism that lays those chunks out on a page. You deliver a mobile experience by picking which chunks to appear via mobile-specific themes or templates.

On the one hand, that's not a bad solution. It allows you to easily reuse existing components and prioritize them in different ways. I recently talked to one intranet manager who gloried in removing various SharePoint web parts she considered useless from her mobile site without anyone complaining.

Just note that this is not true adaptive design. Stacking pre-existing portlets and web parts does not necessarily lead to a great mobile experience.

In the end, there's four ways to think about mobile Web experience:

• relying on COTS vendors to provide mobile clients for their platforms that you license;
• from the top down, taking a subset of your existing, prebuilt components and ordering them in a sensible way for a mobile Web interface;
• from the bottom up, rethinking what content and services (and their associated display) make the most sense for your mobile visitors, and reassembling from scratch, potentially with native apps; and
• a blended approach of all three.

The first approach is easiest, but risks the most disconnected user experience. The second approach is simple, but largely stopgap. The third approach provides the most value, but takes the most effort with today's tools. For better or worse, most enterprises are heading toward option four.

To hear more specific advice and learn from the experience of your peers, join us for The Social and Mobile Workplace  pre-conference workshop this October in Washington, D.C.

We launched SharePoint ... Then what?

SharePoint is nearly ubiquitous. But is it the right platform for all your digital workplace needs?

In conversations with our subscribers on their SharePoint and enterprise collaboration efforts, a common theme keeps recurring: that getting SharePoint up and running is just the beginning of a long and sometimes quite difficult journey.

The core problem is that long-term planning often gets lost in the push to get SharePoint "stood up." You can understand why. For most enterprises, it takes massive effort just to get the platform up and running across the organization. So you can probably empathize when, at the end of that process, the collaboration manager says, "Phew, we made it!"

Except, of course, they have made almost nothing. And here comes the harder part. Colleagues who were expecting finished applications (like ideation communities) respond, "Is that all?" Some of you cleverly budgeted for add-on tools and services. Many of you didn't, and now have to go back, hat in hand, to sponsors. Ouch.

In the end, you need a broader collaboration and information management strategy behind any SharePoint investment. To learn how to craft one, come to the SharePoint Symposium this October in Washington, D.C. The event is co-located with the KMWorld 2012 Conference and Exposition.