DevOps is a huge buzz word of late, and for good reason. A company who fails to organize around this new culture of development and deployment will quickly find themselves falling behind the new pace of technology. In a nutshell,

Five years ago, faced with more complaints and open investigation files than could be reasonably managed, the Real Estate Council of Alberta began the process of change… Through complaints, investigations, outcomes, organizational structure and corporate culture, traditional approaches were reshaped
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
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
I have taken part in many team building activities over the years. They typically involve being plopped into a group of colleagues you don’t work with on a daily basis and participating in endless icebreakers in an attempt to “get
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
Last week I underwent an intensive immersion in all things Yammer in a two day session provided by Microsoft and Yammer folks in Chicago, and I left with a newfound enthusiasm for the Yammer platform and its potential for adoption
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
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
On the occasion of my colleague and good friend, Mark AuCoin, being named Microsoft’s Global Pre-Sales Specialist of the Year, I thought I would share some thoughts on the CRM Demonstration process. As a potential CRM customer, I’ll describe what
Certified for Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution Peopleworks is maximizing on industry trends to drive member engagement through online collaboration. Peopleworks supports an innovative and key differentiator in its forums and message boards section of the Online Portal. This forum and
As part of my job at Navantis over the years, I have sat in on hundreds of our clients’ meeting rooms. In many of those rooms, I see very elaborate and expensive video and teleconferencing equipment. I have seen many
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
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.
We get asked this question a LOT. When do I need CRM vs. using Outlook, Sharepoint, Excel, Access or any other Microsoft platform product that provides an ability to track data in some kind of structured way? The answer is
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
I get asked the question “What are you working on these days?” a lot. Well, one of my responses is, that I spend a lot of my time of late having conversations with our clients around Office 365. When I’m
We have a client that is hosting their site on Microsoft Azure. It is a basic content managed site with a SQL Azure backend. When our client got their monthly hosting bill, we discovered a significant transfer cost that couldn’t
Microsoft’s current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is a SharePoint cloud offering mainly targeted to small businesses who want an instant SharePoint collaboration environment without the need to host on premise. It costs $10 / user / month at a
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

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