Building A Modern SharePoint Intranet with the best of Microsoft Technologies Sareen Babu May 29, 2020

Building A Modern SharePoint Intranet with the best of Microsoft Technologies

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For the last two decades, SharePoint has been a common platform for most intranets used in large, medium and small enterprises. Since its launch in 2001, SharePoint has undergone significant transformations and upgrades and so did the intranets based on it.

In our decade-long strong partnership with Microsoft, we’ve witnessed how the company’s strong commitment to innovation has made SharePoint a leader in the digital workplace technology market.

In the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing change in workplace trends, emergence of new digital technologies and a paradigm shift in how work gets done within an organization.

A modern workplace is evolving at a breakneck speed due to distributed teams, new business models and sophisticated security challenges. Organizations today realize that they will lose their competitive edge in a few years if they don’t find new ways to connect, collaborate, communicate and access information.

This has paved the way for modern SharePoint intranets infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Need To Adopt AI In SharePoint Intranets Is Growing

AI is solving several critical challenges faced by businesses and being embedded in a plethora of enterprise applications. And the digital workplace is no exception. Enterprise leaders are looking to modernize their intranets with AI and improve workforce digital dexterity.

AI is  facilitating the New Work Nucleus by solving some key challenges in the traditional digital workplace and intranets such as:

  1. Poor information discoverability
  2. Generic content
  3. Difficult in achieving personalization
  4. No knowledge mining
  5. Low employee engagement
  6. Difficulty in finding Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Right from basic content management, collaboration, social networking, information accessibility to employee communications, AI has the potential to transform every aspect of the digital workplace.

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An Autonomous SharePoint Intranet Powered By Microsoft AI

Autonomous SharePoint

Considering the new demands of the modern workplace, and the opportunity presented by AI to meet them, we’ve launched Mesh 3.0 – The World’s First Autonomous SharePoint intranet built with the best of Microsoft AI technologies.

Mesh 3.0 is the brainchild of our 13+ years experience in deploying digital workplace and Microsoft technologies for many large and medium enterprises.

Mesh 3.0 brings Microsoft’s cutting edge AI technologies into a SharePoint intranet and stands by the motto of ‘the right content at the right time to the right person’.

AutonomousDigital Workplace

1. Tap Organizational Knowledge With Flexible Integrations Provided By Microsoft

Organizations generate knowledge and data from different applications and databases. Tapping the potential of this knowledge and creating a unified knowledge base for the SharePoint intranet is critical for its success.

  • Capture Microsoft 365 Knowledge With Graph API

 – MS technologies used: Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps

In addition to the MS ecosystem, organizations are flooded with fragmented with several third-party apps and content repositories (Document Management Systems, Drives etc.)

Mesh 3.0 leverages Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps to connect and integrate data from your business-critical cloud and on-premise apps. Power Automate helps in deriving data from legacy back-end systems which lack modern APIs.

2. Deliver Personalization with Microsoft AI, ML, and NLP services

Once a unified knowledge base is created, we need to ensure the right content reaches the right person at the right time. This is where we bring the best of Microsoft Cognitive, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) services together to build powerful content and people personalizers, and unlock the value of unstructured data.

MS Technology

Used To

Azure Cognitive Services

  • Identify and analyze content within images, videos and digital inks
  • Integrate speech processing
  • Sentiment analysis of textual content
  • Enable a multilingual intranet with language translation capabilities
  • Detect potentially unwanted content
  • Deliver personalized user experiences

Azure Machine Learning

  • Harness humongous amounts of data and provide personalized content and people recommendations
  • Improve search relevance

LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service)

  • Understand and process natural language phrases
  • Learn search intent 

3. Intelligent Enterprise Search With Azure Cognitive Search

–  Microsoft technology used: Azure Cognitive Search

Cognitive enterprise search is one of the most significant features of  Mesh 3.0. It leverages Azure Cognitive Search services to access information from all your organizational knowledge bases and enterprise apps like Office 365, ServiceNow, Kronos, Salesforce, etc., by having a one stop search within their SharePoint intranet, employees can significantly reduce the time to find information.

The solution comes with a host of capabilities like:

  • Understands users’ search intent and natural language phrases
  • Smart search suggestions and auto-fill based on the user’s past activities and profile
  • Intelligent ranking algorithms to showcase personalized results based on relevance.

4. Digital Assistants With Power Virtual Agents & Azure Bot Service

–  Microsoft technologies used: Azure Bot Service, Bot Framework & Power Virtual Agents

Chatbot is a key feature of a modern SharePoint intranet. It helps drive intranet adoption by enabling seamless access to intranet content anytime and anywhere. Not only does it provide information access but also helps employees in executing activities like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests, etc. 

Mesh 3.0 is equipped with a companion intranet chatbot – MeshBot. This award-winning bot is built with Acuvate’s low-code chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which is powered by Azure Bot Service and Bot Framework. In addition to MeshBot and BotCore, we also use Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents to provide low-code conversational AI experiences in the intranet.

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Get Started

In the past few years, Microsoft has made significant advancements and innovations in its AI and cloud offerings. These solutions provide an exciting opportunity to bring AI into the digital workplace and modernize SharePoint intranets. Mesh 3.0 is a shining example of this.

If you’d like to learn more about Mesh 3.0 and its capabilities, please feel free to request a demo and get in touch with one of our Microsoft and digital workplace consultants.