Browsing Category
Digital Workplace
66 posts
How to make a personal dashboard (for work apps)
Just like you can see the weather by looking out the window for .3 seconds, most of us have the wish to get a complete view of our data ‘situation’ with just a glance at our dashboard. Making your own personal “hub” can be fun and problematic at the same time, depending on how open you are to compromise on this instantly “glanceable” vision of a dashboard. In this guide we’ll go through how to create your own personal dashboard, but focus specifically on your workplace apps. These are even harder to summarize conveniently than private apps, where any iPhone…
How to save time with Workflow Automation
It’s easy to switch off and lose focus during tedious, lengthy and repetitive tasks. Roles that require employees to perform tasks like this often report a reduction in workplace satisfaction, but also put your business at risk of suffering losses in productivity, operating expenses and even revenue; even small mistakes can be expensive to correct! Workflow Automations can help you transform your organization’s cumbersome processes into a well-oiled machine. By allowing your Assistant to take over mundane, manual tasks, you can eliminate the risk of human error and enable your employees to perform to the best of their ability. What…
September ’21 update: New front-end, on-prem improvements
We’ve been working hard on a new version of the Assistant webapp, especially designed for enhanced customizability. New SPA frontend We’ve got a new front-end based on React, that is open-source and 100% brandable by the tenant. Using the Gatsby site reactor, it is now possible to integrate the Digital Assistant within your existing Intranet stack. The frontend is available on Plus cloud plans (deployment via Netlify CDN), or on-premises plans (for Enterprises) where deployment is handled via Docker containers. This new frontend gives customers complete control over the look and feel of their UX, as they can freely modify…
Tips and tricks to create stunning Adaptive Cards (Updated Mar ’22)
A simple Adaptive Card for your business takes less than 10 minutes to make. But as you start to make more sophisticated layouts you will usually run into common issues where the data you want to show in your Card maybe isn’t 100% what you need it to be, or is just too much to comfortably fit into your layout. In this post I listed examples of cool little hacks that we’ve accumulated over time that helped push the envelope on what an Adaptive Card can do. Some of these use Adaptive Expressions, but others are just thinking outside the…
6 intelligent workplace trends for 2022: Hip or Hype?
Cloud storage + collaboration Many organizations still send attachments through emails instead of consistently using OneDrive or similar tools. However, with working from home, the pressure to innovate has had some incredible results where cloud products have shaped up to become an innovative new stepping stone to collaboration. Look at Dropbox for example: It now offers unrivalled features like an interactive notebook where users can contribute and manage ideas in one view that’s always in-sync. They also vertically integrate with other oft-needed tools like a corporate password manager, or a neat “badge” that automatically keps Word docs in sync between…
6 benefits of introducing a smart assistant to your workplace
We’re very passionate about creating a digital workplace that delights users. Unsurprisingly for a software company, our websites are laden with features and technical specifics; such as APIs, AI chatbots or Adaptive Cards. But, at a more fundamental level, what are these features adding up to? What benefits can your organization expect in the long run? In this post I want to elaborate on the benefits that make your time – evaluating and investing into an intelligent workplace – worthwhile. Cut down on tab hopping Did you know the average worker regularly uses 36 applications, sometimes jumping between a dozen…
Case study: Design and build an internal chatbot with Adaptive Cards
We all know that feeling with certain workplace apps. The despair of too many clicks, everything loading so slowly… as if this app was actively designed to make your life harder. Even for modern apps it can be hard to please everyone, from a novice to a power user. Luckily, if you have even just a little development experience, you can create your own micro app that works just for you – using Adaptive Cards. In this case study, we’ll take a practical look at a CRM, identify a pinch point with its UI and fix it with the power…
Digital Assistant for Marketing
Modern marketers need to coordinate content and campaigns between a bewildering number of tools. Here are the most challenging obstacles and how a smart assistant for marketing can help.
Troubleshoot 5 common SharePoint search problems (Updated Mar ’23)
I bet you didn't know that SharePoint is used by over 200 million people worldwide, which gives its search engine a similar size to Google's US business. Given this size, it's surprising how many people have a love-hate relationship with the SharePoint Online search.
7 things to consider before building an IBM Watson assistant chatbot
We recently documented our own experiment to build an IBM Watson Assistant chatbot with Atlassian. If you’re thinking about doing the same, you could benefit from the lessons we learned. Docs can work against you To IBM’s credit, there is a lot of documentation on Watson Assistant. However, the way it’s organized makes it surprisingly difficult to sift through to find information on some topics. Sometimes details on key functionality, for example Webhooks, are nested three level deeps into their navigation tree (left). By the end we had ten pages worth of Google search history of ‘how to… in Watson…