Here is a guide to help you better master the terms related to the Digital Workplace. Feel free to save it for future reference.
A vocabulary evolving with AI: according to Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, 75% of knowledge workers already use generative AI at work, and 78% bring their own tools.
Focus on the Digital Workplace lexicon
In 2009, Paul Miller, founder of the Digital Workplace Group, introduced the term to refer to an ecosystem of technologies applied to the workspace. Today, the Digital Workplace can be defined as a digital work environment that allows employees to access all of their work-related documents, information and applications. In general, a Digital Workplace consists of an intranet, a search engine, a document management tool and a collaborative messaging application.
At Jint, the Digital Workplace is created by adding many internal communication, collaboration and knowledge management features to SharePoint. We use a specific vocabulary, which we detail below.
Words from the Microsoft universe
Digital Workplace: at Jint, this term refers to a unique and connected workspace that simplifies the daily life of employees, and doubles the power of Microsoft SharePoint by adding many features.
Intranet: a private computer network set up by an organization to facilitate the sharing of information and documents in a secure manner.
SaaS solution: the term "Software as a Service" refers to a software or application solution hosted on a remote server, rather than on the user's machine. The service includes access to the solution, standard support, corrective and evolutionary maintenance
Microsoft 365: formerly called Office 365, it is a SaaS (Software as a service) solution thatis composed of several independently developed applications. The Microsoft 365 suite offers, among others:
- Productivity tools: Word, Excel, Powerpoint,
- Communication tools: Outlook, Yammer,
- Collaboration tools: Project, Planner, Tasks, Teams,
- Tools for document management: SharePoint.
SharePoint: collaborative platform that allows the creation of team or project sites. Users can store and share documents with colleagues or authorized third parties.
SharePoint Online : SaaS version of SharePoint, hosted and managed by Microsoft. SharePoint Online is dedicated to companies of all sizes. It is used by companies to create intranets, but also for content management and electronic document management on the Cloud.
Tenant Tenant: In the Microsoft world, the term Tenant refers to the cloud in which data is stored. Each user has his own Tenant, in which they have secure access to their own data.
Cloud This term refers to networked, remote servers hosted in data centers around the world. These servers are used to store data. The use of the Cloud allows users to do without the need to manage servers themselves and to access their data through a simple Internet connection.
SharepPoint Administrator: person in charge of supervising and controlling the installation of Microsoft SharePoint in an organization.
SharePoint communication site: a site used by an organization to circulate information to a large audience. Only a small group of people can contribute content.
Team SharePoint site: a site typically used for team projects, with content limited to team members and stakeholders. A SharePoint site allows you to collaborate on files, exchange information, and share resources related to the project team using the team site. All members of the site can contribute to the content.
WebPart functional component allowing to customize pages on a SharePoint site, by selecting from a catalog of features.
Azure AD: an acronym for Azure Active Directory. It is a cloud-based authentication and access management service that protects against 99.9% of cyber attacks. All this is achieved through a single sign-on system (which simplifies access to its tools from anywhere), and multi-factor authentication (which secures data).
Microsoft Teams Microsoft Teams: a collaborative application that is part of Microsoft 365 and allows teams within a company to collaborate together and communicate. Microsoft Teams creates a customized digital work environment through the integration of many features. Some examples of uses: project management, internal communication, circulation and sharing of information, resources and documents, organization of events...
Azure: a set of cloud-based computing services that allows users to create, run and manage applications across multiple clouds,
Data CenterA data center is an infrastructure that, as a physical location, consists of a network of computers and large storage spaces. It can be used by companies to store, organize and process very large amounts of data.
SharePoint App-Only (or SharePoint App-Only Authentication) is an authentication method in SharePoint that allows a third-party application to access SharePoint resources and data autonomously, without the direct involvement of a user.
Power automate : Power Automate is a Microsoft platform that enables users to create automated workflows and business processes without having to write code. Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate offers workflow, integration and task automation features.
ActiveX: ActiveX is a technology developed by Microsoft that enables interactive applications to be run through reusable software objects. It is a framework of software components used mainly in Windows environments.
Microsoft Syntex : Microsoft Syntex is an intelligent content management solution based on Microsoft 365. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically extract information and metadata from documents and unstructured content, making it easier to classify, organize and search this information.
Microsoft Copilot: Microsoft Copilot is a tool developed by Microsoft in collaboration with OpenAI, which provides intelligent assistance to developers when writing code. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning models to analyze existing source code and generate context-sensitive suggestions and relevant code extracts.
Terms related to use cases
EDM: acronym for electronic document management. Process of controlling the life cycle of documents in a company, from their creation to their archiving. It allows to manage and exploit all the documents of an organization.
Knowledge Management: It is about gathering information, knowledge and expertise to ensure and simplify their distribution to employees.
Knowledge Manager: in a company, a professional in charge of implementing methods and techniques to identify, organize and share knowledge.
Tacit knowledge: the sum of knowledge that cannot be easily formalized and codified, such as experience, values or know-how. It generally represents the majority of knowledge in companies and is opposed to explicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge: the sum of knowledge that can be formalized and transmitted through written documents, manuals, tutorials, databases or computer systems.
Top-Down Communication: A system in a given organization in which information is passed from management to employees. Its name comes from the fact that it starts at the top and goes down to the lower levels.
Bottom-up communication: a system in a given organization in which information and ideas come from the employees. It starts from the lower levels and goes up to the higher levels. It can be, for example, surveys, idea boxes...
Employee Advocacy A practice by which a company mobilizes its employees to become its ambassadors and/or communicators. For example, by encouraging them to publish and promote the company's content on their social networks.
Corporate culture Corporate culture: also called organizational culture. It is the set of values, practices, behaviors and characteristics of a company, which allow to explain the functioning of a private or public organization. The objective of corporate culture is to be a differentiating force, but also to federate and engage employees and stakeholders.
Internal expert: a person who has specific knowledge or skills in a given organization.
PersonalDashboard : refers to the dashboard that links employees to all their applications.
Other terms you need to know
Design system: A Design system is a coherent collection of principles, rules, guidelines and reusable components used to guide and harmonize the design of user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) within an organization. The main aim of a Design system is to promote visual and functional consistency across all a company's applications, websites and digital products. It provides a set of shared design standards, predefined components and best practices for designers and developers, helping to create unified user experiences and reduce duplication of effort.
Employee experience platform (EXP): An Employee Experience Platform is a software platform designed to improve the overall employee experience within an organization. It aims to provide an integrated set of tools and features to improve employee engagement, productivity and well-being.
CMS (Content Management System) : A Content Management System (CMS) is a software platform that makes it easy to collaboratively create, manage and organize website content. It provides a user-friendly interface for creating, modifying and publishing content without requiring in-depth knowledge of programming or web development.
Open AI: OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company founded in December 2015. Its main objective is to develop and promote so-called "human-friendly" AI, which aims to benefit society as a whole. One of OpenAI's best-known achievements is the development of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series of language models. GPT-3, the most advanced model in the series, is capable of generating coherent, high-quality text on a wide variety of subjects, and is used in diverse applications such as article writing, machine translation, chatbot and many others.
ISO27001: ISO 27001 is an international standard for information security management. It specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and improving an information security management system (ISMS) within an organization.
Conclusion
There you go: you now know more about the vocabulary of the Digital Workplace! Did you come across a word that we haven't defined in this article, and you don't know what it means? Don't hesitate to contact us so that we can enrich this lexicon.
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