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Supercharge your social intranet with Harmonizer!

Since its inception, Harmonizer's usability has grown exponentially, both in terms of the number of applications Harmonizer is able to connect with, the use cases the integrations can solve, and the improved ways of "liquifying data" between them. This enriches application functionality in ways that wouldn't have been possible without the integration. Sometimes 1+1 can truly be 3.

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Since its inception, Harmonizer's usability has grown exponentially, both in terms of the number of applications Harmonizer is able to connect with, the use cases the integrations can solve, and the improved ways of "liquifying data" between them. This enriches application functionality in ways that wouldn't have been possible without the integration. Sometimes 1+1 can truly be 3.

One such (perhaps less obvious) example is around supercharging your social intranet.

This blog originally appeared (in Dutch) on our Partner Winkwaves’ customer platform. However, because of the elegant way it illustrates some of our use-cases, we are republishing it here with their permission.

WINKWAVES HARMONICS

Harmonics is a social enterprise software, distributed by Winkwaves. This platform facilitates knowledge sharing, communication, collaboration and connection for many organisations, associations and communities.

Their application already offers a lot of functionality, such as profile creation, membership of different groups, messages, file sharing, organising events, chat rooms and an elaborate API. Numerous customers of Harmonics use Harmonizer to populate certain data streams, such as job ads from an application tracking system, facilitate file sharing with other applications and synchronise project status information with, for example, Trello.

We challenged ourselves to find creative use cases by leveraging Harmonizer’s untapped potential, in order to further augment Harmonics' functionality. We found many such use cases, four of which have been described in this blog post.

1. Data import that is ‘once-off’

Although some of the primary Harmonizer use cases revolve around the continuous exchange of information, it can also be used as a tool to import more 'complicated' data ‘once-off’, efficiently and to a high quality standard.

Recently, we imported an external set of internally connected Wordpress documents that formed a knowledge base, to a SharePoint on a customer’s intranet. This wasn’t just a simple copy-paste process. The complication that required Harmonizer’s functionality was the requirement to maintain the internal cross references in the knowledge base, as well as the structure.

Importing this knowledge base into the intranet added tremendous value to our customer, since the intranet already held a lot of relevant information for their staff - which was further enriched by localising the knowledge base that was imported. This means it was easier and quicker for the staff to access and use relevant information.

2. 'Auto'-tipping

Winkwaves Harmonics offers the option of turning on notifications for new responses and messages in groups that are ‘followed’. However, some heavy users needed additional functionality on top of this, such as filtering so that they were only being notified for certain new notifications associated with their saved searches.

By combining the search functionality with the notification functionality in Harmonics, we enabled customers to approach certain subsets of their staff members with tailored information streams that were highly relevant to their roles. For example if a new request for assistance was posted in a certain group, the relevant department (such as IT, Finance, HR) could respond directly, rather than having to check multiple notifications across several groups for new requests for their assistance.

3. Onboarding processes

Nearly all organisations have an onboarding program for new staff. Often, this is a combination of (online) trainings and a collection of useful information (e.g. a collection of links, documents) to be perused when the new employee has some spare time. Over the first few weeks in the new job, the employee is quite focused on this. However, over the course of time, the employee loses focus and doesn’t look at this information anymore, and may even forget that it exists.

Our goal was to improve focus on this key information, by drip-feeding the information rather than delivering it in bulk during the first few days. Of course, this needed to be automated to enable an efficient process.

One of Winkwaves’ customers had introduced a nine-week onboarding program for managers. In this timeframe, managers are shown around the local Harmonics implementation, step-by-step. Every week, this includes instructions, manuals and tips for the respective topic. So how did we tackle the challenge of keeping these managers focussed on this drip-fed information for the whole induction period?

We came up with 'auto-tipping on steroids'. Contingent on the date a new manager joined a user group, Harmonizer technology enabled Harmonics to send out a customised tip-message each week. This meant that a new manager received nine customised tip-messages over the period of their nine week induction. Depending on business unit (or organisational) preferences, the managers could set times for when they wanted to receive these tip-messages, empowering them in navigating their new organisation. Once implemented, the workflow remained in place for 100s of managers joining the organisation each year.

4. Dead links

There are many software applications available for checking the quality of links and references on external webpages. These applications assist you in preventing the existence of links on your organisation’s webpage that don’t lead anywhere (but to the dreaded '404' message that severely impacts SEO ratings).

For intranet pages, software that allows for the checking of ‘dead’ links isn’t widely available. However, the problem is large as well, leading to staff spending hours looking for information - or losing all trust in the intranet’s search functionality and giving up altogether. Particularly for larger organisations, this is a risk - since the intranet is used as a knowledge base, and the information collected has a tendency to keep growing.

Harmonizer was deployed to specific, content rich intranet locations, to check for ‘dead’ references. Links to these locations were saved in a report that was periodically sent to the intranet administrator, allowing them to fix any issues. This safeguarded the quality of the intranet and increased the user experience and satisfaction.

What do you want to automate with Harmonizer?

Combining Harmonics with Harmonizer provides many exciting opportunities, in terms of supercharging your intranet and associated processes!

Imagine all the other areas Harmonizer could supercharge, by teaming up with your other applications. We are keen to exploit all these opportunities with you - and will shout you a coffee if you share them with us!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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