How To Achieve Better Collaboration With Office 365

January 9, 2019

A Central Hub Is the Key to Collaboration with Office 365

It’s no secret. Office 365 is the industry standard for productivity software, handling everything from email and calendaring to content creation, storage and document management.

The challenge, of course, is organizing and tracking all of these documents and conversations as they swirl around various Office 365 tools, such as SharePoint, Outlook Teams, Yammer and more. And that’s not to mention all the non-Microsoft apps employees also use for messaging, document creation, file sharing, etc.

Luckily, there’s a solution that can bring order to chaos. Your company can work much better together by using an open collaboration hub that unites Office 365, along with tools from other vendors, in one connected digital workplace.

Learn how you can simplify work and increase employee productivity by up to 15 percent. Read the whitepaper.

Jive and Office 365 have complementary capabilities. Microsoft Office provides a patchwork of function-specific apps, with lots of feature gaps and overlaps and inconsistent user experiences. All of this results in the siloing of content, conversations, search and analytics. To summarize: it’s really complicated.

Information, activities, people and projects end up being splintered across dozens or even hundreds of channels, threads and locations. Employees spend more of their time navigating a jumble of tools, tracking down information and connecting the dots than actually working. Vital knowledge is often trapped and invisible. Ideas, insights, discoveries and decisions are quickly lost and forgotten–especially when people leave the company or change roles.

Jive, on the other hand, is an integrated, open and vendor-agnostic hub. When Office 365 and other apps are connected to Jive, they become part of a seamless communication and collaboration environment. Pieces of content, conversations and information are no longer isolated in separate systems; they’re pulled into Jive and organized in central collaborative spaces where everyone can see, share and act on them.

Jive weaves Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications into a cohesive collaboration fabric.

Out-of-the-box Office 365 Integrations

Integrating your Microsoft suite of tools with Jive is straightforward, thanks to pre-built integrations for O365, SharePoint, Skype for Business and other apps. You can enhance your existing infrastructure without replacing it. By integrating your systems with Jive, you can simplify and improve a wide variety of essential functions, from search to personalization and analytics.

Search

Jive’s integration with Office 365 allows employees to search across all Office 365 tools (as well as tools from other vendors) at once. Instead of searching through Yammer, Sharepoint, OneNote and others individually, a Jive Interactive Intranet allows users to find content, conversations and people across all tools with a single click.

Personalization

Jive uses machine intelligence and data on user preferences and behavior to provide highly personalized experiences. It delivers news feeds, activity streams, notifications and recommendations tailored to the needs of individual users, cutting out the noise and helping employees focus on the things that matter most to them.

Analytics

Office 365 analytics are limited to Microsoft’s tools, with no aggregate view of users and activities across the company. By contrast, when used as a hub to connect Microsoft and non-Microsoft systems, Jive can provide global, enterprise-wide analytics enabling companies to track, measure and optimize processes at an unprecedented scale.

User Experience

Jive is simple and intuitive, and it makes connected systems like Microsoft easier to use, too – by bringing content and activity into a single, seamless environment where everything is easy to find, share and collaborate on. Jive’s simple and engaging user experience results in much higher user adoption, helping companies get more ROI from their IT investments.

Non-Microsoft Integrations

Jive is vendor agnostic, providing integrations with all sorts of tools including not only O365, but also Google Drive, Groups and Docs, Chatter, WebEx and Jabber and more.

Intranet Capabilities, Too

Jive is a turnkey intranet platform, filling a critical need that O365 doesn’t address. With its next-gen interactive capabilities, it goes well beyond traditional static intranets, providing a highly engaging channel for company and departmental news, employee support, onboarding, two-way conversation and knowledge-sharing across the company.

Jive and Office 365: More Powerful Together

The proof is in the pudding as they say. When combined with Office 365, Jive delivers needle-moving results. For example: Jive reduces the time it takes to find knowledge, expertise and best practices by 34%. It cuts onboarding time by 38%. And it improves overall employee productivity 15%. These are independently verified results from hundreds of Jive customers.