As you reopen, how are you keeping your employees and guests safe?

While living and working in a global pandemic we decided to build something to help our clients and partners keep their people safe as they get back to the office. We call it GlassWater Back to Work – a simple and easy-to-use process to help you safely bring employees and guests back into your workplace.

While concepting and building we reviewed more than 50 sets of company protocols, held discovery calls with business owners, tested currently available tools, and consulted evolving federal, state, and local guidance. Here’s what we learned:

• Companies are creating their own process and protocols built around the specific needs of their people and footprint

• Current tools are prescriptive to one way of clearing employees rather than flexible to the policies being rolled out in the real world

• The people who oversee these processes are most concerned with effective governance and the collection of protected health information (PHI) are

As a result, GlassWater Back to Work is customized to your protocols to clear employees or guests to come into work, advise them to stay home, and direct them to further information. The process also adds a layer of actionable screening governance and never collects or store PHI. We leverage calendar integration and automation to make screening as easy as it can be.
 
To learn more visit glasswatertech.com/back-to-work or contact me at aashish@glasswatertech.com to start a dialogue around how we can help you keep your people safe.

You might already own the functionality you're looking for

Microsoft 365 is constantly updating and rolling out new features and tools including enterprise solutions with large-scale business applications. It can be difficult to keep up with all the technology and functionality available to you in today’s constantly evolving world.

We thought it would be helpful to highlight eight features you can use today to increase productivity, improve collaboration, and streamline your workday.

1) Use and Send Links to Empower Real-time Co-Authoring

Save files within Apps and send directly to users, set permissions for editing, if allowed by you IT, seamlessly collaborate with individuals internally and externally while maintaining a single source. Files can be saved to SharePoint or OneDrive. When sending links, the author can set an expiration and password for anyone with the link. To address security concerns, the author can block downloads to require recipients to work withing the Microsoft 365 ecosystem

2) Take Advantage of Allocated Storage

Microsoft 365 gives users an unprecedented 1 TB of storage, this is usually sufficient for 99.99% of common users. If needed a user can request up to 5 TB of storage through their IT team. No need to save documents to local drives or USB sticks, take advantage of the security that Microsoft 365 provides and store files in the cloud.

3) Open, Edit and Convert PDFs

No need to download Adobe Acrobat for simple editing and viewing, with Microsoft 365, users can easily save Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) to PDF files for universal access. An enhanced feature one can open an existing PDF file in Word for editing.

4) Blur Background for Video in Microsoft Teams

Working from home or on the road can often be tricky with video meetings within Teams, avoid embarrassment or crowded workspace’s by using the blur background feature. Before a call toggle the purple slider to the right of the video icon (2nd from left). You can either blur the background or choose a custom background for the call.

5) User Your Mouse as a laser pointer during presentations

Many of use leverage remote sharing during PowerPoint presentations. Use your mouse as a laser pointer. To use the laser pointer in Slide Show view: On the Slide Show tab, click either From Beginning or From Current Slide to start your slide show. Press and hold the Ctrl key, and then click and drag the left mouse button to point to the contents on the slide that you want to draw attention to. By default the pointer color is red, however blue and green can be selected in the Set up Slide Show options within PowerPoint.

6) Reply to emails without opening them

By enabling the reading pain in either the web, desktop, or mobile applications of Outlook, a user can simply preview an email and reply. This will send your response and save them in a easily readable conversation view within Outlook.

7) Covert OneNote Items to Outlook Calendar Items

Items created in OneNote can easily be transferred as Tasks in Outlook. Seamlessly assign tasks to coworkers with due dates and reminders. The notebook can also be attached to meetings both one time and reoccurring events.

8) Create Surveys using Microsoft Forms

Use Microsoft Forms, found in the waffle under all apps to simply create and distribute surveys and quizzes throughout your organization. Easily document response and share collection information in real time to appropriate parties. Results can be saved in Excel for further calculations.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of features like this that can help streamline productivity and increase productivity within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. For more information reach out to a GlassWater Technology representative to learn more about the features that cater to you organization.

New Webinar with Powell 365 July 26 @ 11am CST

Go Big and You’ll Go Home: How to roll out a corporate intranet successfully by building on success and governance.

July 26, 11 am CST

Your corporate intranet is a reflection of your corporate culture, and changing either is difficult. Of course you need management buy-in, budget, and a capable staff to execute, but what is often overlooked and underappreciated are simple victories or wins! Starting small, collecting wins, and building on success with an eye towards governance is an essential strategy to corporate intranet (and cultural change).

GlassWater and Powell Software come together to host a special 30-minute webinar. The two partners would like to showcase how Powell 365 is easy enough for a single business unit to get started and powerful enough to support a robust governance plan. With Powell 365, you don't have to do it twice, build your site framework and replicate it into a corporate wide intranet via a repeatable process within Powell Manager.

Aashish Warty of GlassWater and Ryan Orehek of Powell Software will walk you through the process in this month’s Powell 365 webinar.

Join us on July 26th at 9am PST / 11am CST / 12pm EST for our partner webinar. Come see what makes Powell 365 unique! Don’t miss the fun, RSVP today!

GlassWater Technology Company and Powell Software Launch Reseller Partnership

GlassWater Technology Company, a leading information technology company, and Powell Software, a global leader in ready-to-use collaboration software solutions, today announced a national reseller partnership. The partnership brings together Powell Software’s leading-edge technology, Powell 365, and GlassWater’s market expertise to develop innovative and personalized customer experiences.

Powell 365 is an intranet software that provides a no-code approach to SharePoint solutions. In as little as two weeks, a company can completely customize the user experience of their own branded intranet portal to relieve employees of painful day to day operations and withstand tedious IT interfaces. “We welcome GlassWater into the Powell 365 Partner Program,” said Antoine Faisandier, CEO of Powell Software.

Through this partnership, the two companies simplify the digital transformation process by creating a single window into the Microsoft Office 365 digital workplace. GlassWater crafted an innovative approach that helps clients leverage Microsoft Office 365 features through a customized Powell 365 digital workplace. The intranet portal presents a simple way to build a secure and cost effective digital workplace in record time.

Not only will this approach allow for an improved user-friendly experience, it will also increase the clients overall Office 365 usages and in turn their return on investment.  “We have seen unprecedented growth in our client’s SharePoint adoption and usage after deploying Powell 365. What was once a glorified file store is now a true collaboration environment used by every employee,” state Aashish Warty, Principal Cloud Architect at GlassWater.

“GlassWater was founded on the premise to delivering the most valuable software solutions to their customers and topnotch professional services to implement them,” continued Faisandier. “This is in perfect alignment with Powell 365 strategy and after a first successful customer project together. We are set for a promising year 2018 together!”

GlassWater Technology Company:

GlassWater was founded on the premise that there are enterprises and governments with the desire or mandate to adopt the Microsoft cloud into their overall IT landscape but lack the experience or situational awareness to execute. Additionally, there are a multitude of emerging software providers that have compelling technology that would be beneficial to these customers but they lack the sales and business development wherewithal to reach their prime markets. We aim to bring these two ecosystems together, to eliminate the turbulence associated with cloud adoption, and lead your organization to calm waters. For more information visit: www.glasswatertech.com

About Powell Software:

Powell Software was founded in 2015 by Expertime Group, a Microsoft platform expert. Based in France and the United States, Powell Software drives digital transformation by offering Powell 365, an integrated digital workplace solution that transforms the user experience and boosts communication, collaboration and business productivity. Behind each Powell 365 portal is the WSYWYG designer, Powell Manager that configures compelling digital workplaces based on Office 365 and SharePoint. For more information about Powell 365 or Powell Manager, please visit our website: www.powell-365.com

Put a Beacon on It!

Ever want to know how many times someone requests time off?

Or when an employee  requests a new computer?

Or when a sales rep asks for discount of greater than 50%?

Well now you can, with Nintex Hawkeye. Nintex Hawkeye allows point analytics within Nintex Workflows. Adding a beacon to any action allows rich analytics pretty much anywhere you want them. Nintex provides users and admins the ability to unlock the value in your data and gain unique perspectives on which workflows improve your organizations business processes. Adding Beacons can allow monitoring of departmental usage, unique users and current instances within a specific scope of your Nintex environment. Beacons can also address areas of training and efficiency within your organization. With Nintex's drag and drop interface, Beacons can be added by administrators and power users alike. Nintex Hawkeye can be accomplished in three easy steps:

 1) Add Beacons to actions within workflow

 2) Add lenses to filter out data and only show what's needed for a clean report

 3) Share data through rich interfaces like Microsoft's Power BI.

See more at https://www.nintex.com/workflow-platform/hawkeye-workflow-analytics

Why GlassWater Technology?

So you've made it to Office 365, paid for a pile of users, gave them the keys to all the rich functionality and applications. Now what? How do you propel your business to the next level and get the most out of your investment? After working on the software side as well as the delivery side I noticed that there needs to be a middleman, someone that knows software well enough and knows when to build vs buy. GlassWater Technology is that middleman, we vet independent software vendors and compile the best of breed companies while allowing delivery organizations to customize solutions to fit the needs of their clients. It's our goal to provide our customers with the best combination of software and services to solve business problems. We are always looking for new partners in both applications and delivery. 

Aashish Warty

Principle Cloud Architect - GlassWater Technology