There is no getting past Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 and Office 365 (formerly just Office 365) is THE office software subscription from Microsoft Office. Microsoft developed Office 365 as an evolution of Microsoft Exchange email and the Office suite that many people are already familiar with. For an enormous number of office workers, Microsoft Office has for decades been practically the “lowest common denominator” of document-based office communication. With Office 365 these services moved into the reliable Microsoft cloud, gained additional capabilities, became subscription-based, were combined with other productivity tools such as Teams and SharePoint, and were enriched with digitalization aids such as Power Automate.
At the same time, Covid — not only, but also — accelerated the age of digitalization. More and more processes, such as job applications, submitting a holiday request, or creating and filing personnel records, increasingly run entirely digitally. Moving work into the home or mobile office naturally doesn't work in practice with analogue paper files either.
Given the high market penetration of Microsoft 365 (compared with the competing Google Workspace offering, for instance), Microsoft 365 thereby becomes a thoroughly essential “digitalization hub” for many companies. Digitalizing processes is meant to help shorten action and reaction times in day-to-day work, within and between companies. Digitalization is meant to enable modern-work concepts, of which location-independent working is only one facet.
Turning the affected into the involved
But if digitalization is not to consist merely of copying manual processes and “prettying them up” digitally (no, replacing a paper form with a PDF download is not digitalization, at best it is “electrification”), but of reviewing and improving them, then those processes have to be known and described, visible and open to discussion. And describing and discussing processes and structures should involve the people who live with those processes every day. Turn the affected into actors. When processes described in this way, drawing on the “knowledge of the many”, are digitalized, the result is far more likely to be processes that are actually lived than process design from an ivory tower. Process diagrams are no longer dead paper; they become an important foundation for digitalization goals.
It therefore makes sense to integrate process management into this daily working environment. That is why we integrated aiio into Office 365. Users can reach aiio through Microsoft Teams — the “collaboration hub” of Office 365 — and work on content together. Documents created or used in that context are stored in the SharePoint Online of your own Office 365 tenant, so no data leaves your own “digital office”. A separate user administration is unnecessary too; aiio uses the user administration of Office 365.
aiio is where its users are. Never more than one click away from the task at hand.