THE TASK
There are so many important things happening in successful companies, but how are employees supposed to stay informed about it all?
This is a major challenge for many organizations, and one of our clients has turned to us for help with handling their weekly newsletter. We were thus faced with the complex task of publishing news, and conveying it to a large number of employees. Drawing on the creativity of our SharePoint Team, we devised an efficient process that resulted in a high-quality, professional publication - but also in a flawless, error-free delivery. Our sophisticated solution includes the following features: the publication of articles on a SharePoint intranet website, their automatic distribution over email, and an approval process for authorized personnel. Read the next paragraph for more details.
THE PROCESS
We've created a process that transforms our client's news into a rich multimedia publication that is conveniently accessible on a dedicated SharePoint site. All the client has to do is send us their articles in the form of a Word document - and optionally include other materials such as graphics, photos, or presentations - and we take care of everything else. After our behind-the-scenes work is done, each employee will receive an email with a newsletter that contains a set of links to the published articles. The links will be accompanied by brief introductory snippets to give users an idea of what the articles are about.
The employees reading these articles won't be misinformed. Mistakes can slip into written texts, but our publication procedure was deliberately set up to avoid them. Articles are never published, or newsletters sent out until they are approved by the appropriate personnel. The approval process seeks to ensure that the provided content is accurate - with the positive consequence that employees will consider the articles trustworthy and credible.
Once the newsletter is approved to be sent out, can we be sure it'll reach the right people? For medium to large-sized companies, the answer is not so straightforward - their list of employees frequently changes, perhaps even on a weekly basis. Fortunately, our system makes this a non-issue; we always update our email distribution lists to reflect departures and new arrivals. (To do this, we use the company's global directory.) This ensures that new employees don't get left out of the information loop, and that internal information isn't needlessly shared with those who've left.
After all this talk of news and information, a small reminder: staying informed shouldn't be boring. That's why our articles feature a professional SharePoint design with a print-like apperence. No one is excited by something that looks like a cheap paperback. So, how about something fancier? We want employees to feel like they are casually browsing through a glossy magazine. Consovenio's commitment to quality embraces all aspects of our work, including visual appearance.
THE RESULTS
Consovenio's SharePoint experts have been providing the newsletter editorial service to our client for several years - and we are proud to report that they are highly satisfied with our work. We've also recently made an important improvement, in which we have decided to modernize the article space and managed to successfully migrate to SharePoint Online environment, which allowed us to make our workflows more efficient. The migration to office 365 was a major time saver - the whole set of newsletter-related tasks, like publishing and distributing, was performed much more quickly.