On March 27^th, we hosted senior leaders from regulatory bodies and associations, spanning a variety of industries, for a round-table event to discuss the common issues and potential solutions these regulatory agencies & associations are currently facing. Challenges, opportunities, observations, and current trends were brought up to encourage idea exchange and discussion among the attendees.

The group setting facilitated peer-to-peer discussion where the senior leaders re-analyzed how their data and member information was being stored and took a closer look at how efficient their current business processes are. Navantis provided attendees with a pressure-free environment allowing for the free flow of information. The event was the perfect opportunity for senior leaders to learn more about how other regulatory bodies and associations are overcoming challenges similar to their own, and how Navantis’ Peopleworks helps others make their business more efficient.

Although every regulatory body and association represented at the event was unique, and had its own set of concerns and requirements for a member management solution, we were able to identify many common issues. Here are just a few:

• Multiple systems and databases being used to record, and store information making it difficult to access, search, and organize data.
• Inefficient use of time and resources manually implementing processes like initial registrations and renewals.
• Lack of employee training and support after implementation.
• Little integration between the company website, databases, programs, and other departments.
• The security of information is at risk as there is currently no access limitations.

If you are facing these types of issues you should consider reaching out to us for a consultation, we’d love to hear from you!

Laura Panteluk, the Executive Director and Registrar of the College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Manitoba (CRPNM), flew in to speak at the event. She provided attendees with invaluable insight into the entire process, as the CRPNM faced many of the same challenges and recently implemented Navantis’ member management solution, Peopleworks. Laura discussed her needs, decision making process, how her team managed the risk, and experience working with Navantis. What many were interested in however, was how smoothly the implementation process was and how Peopleworks is working for the CRPNM now.

About Peopleworks

A constituent relationship management solution for regulatory bodies and associations can offer solutions to all of these issues and provide functionality which you may have not considered yet. Peopleworks is built on the powerful and robust Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. It provides everything your organization needs to eliminate repetitive work tasks and frees your staff resources to focus on other objectives such as driving membership growth, stakeholder management and enhancing services.

Navantis and our award-winning Peopleworks product has helped hundreds of membership organizations and regulatory bodies realize value. From the very small to the very large, we have a solution that enables you to harness your vast repositories of data and turn that into valuable business information and insight that you can leverage to serve the needs of your constituents.

The event was certainly a success and provided all attendees with valuable information to take away. We hope to organize future events similar to this, focusing more closely on the issues you are facing, and how Peopleworks will work for you. Stay tuned for updates on future event details!

Microsoft has recently released a bulletin and fix for what they have deemed a critical vulnerability affecting the Office suite of products (which includes SharePoint and its companion Office Web Apps). The vulnerability affects both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 where Word Automation Services have been provisioned (or may be provisioned in the future), and all instances of Office Web Apps (2010 and 2013).

If exploited, these vulnerabilities could lead to remote code execution, which provides attackers with the ability to execute commands on a targeted machine from another. The flaw requires that a user opens or previews specially made rich-text formatted (RTF) data with an affected version of Microsoft Office Software. This RTF could be sent via email or could be hosted on a compromised website.

Users who have fewer user rights will be less impacted than those users who have full administrative rights. If successful, an attacker can take over an entire system – creating new accounts and viewing or altering data – therefore it is extremely important to apply the fix as soon as possible.

As a valued customer of Navantis, we would like to take this opportunity not only to alert you of this vulnerability, but also to offer assistance in applying the fix. Patching SharePoint can be a daunting task even for seasoned SharePoint administrators; having an experienced partner like Navantis at your side is a good strategy for minimizing your SharePoint farm’s downtime during this and any other update. You may also want to take this opportunity to get caught up on service packs or cumulative updates, as the SharePoint platform has no doubt received several updates since we last worked with you.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to schedule a time when Navantis can assess your exposure to this vulnerability and help apply the fix to your SharePoint environment(s).

It took innovative thinking to successfully negotiate that contract for new equipment; the documents are signed and sealed and the equipment installed. Job well done. But it isn’t over yet. Because although today all the salient facts are at your fingertips, three years from now this contract will not be top of mind. You might remember the renewal date is coming up, but wasn’t there also a clause in there about getting an early upgrade? If only you could find the file.

And that’s just one contract. What about all the others with various suppliers? What are their obligations; what are yours?

Every business has contracts of some description. An estimated 80% of business-to-business transactions are underpinned by legally binding contracts and agreements. Whether those contracts are big or small, managers need to keep track of each one; their lifecycles, renewal dates, provisions, special clauses, and the myriad of details that are so easy to forget once the papers are signed, sealed and filed away.

If not proactively managed, contracts can put your business at risk for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrealized benefits or non-compliance penalties. Organizations are increasingly looking to contract management as a way to keep bottom line costs down and increase net revenues from business-to-business transactions. A comprehensive contract management system provides control over manual contracting processes and provides an alert system for finance, legal, procurement, sales and other stakeholders who must keep track of milestones, commitments and obligations.

Dolphin Contract Manager, a contract lifecycle management solution, helps you streamline your contract management needs, capture information previously relegated to dusty files and give managers the information they need with the push of a button, ensuring their organizations aren’t losing money, business or their reputation due to sloppy contract management.

The solution improves visibility into each stage of a contract’s lifecycle. Through the use of advanced reporting and analytics, organizations are able to automate important processes involved in contract creation, management and archiving. Built on Microsoft SharePoint, Dolphin Contract Manager easily integrates with your current technology investments and offers a familiar look and feel with the flexibility to grow with your business.

Valuable information is right at your fingertips. To learn more about how Navantis’ Dolphin Contract Manager can help contact sales@navantis.com today!

Performing health checks on a regular basis is an important part of your SharePoint implementation’s lifecycle.

It’s a sad but well-known fact of IT life: many organizations feel they can’t afford or justify keeping a full-time dedicated SharePoint administrator on staff. So either the job gets added to some unfortunate soul’s already full roster of duties, or worse, nobody handles on-premises SharePoint administration duties at all – leaving the platform to fend for itself. SharePoint involves a lot of moving parts. Even a perfectly-built farm can degrade over time if left unmaintained – never mind a farm that was built quickly with little planning, or even (gasp!) using the Farm Configuration Wizard. Personally, I’ve never met a farm that couldn’t use at least some TLC (Tuning and Log Checking), whether it be arriving at a quick one-day “Top Ten” issues list or a multi-day effort complete with performance, capacity and response time monitoring.

Some of the bad things that can happen over time:
• SQL database transaction logs grow to excessive sizes
• User profile synchronization service stops syncing
• Search crawls take forever and/or never seem to complete
• Other SharePoint or Windows services spontaneously stop or become unresponsive
• Central Admin Health Analyzer shows lots of warnings or errors. And contrary to popular opinion, these are not just “to be expected” – in most cases they can be cleared up – restoring your Health Analyzer to a useful state!

A health check for SharePoint involves gathering and analyzing metrics from several different sources: disk, memory, network, event logs, ULS logs, SQL server, Central Admin, and Windows performance counters. In addition, if your users anecdotally report that “SharePoint is slow”, this warrants its own investigation and analysis, both from the perspective of the user and as viewed from the infrastructure itself. SharePoint as a platform can have its share of adoption challenges; a farm that’s perceived as “slow” will face even more of an uphill battle. For their part, as a minimum organizations should have a plan for updating SharePoint, including identifying the update frequency and the types of updates (service packs vs. cumulative updates vs. security fixes). But health checking involves much more than determining if a farm is up to date. A proper and thorough health check looks at all the components and technologies that make up a SharePoint farm, and compares them either against community-accepted best practices, or the standards and business requirements of the organization itself.

Whether performed internally, or by an experienced partner like Navantis, all SharePoint deployments, no matter how carefully built, require monitoring, maintenance and yes, the occasional health check. As you can probably imagine, in our years of architecting, building and developing for SharePoint, we’ve performed a fair number of these health checks. And whether on a one-off basis or as part of an ongoing Managed Services support agreement, Navantis is an excellent partner for helping you reduce or eliminate your SharePoint’s “sick days”.

At Navantis we see hundreds of SharePoint environments. Some we build, some we rescue and a lot of which we manage.

Our clients run their business on SharePoint. It’s their communications portal, their frontend interface to applications, their internal or external web content, their record repository, etc. SharePoint is a powerful part of a client’s technology investment.

Many of our clients have their SharePoint hosted by a third party or have it in someone’s datacenter. That environment typically has some level of proactive monitoring.

Unfortunately that level is low. Low with respect to monitoring what really matters!

Traditional hosted services watch the operating system and some of the running services 24×7, and if they fail – in essence solve the issue by a reboot.

They do not manage or monitor what matters to you – what matters is the Application, that being SharePoint.

The reason is simple; these companies are great at hardware and operating systems – not applications. Your applications are what matter. To monitor, manage and support SharePoint you need a strong SharePoint partner with application and development experience.

Navantis is a leader in the SharePoint application space; why trust your environment to a company who simply hosts physical hardware?

SharePoint monitoring run by SharePoint people! SharePoint managed by SharePoint people.

Welcome to Advantage by Navantis.  Advantage is our managed support and services offering that gives you SharePoint driven expertise to drive 24×7 reliability to your environment.

ADVANTAGE PROVIDES

• Proactive Monitoring of your SharePoint farm 24×7:
  • Someone is watching your environment around the clock
•  Alerts, escalation and remediationfor issues that arise:
  • If something goes wrong we triage it in real time
  • We work with you to map our escalation and resolution process
• Insight into your farm with real data – monthly reports on:
  • Capacity planning
  • Users Stats
  • Basic compliance reporting
  • Security reporting
  • Custom reporting available
• Extension of your own SharePoint support, development and technical bench:
  • An allocation of support hours are made available to you
  • Hours can be used for any support or enhancement services you wish
  • Can be leveraged for planning and advisory requests
  • Our entire support team is now available to you
•  Simplified Procurement Process:
  • No need to go through your regular procurement process to gain support or enhancements
  • Your time to get the support you need is dramatically reduced
  • You can pick up the phone and access our team right away
• Navantis Service Managers:
  • Based on your plan you are assigned a Service Manager
  • You have a central point of contact
  • We provide monthly updates directly to you

Trust your SharePoint environment to Navantis. Talk to us today about how Advantage fits your company. All you have to lose is a headache.

To learn more about our Manages Services Offering, visit us on the web: http://www.navantis.com/Managed_Services.cshtml

For further information and to get started contact:
Andy Papadopoulos
andyp@navantis.com
(416) 477-5711

The post Navantis Introduces 24×7 SharePoint Managed Services powered by SharePoint Experts appeared first on Navantis Blog.

In a SharePoint environment, on average, a quarter of the cost is associated with facilities, another 40% is allocated to labor, and the ROI is still questionable for many organizations. It should also be considered that experienced SharePoint resources are expensive and difficult to find, and existing “jack-of-all-trades” resources seldom understand the complexities and opportunities to realize the business value of the platform. Many organizations unfortunately don’t consider what it truly takes to run, manage and develop platforms like SharePoint and CRM. In fact some consider them no different than Exchange or Active Directory, however these are very different platforms indeed; especially if used to their full potential.

So why do so many organizations struggle to realize the full benefit of these platforms?

If you look at the governance and best practice guide for SharePoint (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wael/archive/2010/12/16/sharepoint-governance-individual-roles-and-responsibilities.aspx) you will notice no less than 17 unique roles tied to SharePoint governance! Granted not every one of these equates to a full time employee; but each functional role is absolutely critical to ensure your solution doesn’t become another piece of irrelevant shelf-ware with your business users. The reality is very few of the largest organizations in Canada have the necessary in-house expertise to provide the necessary care and support for these solutions to achieve business results. For others, the cost is simply too much to bear and those organizations will settle for leveraging only a handful of the out-of-the-box capabilities. Others may perhaps look to hire contractors to perform sporadic tasks while outsourcing the hosting of infrastructure to another provider.

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that these approaches flat out don’t work, but I have no qualms about saying that there is a better way.

Consider the roles I have pointed to in the SharePoint governance guide, while your organization may not have them all, we at Navantis do. As one of the few partners in the country with a range of Microsoft competencies we have expertise across the Microsoft stack, a strong offshore delivery center, and have been able to put it all together with our Managed Service solution for SharePoint.

While every organization will need all these roles to play a part, you very likely need a small fraction of a full time employee across those disciplines. Here is how we help our clients realize the full potential of SharePoint and CRM:

1. Our Consultants and Business Analysts can help you understand your business goals, define the problem and opportunity statements, create a vision and develop a strategic multi-year roadmap for the solution.
2. Next, our Application and Infrastructure Architects can take that strategy and turn it into a solution that is scalable, aligned to best practices and will ultimately address your business goals.
3. Our Deployment Specialists will then help implement, not only the platform but underlying infrastructure; on-premise, in Office 365, or in the cloud.
4. Our Developers and Quality Assurance folks then step in and build business applications that actually solve your business problems and provide a real ROI.
5. Finally, the solution is transitioned to our Managed Services Group that assumes the responsibility for the long term care and evolution of the overall solution across each of those disciplines.

During the sustainment phase we focus on maintenance, enhancement and evolution of the solution; from infrastructure through to the application layer. What that means is when we put it all together our Managed Services clients do not have to worry about designing, developing, deploying or operating their solution.

If something needs fixing, chances are our monitoring picked it up and we fixed it before you or your users ever knew about it. If you suddenly have a business unit with a new requirement let us know and we will let you know when your solution is ready and in UAT for testing. If you acquire a business and need your solution to scale, no problem, let us know and we will make sure it gets done.

Thanks to our competencies, history of software development, strong infrastructure team, our cloud and data center services and our global delivery center of excellence we have been able to put it all together in a comprehensive solution that costs a fraction of what it would to run it all in-house or through tactical short term engagements.

Best part yet, it’s a fixed and predictable annual cost.

If you struggle with seeing the value of these solutions I encourage you to talk to us or some of our existing clients who we’ve had had the pleasure of serving for a number of years.

To learn more about our Managed Services Offering, visit us on the web: http://www.navantis.com/Managed_Services.cshtml

For more information contact:
Adis Tucakovic
adist@navantis.com
(416) 342-9642

The post Got SharePoint? Need Help? appeared first on Navantis Blog.

There is a widely-held opinion that SharePoint’s 2013 Records Management out-of-box functionality is not robust enough to manage records at an enterprise level. This blog explodes that myth and exposes the top challenges that can make or break your SharePoint 2013 project.

When people hear about some of the Enterprise Records Management (ERM) projects we are tackling with SharePoint 2013 their first reaction is “SharePoint? Really?” Okay, I get it. But this is not the SharePoint of a few generations ago. Microsoft has invested millions in product R&D, introducing features and security enhancements to ensure SharePoint 2013 really has the chops to go the distance with ERM. And in the past year since its release, SharePoint 2013 has proven itself over and over again to be up to some of the toughest challenges that the enterprise wants to throw at it.

While ERM projects aren’t easy, they do have the potential to return enormous benefit to the organization. This is especially relevant when deciding to use SharePoint as your ERM platform. Since most organizations have already invested in SharePoint in some capacity, it only makes business sense to optimize it to manage records as well.

So how can you ensure you are setting up your SharePoint 2013 ERM project to be successful? Here are some tips that will help guide you:

Automate, Automate, Automate

“If you build it they will come.” ERM is not a “Field of Dreams” but it can be. And similar to the theme of that famous Kevin Costner movie, having people buy-in, use and adopt the new system is pivotal to success. Getting employees to declare records is the key and this usually means shifting employee behaviors. But we all know it is tough to get people to change.  So why make them? One way to help increase project success is to use automation. In some cases employees will not even realize they are conducting Records Management as they go about their day-to-day knowledge worker duties.  This can be accomplished through automated content type records declaration, architecture tweaks and tricks, location based metadata, revised business processes and simplified user friendly education.

Consolidate and Streamline

During ERM implementation planning, management and employees are often overwhelmed by the vast amount of rules, policies and procedures that exist in their organization.  In many cases, large enterprises can have well over 300 retention periods spread across various business units. One critical mistake ERM projects make is trying to recreate all of these rules as they are today instead of using the opportunity to consolidate and streamline. With some analysis and negotiation between groups this inventory can be much more easily managed by reducing and grouping like assets into similar content types and lifecycle rules.

Start at the Source

For many of our clients, SharePoint is already being used and document management has been adopted by their employees. If this is the case, then capitalize on it and begin records management at the start of content creation. Making the process as seamless as possible will remove the burden of record declaration from the employee by creating an automated capture based on content types that have information management rules incorporated. This reduces the amount of content that becomes “orphaned” and provides a superior means of retrieving the content again.

When IT departments, and employees themselves, take the time and effort to cultivate their SharePoint environments by establishing metadata when they upload, create and store content within their SharePoint repositories, this metadata triggers Records Management declarations that are passed along as the content moves through its lifecycle. Content can now be managed in place, preserving its integrity.

Life Cycle Best Practice Tips

Because SharePoint manages information throughout the entire life cycle – some tenets to bear in mind include:

• It is easier to manage content in place rather than move it out of the current repositories;
• SharePoint allows content types and taxonomy to do the heavy lifting at the inception stage;
• SharePoint does not force users to perform additional work to declare a record if content types are created to automatically save as a record;
• K.I.S.S. principle rules.

Third Party Tools

Third party tools designed to enhance SharePoint introduce new options, broadening capabilities and functionality in your SharePoint ERM environment. These tools can add even more robustness, ensuring that SharePoint is meeting your enterprise grade. Tools such as Collabware, a third-party records management add-in to SharePoint and Navantis’ newly acquired, contract lifecycle management tool, Dolphin greatly enhances the ability to create, surface, dispose and archive unstructured content, with less enterprise risk.

Fear, Communication and a Little Bit of Expert Guidance

“Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.” King Whitney Jr.

The most obvious impact of any corporate project will be to end users. The introduction of complex ERM systems is often intimidating and overwhelming to employees.  If employees do not see the need or do not understand the reasons for implementing records management they will not participate as expected and required.

A well thought out plan of action using SharePoint as a platform with the addition of the right third-party add-ons and the professional services of experts who have done it all before, can produce a solution that enables an organization to adhere to its regulatory, legal and business records management needs without overburdening employees and records administrators. Being clear about what you want to achieve and following some of the simple guidelines we have introduced here can go a long way to ERM project success.

The post Myth Busters: Avoiding Failure with Enterprise Records Management and SharePoint 2013 appeared first on Navantis Blog.

You have heard the saying ‘we’re only human’?  It’s a phrase we use to remind ourselves that we are prone to making mistakes.  In your business, your team members do not intentionally enter incorrect data or lose information but it does happens.  That is why it is so important to try to capture data once and put it into ‘action’ immediately.  Getting it right the first time goes a long way toward ensuring data integrity and accurate information on which to make decisions.

Many of our customers have staff in the field – maybe a property manager on site, an engineer inspecting a piece of equipment or an insurance adjuster investigating a claim.  Let’s think about what they do on a daily basis. They fill in forms, make notes, or take pictures. Typically much of this information is critical to a business process. The question then becomes how does an organization make that information actionable?  Forms get dropped off in the office and are manually moved through a process to data entry where eventually an action will occur based on that data.  Photos get placed in file shares and hopefully attached to the item they relate to.  In many cases forms get destroyed or misfiled, photos get lost, and notes are forgotten.  They are simple mistakes but the consequences to the business can be significant.

The move to mobile computing gives us an opportunity to eliminate many of these costly errors.  Everyone carries a phone and an increasing number of our team members carry tablet devices.  They have high quality cameras, some have a stylus and they can be ruggedized for extreme conditions.  In our case we have been working with clients to implement a new digital pen that is capable of recognizing data entered onto a paper form. This solution works really well for employees who are in the field and comfortable filling in paper-based forms. The switch to a digital pen doesn’t feel like a switch at all.

These are all means of capturing critical information in the field thus eliminating one opportunity for human error.  They key it to create an automated process that can pick up that data when it is entered and turn it into an action so we further decrease the opportunity that information can get lost, damaged or forgotten.  Using tools from the Microsoft platform such as CRM, Lync and SharePoint you can act on the data and create a case or a work ticket, attach it to a customer file, send for review or even use the camera to  show a team of experts back in the office what the ‘on site’ situation is in real time.

It is important to trust our team members but we also have to recognize that people occasionally make mistakes.  Eliminating opportunities where errors typically occur reduces burden on the employees while also creating efficiencies in the business.  And we all feel good about that.

The post Maxing out Field Mobility – Capture Data Where it Happens appeared first on Navantis Blog.