Comic by Luke Martin
Microsoft SharePoint is a fantastic tool that does numerous things well. It allows companies to manage complex workflows, create Intranet and web portals, and manage sales and marketing materials across large companies. Unfortunately, without the right mobile app, you risk losing the impact and sizzle of your mobile presentations and mobile content. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint has two major limitations when it comes to mobile enterprise enablement:
1) SharePoint does not allow for easy video content management and delivery to the vast array of mobile devices on the market.
2) SharePoint mobile capabilities are limited to delivering rudimentary access to files stored within the system.
Enterprise mobile content from SharePoint can be made much sexier. Let’s explore some of the easier fixes to solve the surface issues.
Video Content: SharePoint’s Achilles Heel
SharePoint has limited capabilities available for video storage, driving most large companies to store video content in separate systems, such as YouTube, Brightcove, or a shared network drive. This makes the management and organization of content complex, fragmented, and negatively impacts the end user experience. The productivity of sales reps and other members of the mobile workforce are cannibalized as they struggle with moving between different content source systems. This negates other outlying benefits of including user adoption, user collaboration, and admin control of content.
Access vs. Engagement
Mobile content access is undoubtedly a critical part of mobility, however, today’s end user is savvier and more critical than ever. Enterprise solution providers often don’t reach beyond simply meeting an objective. For example, the objective of air travel from point A to point B can be met by simply boarding a plane, but, without wider aisles, reclining seats or in-cabin movies the overall experience is poor.
In the world of elegant and modern mobile devices, enterprise end users expect a more engaging user experience. They want a sleek design and the ability to discover content easily. The interface needs to look and feel as easy as the consumer mobile apps they use on a regular basis, such as Netflix, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
If a SharePoint mobile user is moving between pieces of content in front of a customer on their iPad or tablet in a utilitarian file system interface, it can be frustrating to the user and boring to the customer(s). It’s time to go beyond putting a mobile mask on traditional file management solutions.
Many companies have improved upon the mobile access to SharePoint files, such as SharePlus, Colligo, Filamente or collaborations such as Yammer and Averail.
However, if you have ever been an executive, salesperson, etc. presenting to a room full of people and you have to find a presentation or move between presentations, being able to do this gracefully and confidently is an impressive feat. Unfortunately, all too often, it is a painful process to watch as people drill into and out of folders looking for the right document, video, presentation, etc.
Tailor as You Talk™
Most people overcome the risk of stop-and-go business presentations by spending hours preparing for every foreseeable route of discussion. In the world of thumb drives and emailed presentations, this was the only option. This is not the case anymore.
The mobile workforce is increasingly armed with a revolutionary delivery method: iPads and tablets. Presenters, such as sales reps, executives and corporate trainers want the ability to “tailor as they talk” allowing them to change what they present, in real-time, with the ability to move between all types of content (graphs, images, documents, and videos) in a non-linear fashion. Companies need to rethink their content, marketing, communication and technology strategies to achieve this new “tailor as they talk” paradigm.
CMS: Content in Many Systems
There is a running joke in the enterprise software industry: “CMS” does not stand for “Content Management System,” it stands for “Content in Many Systems”. Unfortunately, this is all too often the case. Content systems can include multiple SharePoint systems, a CRM, Brightcove, network drives, etc. This complicates the mobile enablement of content even further because users often need to spend hours finding, organizing, and assembling content from various systems before a meeting or presentation.
One of Mediafly’s Fortune 100 customers recently studied the effect of this situation and discovered that it takes each of their reps 4-5 hours per week, on average, to find sales and marketing materials from various internal systems and assemble them for their sales presentations. Most of these presentations don’t need to be customized to this degree. They could be delivered through an effective mobile app, given all the content from the various systems was easily discoverable and presentable from a single platform – i.e. a mobile app.
Mediafly makes SharePoint Elegant, Engaging, and Downright Sexy!
What we have done at Mediafly is create a two-part platform that comes together to form a complete enterprise mobility solution.
Mediafly’s enterprise cloud system, Airship, is like a universal adapter – plugging into various enterprise IT systems. Airship federates the content from these various systems and provides critical content transformation so that the content is ready to be accessed across a myriad of mobile platforms.
Mediafly’s Airship also allows admin users within the company to manage access permissions and dictate the user interface so that content can be located easily. More often than not, how content is organized within a file management solution is disparate from how mobile users will want to discover and interact with the content.
The second half of the Mediafly solution is a set of native applications which can be installed on all the major platforms – iPad, iPhone, Android, Win 8, Desktops, Roku – and can be designed, styled, and customized quickly and cost-effectively to a company’s particular needs.
These native apps are built on the Mediafly core platform so they all share best practice features, functionality and a sleek user experience. Content is easily discoverable, the applications are elegant, and the users can make “tailor as you talk” presentations that are engaging enough to impress a diverse room of customers, prospects, and observers.
Enterprise end users get what they want: A mobile app that they love to use and that delivers results, e.g. sales. CIOs and corporate IT managers get what they want as well: An extension to the IT systems they have already invested in, which maintains the high degree of security and permissions that have been setup.
The Future of Presentations: Interactivity
The enhancements we’ve explored in this article do not mark the pinnacle of the evolution of mobile presentations. The future of presentations is not just better discovery and utilization of digital content. The future is in dynamic, interactive content.
Progressive companies must compliment their library of static content with new, interactive ways of engaging their audience. Their enterprise mobile users need the ability to present content, information, data, and media in a way that feels like a conversation. They need a mobile solution that allows content to flow and accommodate a conversation that can go in a multitude of directions and still feel natural. The information needs to dynamically incorporate graphs, charts and visuals that are updated in real-time from back-end systems such as CMS, ERP, or TPM.
Mediafly has delivered this progressive capability for thousands of Fortune 1000 enterprise users around the world through our Interactive technology.
Mediafly’s customers are talking with their customers, prospects, employees and partners in an entirely new way – a way that leverages the latest technical innovations of iPads and tablets, stimulating a more engaging experience for everyone involved.
How can we help you make SharePoint more engaging on mobile or transform your presentations into Interactive experiences? Contact us today at info@mediafly.com
Resources:
Juan Carlos Perez, “How to Make SharePoint 2013 More Mobile,” CIO.com
http://www.cio.com/article/735208/How_to_Make_SharePoint_2013_More_Mobile?page=3&taxonomyId=3000
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