They're doing what? It's a Sharepoint shakeup!

SharePoint 2010 workflows are being turned off in SharePoint Online…

Let's set the scene. For the past decade SharePoint users around the world, in offices big and small, have used workflows to replace and automate enormous amounts of paper-based processes and repetitive tasks. With the move to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, these wonderful enterprise workhorses made the jump as well, and continued to serve us well. But.. and there's always one - they didn't talk to the other parts of the Office 365 family like Dynamics or Forms.

To solve this dilemma and provide a fully integrated environment, Microsoft introduced Flow (now called Automate) which has become the binding between not only the Microsoft 365 apps, to hundreds of other cloud-based platforms as well. The writing was on the wall - Flow/Automate would eventually supplant the venerable 2010 and 2013 workflow engines.

This week’s announcement has heralded the end of the classic era - SharePoint 2010 will stop working November 1, 2020, and 2013 workflows will no longer be available for new tenancies after that date. While we don't have an end-of-life date for 2013 workflows yet - it's coming.

What to do? Stay calm. If you think you have a mission critical workflow in your SharePoint Online call us on 1300 611 359 for a free discussion on your options. We can assist your administrators with a review and audit to identify what's running and where. From there - is this an opportunity to revamp an aging process into a modern powerhouse? Our consulting team has years of practice building Automate Flows, as well as custom development of PowerApps to act as high quality data entry forms to kick them off.

Sharing Minds Joins Nucleus Cyber

Nucleus Cyber, a provider of advanced information protection solutions, today announced a partnership with Sharing Minds, a Microsoft Gold Partner providing SharePoint and Office 365 consulting and business productivity services, to resell and support the company’s NC Protect solution in Asia Pacific.

“Sharing Minds is thrilled to partner with Nucleus Cyber. We saw the immense value in Nucleus Cyber for the M365 ecosystem, as the perfect partner in governance, compliance and secure collaboration,” said, Adam Clark, Founder and CEO of Sharing Minds. “A number of organisations have rapidly deployed collaborative and remote working solutions on the platform. NC Protect will provide the assurance that the right people, see the right things, in the right place, at the right time.” Nucleus Cyber’s NC Protect provides advanced real-time information protection that increases the value of existing Microsoft security investments to secure business-critical content without the complexity or cost of native tools. NC Protect’s easily configured rules dynamically evaluate all available data and user attributes to tailor information protection for file sharing, messaging and chat across collaboration tools.

Established in 2008, Sharing Minds brings a wealth of experience across strategic, consultative and support services to enable collaboration, integration and productivity through the use of SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies. The company’s Microsoft Certified Professionals partner closely with clients to understand their needs, tailoring individual solutions for each business. “We welcome Sharing Minds and to our channel program. Their expertise in delivering Microsoft products makes them the ideal partner to offer NC Protect to customers in the region requiring a solution that can quickly and simply provide advanced information capabilities for secure collaboration in M365 apps,” said, Kurt Mueffelmann, CEO of Nucleus Cyber. NC Protect is fully integrated with Microsoft Office 365—SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, and Yammer, plus Dropbox, Nutanix Files and Windows file shares. NC Protect allows customers to safeguard business-critical data in midsize to large enterprises, as well as industries with large amounts of regulated and sensitive data, including government, defense, utilities, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

About Sharing Minds

Sharing Minds is a Microsoft Gold Partner providing SharePoint and Office 365 consulting and business productivity services, since 2008. We have teams in our Australian offices in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney and our reach extends to clients across Asia Pacific. For more information visit sharingminds.com.au.

About Nucleus Cyber

Nucleus Cyber is a provider of advanced information protection solutions that prevent data loss and protect against insider threats. The company’s NC Protect solution leverages existing technology investments to provide a simpler, faster and cheaper solution to tailor information protection for file sharing, messaging and chat across collaboration tools. For midsize to large enterprises and regulated industries it protects business-critical content in cloud collaboration tools Microsoft Office 365—SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, and Yammer, plus Dropbox, Nutanix Files and Windows file shares.

New look and new realms

Sharing Minds has had the ultimate "glow up", with a fresh new look and new realms ahead.

With 12 years under their belt, Sharing Minds is graduating into its teenage years with a new look to support their evolving business model.

Incorporating the elements you’ve come to know Sharing Minds for, but stepping into a more grown up space, the new look logo is a definite line in the sand that moves Sharing Minds into a more mature and accessible aesthetic.

The ultimate ‘glow up’, the new look continues to incorporate the infinity symbol, but with a bolder direction. The rich purple tones have been carried through in the re brand and draw a clear distinction that has set Sharing Minds apart as the professional, robust, industry front runner. The typography is as simple and easy to use as the companies products and service offerings. It was designed to maximise its impact across all applications while keeping it easy to read and highly recognisable.

Company Founder and Director, Adam Clark is confident about the new direction and has expressed his excitement in the brand rollout, which will take place over the coming weeks.

COVID-19 RESPONSE

Adam Clark

Company Director, Founder, Chief Technology Officer

An open letter to our clients

Dear friends of Sharing Minds,

The COVID-19 virus is dominating the news cycle, and it must also be dominating your personal and professional conversations. Sharing Minds is no different; we are actively implementing our response to this situation while operating in an environment of considerable uncertainty.

We are all in this together.

We draw on more than 11 years of experience in helping our clients navigate through their most urgent and challenging situations. In a crisis, the foremost concerns must be personal health and safety—of our families, our neighbours, our workmates, and ourselves. Taking care of those who contract the virus and joining the global community in taking sensible steps to slow its spread is of the utmost importance.

As a technology consultancy, we understand better than most the impact and importance of continued business operation in times of crisis. We are actively working with several Partners and Clients to ensure the continuation of their business services with a remote enabled workforce.

There is no single formula for managing this challenge, however we are putting precautions in place for our Consultants and office teams to use remote conferencing and avoid face-to-face meetings wherever possible. 

We are also placing a restriction on all travel, effective immediately, and only absolutely necessary domestic travel will be considered. 

These are measured and sensible steps taken to dampen the possibility of the virus spread.  If these changes cause concern for you or your team, I invite you to contact me directly to discuss a way forward.

Many of you have already reached out to ask a question, brainstorm an idea, or enquire if Sharing Minds has an action plan detailing steps to take during a crisis. We are honoured by the outreach, and we are happy to help in any way we can.

You are our friends, and we’re here to help.

We are all in this together.

Best regards,
Adam Clark

For more information, contact us.

Sharing Minds Wins 2019 Nintex Partner Award for Customer Success - APAC

Sharing Minds is pleased to announce we have been named a winner in the 2019 Nintex Partner Awards within the Customer Success – APAC category. 

Sharing Minds was recognized for our proven ability to accelerate business outcomes and results using the Nintex Process Platform. We have leveraged the powerful and easy-to-use capabilities of the Nintex Platform to digitally transform operations and enhance how people work.

“Nintex is honored to recognize Sharing Minds as a winner of the 2019 Nintex Partner Awards,” said Nintex CEO Eric Johnson. “Every day Nintex Partners, like Sharing Minds, help our customers achieve process excellence and digital transformation leveraging the Nintex Process Platform.”

We are thrilled to be named as one of this year’s Nintex Partner Award recipients. Through our 7-year long partnership with Nintex we have been able to deliver excellent, innovative, purpose-built solutions to our clients to assist with their business process mapping, management and automation needs. 

“It is a privilege and an honour to receive this award for the Sharing Minds team, in recognition of the hard work and effort our Consultants have shown over the last year. Nintex is one of our most valuable partners and we look forward to continuing our strong working relationship with the whole Nintex team, “ said Adam Clark, CTO and Company Director of Sharing Minds.  

“Over the last seven years, I have continually seen the Nintex Platform enable our clients to consistently improve their productivity and efficiency as a result of the automation, management and optimisation of their internal business processes,” explained Adam. 

The Nintex Process Platform offers industry-leading process management and automation capabilities including: process mapping and management with Nintex Promapp®, robotic process automation (RPA) with Nintex Foxtrot® RPA, workflow automation, forms and mobile apps, document generation with Nintex DocGen® and Nintex Drawloop DocAutomation, and e-Signatures with Nintex Sign™ powered by Adobe Sign and process intelligence.

Thanks again to Nintex for the award and recognition, here’s to another year of delivering excellent business process automation solutions together! 

Published by: Sharing Minds Communications Dept
Date: Friday, 26 July 2019
Contact: 1300 611 359

Sharing Minds Named a Finalist for 2019 Nintex Partner Award

The Nintex Partner awards recognize the valuable contributions of channel partners helping organizations transform their business with Nintex.

“Nintex Partners, like Sharing Minds, have an important role in helping our customer around the globe achieve their digital transformation and process excellence goals,” said Nintex Chief Executive Officer Eric Johnson. “We look forward to recognizing our top partners for their success helping clients automate, manage and optimize their business processes by developing customer services and solutions using Nintex.

Sharing Minds have been working with Nintex as a trusted partner since 2012 and have developed a range of process automation solutions for our customers. We have enjoyed partnering with Nintex throughout their evolution from a SharePoint workflow and forms solution into an all-in-one enterprise process solution that encapsulates a range of 8 different products throughout the platform.

“Nintex are one of our premium product partners that we are delighted to have a strong working relationship with. Over the course of many implementations and deployments for our clients, we have seen first-hand the power of the Nintex platform in automating business processes to achieve productivity efficiencies,” explained Sharing Minds’ CTO and Company Director Adam Clark.

Nintex will announce the winners of the 2019 Nintex Partner Awards on Sunday, July 14 during Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Published by: Sharing Minds Communications Dept
Date: Tuesday, 2 July 2019
Contact: 1300 611 359

SharePoint Conference 2019 Wrap Up

This year, I had the pleasure of attending the annual SharePoint Conference (SPC) with one of our Senior Consultants, Shannon Carey, in tow. SPC is the premier SharePoint event offering sessions with expert tips on how to best utilise the platform and updates about the product roadmap as well as providing opportunities for networking with colleagues across the industry. This year was no exception as it was the 20th year since SharePoint’s humble beginnings running on an old server under Jeff Teper’s desk.

SharePoint Home Sites. Image credit: Microsoft

SharePoint Home Sites

The keynote session opened the conference with a range of speakers from Microsoft, and so too came one of the biggest announcements of the event, the launch of SharePoint Home sites. Through leveraging Communication sites, Home sites combines news, events, content, conversations and video which will emphasise organisational priorities and branding. Home sites are intended to be used with one per Office 365 tenancy and will eventually become the Home page on the SharePoint mobile app. 15 SharePoint Home sites launch partners were announced to coincide with the release and we were proud to hear Sharing Minds partners LiveTiles, Hyperfish and Wizdom are part of this cohort.

SharePoint Search Updates

There are many improvements to the Search functionality rolled out across the Microsoft 365 suite. In December 2019 custom refiners and verticals, display templates, more extensibility, more scalability, more content types, inline @Office help assistance and many more updates will be made available. As a result, content will be searchable within 15 seconds of an addition or change.

Multi-Geo Capabilities. Image credit: Microsoft

Multi-Geo Capability

New multi-geo capabilities have been announced for Office 365 Groups and SharePoint, which will enable users to store data in one or more locations they have selected. These capabilities satisfy data sovereignty requirements in each location and the user requirement has been lowered to organisations with 500+ users. This makes this feature available to more businesses that before and provides enterprise functionality for mid-sized organisations.

SharePoint Admin Centre Site URL Rename Functionality. Image credit: Microsoft

SharePoint Admin Centre - Site URL Rename

A host of improvements and updates to the SharePoint Admin Centre were announced during Jeff Teper’s opening keynote address. The most notable of which, site URL rename, was met with a raucous applause by the room of SharePoint devotees. This change will allow for the URL address of a site to be updated simultaneously when the site name changes and all future requests redirected to the new URL.

OneDrive Updates

Rolling out later in 2019 will be OneDrive Differential Sync, a new functionality which will only sync changes to files within a OneDrive, avoiding the need for the whole listing to be synced. This will save data and time usage for OneDrive users on the move.

Between sessions, I managed to find a few friendly faces around the exhibition, including Sharing Minds partners AvePoint, LiveTiles, Nintex and ShareGate. Keep an eye out on the Sharing Minds social media channels for some exclusive interviews I recorded with each of the partners about their product roadmaps and exciting updates.

Ben Creamer with Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office, OneDrive SharePoint and Office Media Group.

A personal highlight of the event for me was meeting the legendary Jeff Teper. Known in the industry as the Godfather of SharePoint, it was a real honour to meet with Jeff and have a quick chat about the journey of SharePoint and where its headed in the future.

Already looking forward to next year’s SPC!

Cheers,
Ben
Ben.Creamer(at)sharingminds.com.au

What Nintex's Latest Acquisition, EnableSoft, Means For You

Last week Nintex announced their acquisition of US-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software provider EnableSoft and their industry leading RPA product Foxtrot. At Sharing Minds, we’re thrilled with this announcement as we can now offer our clients and partners a comprehensive business process automation and workflow solution within the Nintex platform.

Image credit: Nintex

What is Foxtrot?
Foxtrot is a scalable RPA software which empowers companies to accelerate their speed of business. With Foxtrot, businesses can amplify operational efficiency and lower human capital costs through automation. Whether integrating existing processes or building a program from scratch, Foxtrot is the fastest time-to-value RPA solution available.

What can Foxtrot do?

Foxtrot RPA focuses on ease of use and time to value; enabling business users to automate their own processes while established vendors focus on building developer centric tools to tackle complex scenarios.

Foxtrot RPA has taken a unique approach to integration, leveraging native APIs which allows for creation of bots which are more resilient to UI changes.

Foxtrot RPA is trusted by 600+ banks in the USA, more than any other RPA vendor.

Image credit: EnableSoft

Image credit: EnableSoft

Image credit: EnableSoft

“Foxtrot will allow our clients to include the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Bot within their Nintex Workflows to streamline and automate processes. This will increase the efficiency of workflows and ultimately provide a better process automation” stated Sharing Minds’ Chief Technical Officer, Adam Clark.

The demands of today’s modern enterprise require a process platform that offers a complete end-to-end solution: process mapping and management, process automation (including both workflow-based and robotic process automation) and process optimization. The Nintex product suite can now be leveraged to overcome the challenges previously faced by RPA customers when scaling bot deployments. With Nintex Promapp, customers can now achieve effective management and mapping process to prevent existing legacy systems being adversely affected when business processes change. 

“Foxtrot RPA is an excellent addition to the Nintex family and we are looking forward to offering RPA and complete business process automation solutions to our clients and partners” said Ben Creamer, Sharing Minds’ General Manager.

For more information about Foxtrot, or how RPA can benefit you, please get in touch with us at sales@sharingminds.com.au or give us a call on 1300 611 359.

Announcing New Sharing Minds Partner: Wizdom

Sharing Minds has recently expanded its range of design services by adding the industry leading Wizdom product to its catalogue of applications. This addition provides customers and partners with the ability to purchase Office 365 intranet solutions from Sharing Minds that use out of the box capability, LiveTiles and now Wizdom.  

Founded in 2001, Wizdom has focused on intranet and digital workplace from day one. Wizdom is a recognized leader in Digital Workplace/Intranet solutions that Clearbox - a leading analyst firm - has rated #1 three years in a row, and Gartner just recently designated as a Cool Vendor. 

Today, Wizdom supports both SharePoint 2013/16 On Premises and Office 365 using the Microsoft SharePoint Add-In Model. For customers that are implementing SharePoint intranets for the first time, moving to a newer version or moving into the cloud, Wizdom is the proven solution for a modern evergreen digital workplace and intranet solution.   

Overview of the Wizdom intranet solution: 

Image credit: Wizdom

• Includes the broadest set of features and functions (50+) in the industry including design, corporate-departmental and subscription-based news, collaboration and project sites, social media likes and sharing, personalized and global menus, automatic translation to 40+ languages and many more. 

• Extensibility enabling enterprise deployments with many integration points (REST endpoints, custom modules, custom designs, integration of third-party tools and much more).  

• An enterprise platform that is designed to be easy to implement and manage even in large distributed global implementations in both on-premises and Office 365 environments.  

• Proven customer base in large deployments – including customers with hundreds of thousands of employees, down to 50 employees.

“We’re excited about the addition of Wizdom to our partner network and are very much looking forward to working closely with the Wizdom team to deliver innovative solutions for our clients” stated Sharing Minds’ CTO and Company Director Adam Clark.  

At Wizdom the feeling is mutual and confirmed by CEO, John Wainer, “We are thrilled to be working together with an expert Microsoft Gold Partner house like Sharing Minds, which allows Wizdom to extend the reach and offering of our award-winning and powerful digital workplace solution even further in the Asia Pacific region”.

For more information about the partnership or the Wizdom solution, please contact us at info@sharingminds.com.au or call 1300 611 359. 

EVENT WRAP-UP: Sharing Minds and LiveTiles in Melbourne!

L to R: Ben Creamer, Kevin Berry, Richard Harding and Jason Alessi.

Sharing Minds has started 2019 off with the second run through of our hugely popular LiveTiles Customer Success Story Event on 21st February 2019 in Melbourne. Our client, Toowoomba Catholic Schools (TCS) showcased their new intranet solution that Sharing Minds developed, to a variety of customers keen to learn some of the tricks of the trade.

As with the Brisbane version of the event we ran last year, Ben Creamer MC’d the two presentations. The first was an interview-style discussion with TCS’ Director of Information Services, Kevin Berry, about their technology journey and decision to pursue a LiveTiles solution. Kevin concluded the session by demonstrating to the audience the sites which have been created during the project.

The second presentation led by the LiveTiles team, Richard Harding and Jason Alessi, provided the audience with an overview and demonstration of the LiveTiles platform and capability. Particularly, how the LiveTiles product suite can radically transform your digital workplace using Intelligence, Insights, Intelligent Directories and also Bots. The event concluded with a discussion of the LiveTiles Roadmap of what’s to come and some hearty questions from the audience.

If you have any questions about how Sharing Minds Design Services can work for you, or would like to request a copy of the slides, please contact sales@sharingminds.com.au and one of our friendly team will be more than happy to help you out.