The real digital workplace

Some vendors focus on Intranet and Collaboration, others have a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service and call it a a "digital workplace". A real “digital workplace” includes business apps! Right?

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Microsoft is positioning the Office 365 ecosystem as place for digital working. So, the right place for business apps / solutions / processes on top. “Digital Workplaces” are fully in trend, no questions about that. But the offerings are very different.

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Some vendors focus on “Intranet” and “Collaboration” and call it a digital workplace. Others have a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service, but no Applications-as-a-Service on it. A real “digital workplace” includes everything, especially the things end-users work with; Business Applications. So many providers miss out on that opportunity.

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Gartner says the following:

1. From 100 people using 29 “Storage / Sharing tools” daily, 26 weekly, 13 once a month, 9 a few times and 23 never.
2. From 100 people using 22 “Productivity enhancing tools” daily, 22 weekly, 11 once a month, 9 a few times and 36 never.
3. From 100 people using 16 “Collaboration tools” daily, 20 weekly, 14 once a month, 11 a few times and 38 never.

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What does that mean?

1. Customers use “productivity-enhancing tools” more than “collaboration tools” on daily basis. We count business apps to this category.
2. A good business app is a storage and sharing tool and - as we said - a productivity enhancing tool at the same time.
3. Specially with skybow and SharePoint you can have all information like structured data and documents in the same dossiers or case file. From there you can share the whole dossier with somebody else; with that storage and sharing of documents happens in the business apps itself.
4. If we count the daily uses of 29 plus the 22 together it will be clear where the priorities shall be.

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It is clear that business apps are a huge piece within a digital workplace and many of today’s vendors have to make sure that they add this to their portfolio. With skybow they would have the chance to enhance their tools with automatically installed ready-to-go-Apps and a platform to build even more apps with least effort possible while not compromising on functionality.

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Building, maintaining and selling business apps / solutions / processes would be a major asset, cash cow, time saver and quality assurer. Specially when you can sell it within your digital workplace offering. But “building business apps” was yesterday. “Selling business apps” is in trend. A solution built once can be deployed, updated, and maintained automatically on multiple customer environments. Finally, you are able to easily sell added value on Office 365.

What have people built with skybow? …or in other words, what is a business app?

Here a lot of examples from real customer projects and in our Business App Catalog some examples for ready-to-go-Apps.

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