Strategy
December 19, 2017

The Three Pillars of Modern Applications

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modern applications, application modernization

Modern applications help you leverage your unstructured and structured data available in your organization. They allow you to collect data, analyze it, share your findings, innovate your operations and continually improve as you grow. When you decide to modernize your

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application modernization

A “set it and forget it” approach is tempting when you have so many things to worry about as a modern business. You have to compete in the global market, worry about startup disruptors coming out of nowhere and keep

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Business leaders are increasingly asked to do more with less AND to increase innovation within their organization – tall order! As companies are more and more reliant on technology to innovate, they get bogged down in support and maintenance tasks,

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May 24, 2017

Why We Fight New Technology

Written by Posted in Strategy, Technology Comments 0
technology

Innovation is essential for success in business, but some people just don’t like change. If you’ve ever tried to introduce a new technology or a new approach to doing business to an organization with an established way of doing things,

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April 19, 2017

How To Get Your Idea Past The ‘VP Of No’

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innovation

Got an exciting new idea and want to get it past the boss? Yeah. Good luck with that. No. I’m kidding. I’m going to help you. Innovative thinkers often face an uphill – and, yes, sometimes impossible – battle at

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innovation strategy

There are two fatal concepts for business success that you are likely going to encounter numerous times over the course of your career. They are just that common, and they are why so many enterprises fail to achieve their goals.

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innovation

The key takeaways: Global surveys of business leaders show that investing in technology is a key strategy for competitive organizations. When an organization falls behind in the innovation game, catching up with the competition can be nearly impossible. The full

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Imagine having a whole extra workday to create and bring your ideas to fruition. You know what? Just by eliminating some of the most common time-wasters we all encounter almost every day, you can earn one back. Here’s how. “Oh

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office 365 implementation training

When we talk about Office 365 and the move to the cloud with our clients we’re often surprised to hear how disparate their opinions are. They usually know of the business agility and potential cost savings that come with moving

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Windows Server 2003 End of Support

If you’re still running Windows Server 2003 (WS03), I’m sure you are starting to get a sense of impending doom. On July 14, 2015 support for Windows Server 2003 will cease, leaving the 61% of customers, according to Microsoft data, who

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Sale Collaboration Panel

The Sales Collaboration Panel is the next feature of Dynamics CRM 2015 I’ll discuss in my series. Imagine a world where your marketing team was able to tailor every engagement with a lead or client by gaining input from the

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Dynamite

It’s undeniable, big data is everywhere and is being generated by everything around us at all times. It’s changing the way organizations operate and changing how people work. Now more than ever business and IT leaders are forced to work

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Power Lines

Is Conservation Demand Management (CDM) worth the effort? Is it possible you are missing an opportunity to save, and conserve – and letting your customers do the same?  Do you maximize best-in-class communications planning to optimize the benefits of building

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System Center Service manager vs ServiceNow

With more than 100 vendors operating in the market, IT service desk tools have become widely available and highly commoditized. Each year Gartner releases their ITSSM Magic Quadrant to help customers evaluate vendors and support decision making. The research is

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The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) has gained an increasing amount of attention over the last few weeks. Although the legislation has been in the works since late last year it is only now that businesses have begun to understand the

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Security in the cloud

Thinking of moving your business to the Cloud?  Making the decision to move to the Cloud can cut costs, inspire innovation, and improve productivity and efficiency; all things that can propel a business ahead of its competition. But the bottom

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Richard N. Foster, former senior partner with McKinsey and best-selling author of two books “Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage” and “Creative Destruction” promoted that, “to outperform the market, you have to change at the pace and scale of the market, without losing

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XP deadline

It’s been awhile since my PC has been compromised. Years in fact. As a road warrior I am constantly travelling, tapping into public networks and accessing critical data and applications that I need to meet deadlines, make decisions and generally

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Disaster Recovery and back up

It isn’t until disaster strikes that organizations often learn how vulnerable they are. A large US-based financial institution was planning a new marketing campaign. Independent research showed that customers perceived them as behind-the-times and lacking in innovation and they were

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Your membership constituents are your most valuable asset. Keeping and maintaining a healthy and vibrant community means consistently delivering value at every step along their relationship journey with you. For best-in-class membership organizations, this translates into continually improving services for

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Navantis Managed Services

Managing contracts is one of the most challenging tasks in any size organization today and one that has the potential to expose your company to risk along with significant financial loss through penalties incurred or bonuses not being realized. Most

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January 13, 2014

Building a Business Case for Managed Services

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The headline in the Toronto Star on Thursday, January 9 said it all “Canada viewed as Safe Haven for Cloud Computing”.  With more and more companies including cloud as part of their data and application management strategy, Canada is poised

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SharePoint Support

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

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One of the biggest challenges projects face is reaching a successful closure, one where everyone at the table agrees that together we’ve made it to the finish line with flying colors. At Navantis we rely on a powerful tool to

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November 6, 2013

Got SharePoint? Need Help?

Written by Posted in CRM, Hot Topics, SharePoint, Strategy Comments 1
SharePoint Support

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

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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

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The recent announcement that Lenovo is planning to throw their hat in the BlackBerry fire-sale ring has caused a flurry of commentary in newspaper business columns and blog posts – and the noise is not likely something that will help

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I recently returned from my second International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference and thought I would blog about some of the trends I’ve noticed within the legal vertical since I started at Navantis 18 months ago.  There’s no real structure

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There are a number of things I hold onto from my past, but my operating system isn’t one of them. Microsoft Windows XP was released in the fall of 2001 and has had a good long run, its support from

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Like most of us on every project we bump into some of the CRM restrictions and we need to somehow display some records and the only way it seems to be a SSRS report. One way I found it can

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A large number of organizations rely on public folders for day to day business and they cannot get away from them. This becomes an issue for those organizations in that they are limited in their ability to migrate or upgrade

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Have you ever experienced the inconvenience of trying to view a website on your mobile phone only to encounter missing content or bad formatting?   Or how about the frustration of clicking on a link in your boss’ email only to

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This is the first blog in a series of posts related to “Migration” and “Upgrading” to the latest SharePoint 2013 Platform. Many of our Enterprise customers are hearing a lot of good things about the new features and functionalities. They

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At Navantis, we have completed many CRM implementation projects and I believe the ‘missing link’ in most plans is the amount of time allocated to Change Management. Training alone does not ensure the successful adoption of your new CRM environment.

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The clock is ticking for those enterprises who still have SharePoint 2003 deployments, and the distant drumming begins for those who have any investment in the SharePoint 2007 platform. Microsoft’s support of both of these products have recent or upcoming

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January 28, 2013

Ethical Leadership of Innovation

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The primary goal of corporations is to create money for its shareholders.  Executives and managers are faced with the responsibility of making sure that the businesses with which they are associated remain profitable for the sake of its stakeholders.  Solely

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January 16, 2013

IT as a Service

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Welcome to the first of many blog post addressing IT Service Management and Delivery. Over the past several years, we in the IT world have embraced the “as a Service” mantra in the race to the Cloud. Striving to establish

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There are by default four search scopes in SharePoint 2013: This Site (the default) People (searches personal sites and skills) Conversations Everything For search results of “This Site”, the search results page is actually in the site collection itself.  For

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Maturing Enterprise Content Management has become a critical success factor in managing information in global organizations.  In many cases, we see organizations who have implemented traditional ECM solutions such as LiveLink, Documentum, Filenet, etc. five to ten years ago.  Many

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One of my colleagues sent me a couple good articles on SharePoint Governance specifically related to manufacturing companies. http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240036242/Microsoft-SharePoint-best-practices-begin-with-governance-experts-say http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240035866/More-manufacturers-turning-to-Microsoft-SharePoint-collaboration Some good insights and we would agree with most of the suggestions in these articles.  I especially like this comment:

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April 26, 2011

What is Metadata?

Metadata is information that describes, classifies or identifies a piece of information.  Metadata is typically described as a set of attributes that help to describe or classify an object.  For example, here are just some of the metadata attributes for

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SharePoint 2010 provides a container approach to partitioning information, security boundaries and infrastructure:     When you design your SharePoint governance strategy, you can apply decisions on how the platform is divided at each layer in the model.  For example,

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In most cases, SharePoint users are authenticated and authorized through Active Directory.   Within SharePoint, there are several alternatives to authorizing users: Creating a SharePoint group and mapping roles such as Contributor, Designer, Reader, etc. to the group.  Members of the

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One of the key facilitation techniques we engage in with all our customers is to start with “pain points”.  As part of every planning engagement, we start with a group session with a broad variety of stakeholders.  Using one of

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When we engage organizations in SharePoint Governance Strategy projects, we’re working with the organization to help define their overall approach to implementing, rolling out and operation of their SharePoint platform.  The typical deliverable is a large document that provides the

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Navantis Implementation planning

Planning creates the following benefits: Stakeholder buy-in Alignment to business objectives Operational sustainability Ability to measure success Prioritization of spend Adoption It also reduces traditional project risks: Expectations not being met Uncontrolled growth Re-work Project failure Before you invest significant

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