Over the past 10 years, Cognit has been involved in collaboration projects for mid-sized and big companies. Whether through the creation of collaboration-driving intranets or product development, we’ve helped businesses meet their business goals.

2017 has been a fantastic year for us. We launched Involv, an Office 365 intranet solution which helps organisations deploy their digital workplace faster and which is easier to use and manage than the default Office 365 SharePoint. Looking back at the past months, I can say our team did a great job. Already, our customers are sharing their success stories and the feedback we receive is very positive. As Hans Van Steenbreker – IT Director at Vasco Group concludes in his success story; “The office 365 intranet is really being used at Vasco Group”. Too many intranets fail because of a lack of user adoption so this is the best feedback I could wish for.

And there’s even more to come. We’re continuously improving  Involv, with fixes and new functionalities that focus solely on one goal; adding more value to all Involv users. In this post, I’m happy to lift a corner of the veil on the great things that are to come to Involv in 2018.

Quick wins

We don’t just add random features to Involv. We only add tried and tested features that leverage the power of employees to get things done easier, and faster.

A good example that is already available in pre-order today is the Involv ‘sandwich shop’. This plugin collects all meal orders of your colleagues and sends the order to your supplier. Simple yet effective, just like the other quick wins we will integrate: A holiday request/approval flow, surveys and quizzes, events registration and even a lightweight ticketing system. The latter will allow you to manage your service desk within Involv.

Enhanced search capabilities

Nobody likes losing time, looking for the right document or information. That’s why we’re making the Involv search box even better. At this very moment, we’re already in the final testing phase of our first update, bringing suggestions and synonyms to the search.

SharePoint already offers a self-learning search tool out-of-the box. It populates the search suggestions with keywords that have been searched for at least 6 times and which resulted in at least one click in the search results. Microsoft has set these requirements to prevent search suggestions to populate too fast, with irrelevant keywords, for example when a user misspelled a word. The downside is, as different users often use small alterations of a certain search query, search suggestions populate slowly.

That’s why we’re adding this great feature to Involv where you can add your own suggestions manually, making it possible to populate the search suggestions from day one. This will help your users find new but relevant information faster. If you ever got frustrated about your search result not showing the right document because you used a synonym and not the correct search term – that’s something we’ll be covering too, as you will be able to add synonyms for your keywords.

But that’s not all. We ‘ll be adding ‘direct search results from metadata’. This update will create an overview of all available metadata, which you can click to initiate a search query. Last but not least, we are working on a document dropdown, which gives you a real-time overview of documents as you type.

Push notifications

Push notifications is something else we’ll be working on. These notifications come very handy if you need to alert your coworkers, for example if an incident occurs. It pops up a message on their (mobile) devices, making sure they don’t miss these important updates.

Modern sites / communication sites integration (already available in pre-order)

SharePoint communication sites offer a fast and simple way to set up beautiful pages for internal communication, using content blocks from various sources. Involv integrates with this technology, for example for the commenting/Liking capabilities of newsitems and the ‘sandwich shop’ I talked about earlier.

Enhanced analytics

This feature is one I personally love most: Enhanced analytics. As we’re always focussing on user adoption, I think we should make this measurable. Measuring the usage of your intranet not only gives you valuable insights (which coworkers are most active, which content is most viewed) but enables you to make improvements if needed.  We will be offering this through a third-party add-on.

Design: Extra color schemes and color picker (already available in pre-order)

Our team will be adding some cool extras to the Involv templates too. Actually, we already added a color picker, which makes it super easy to brand your intranet perfectly to your needs. We will be adding some other cool predefined themes too .

Would you like to take a look at Involv? Request access to our demo environment today.